RQ9748M Minor Thesis McDonald

Minor Thesis RQ9748M
Brendan McDonald – Student ID: 201619862
Imago Christi, Conformity to Christ, and Compassionate Mission
Introduction
A famous story of transformation can be found in Victor Hugo’s epic nineteenth century
novel, ‘Les Misérables’1, in which the main character Jean Valjean is introduced as a
prisoner, someone at the bottom of the heap, a man who has been stripped of his human
dignity and is not even referred to by his real name. Instead, Valjean is known only by his
prison number ‘24601’. The reader is immersed into the harsh world of early 19 th century
France, where poverty, injustice and misery are the order of the day for the majority of ‘the
miserable’ people.
The novel is memorable because of Jean Valjean’s conversion. He becomes a man who is
transformed as the story unfolds. In the beginning he is rejected, turned away by innkeepers
and employers because he is marked as a convict. Valjean is portrayed as an angry and bitter
person who in an act of desperation steals silver from a Church, the only place that is willing
to provide him sanctuary. Upon his capture he is brought before the character ‘Monseigneur
Bienvenu’ (Bienvenu being the French word for ‘welcome’) and a most peculiar thing
happens; instead of inhumane treatment and further judgment he receives mercy, compassion
and forgiveness from the victim of his crime. Bienvenu embodies the teachings of his Lord
by not only offering compassion, but acting upon the compassionate impulse within him by
freely handing over two valuable silver candlesticks with the exhortation that Valjean should
use them to become an honest man. In the reading of this the mind is drawn to Christ’s
1
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (San Diego: Printers Row Publishing Group, 2015).
1
teachings ‘not resist an evildoer’ and ‘give your cloak as well’ (Matt 5:39-40, NRSV). It is a
story of redemption, of conversion and transformation instigated through a single act of
compassionate justice. Therein lies the basic premise of this thesis; that God’s mission in the
world is one of transformation and redemption that find’s its genesis in the compassionate
impulse.
This conversion is the transformation of people individually and corporately from humanity
to a “new humanity” (Eph. 2:15). The transformation of human reality from heaven and earth
to “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1). Considerations of this thesis will orbit
theological anthropology and human ontology. More specifically, what does it mean for the
human pair, male and female, to be created in God’s image and likeness and in turn, for them
to bear Imago Christi? As human beings are immersed in two contexts, individual and
corporate agency, how do they image God - Imago Dei - and what is the function, if any, of
bearing that image?
The method followed will be to partition this research into four chapters. First, I will provide
a brief survey of Christian thought on the image of God, from the substantive ideas of the
patristic era through to contemporary ideas couched in relational and functional approaches.
In her work Conformed to The Image of His Son, Haley Goranson Jacob’s exegesis of
Romans 8:29 seeks to substantiate a functional view of conformity to the image of Christ. 2 I
will draw from her perspectives on the ‘Image of his Son’ and Paul’s first century Jewish
understanding of ‘glory’ as relevant for discussion around what ‘bearing’ God’s image may
actually look like vocationally.
2
Haley Goranson Jacob, Conformed to the Image of His Son: Reconsidering Paul's Theology of Glory in Romans
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2018), 11.
2
Second, the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer will be considered
as both the catalyst and mediator for their transformation. Drawing again from Jacob as well
as Grenz and Wright, I will consider the nature of the conversion following the Adam to
Christ framework outlined by Paul in the New Testament.
Chapter three will consider what it means for the human to be the idol of God (the one who
images God) and the question of whether or not the divine presence of the Deity is imbued
within. Drawing from the work of Marc Cortez, it will consider the cultic framework of the
Ancient Near East and the correlation between pagan and Hebrew understandings of the
purpose of idols. It will discuss the premise that Jesus Christ is the perfect image and the
perfectly true human being. That his life, death, resurrection and ascension are the catalyst for
a conversion of human identity. I will argue that this transformation is vital to God’s mission
and that those who participate in it not only ‘bear’ Imago Dei but are being conformed to
Imago Christi as they engage the world with Christ-like compassion. N.T. Wright describes
this as ‘becoming truly human’ stating, “we are not only flat surface mirrors to reflect God to
the world, and the world to God, we are also to refract like a prism, so that we ourselves are
transformed in the process.”3
In addition, the advocacy of the Holy Spirit will be discussed to draw a direct relationship
between the Spirit and the Imago. Marc Cortez writes:
(1) the imago Dei is central to a properly Christian understanding of the human person; (2) the
imago can only be fully understood in light of the person and work of Jesus Christ; and (3) Jesus
Christ himself can only be properly and fully understood in light of the person and work of the
Holy Spirit. Taken together, these convictions would seem to lead necessarily to the conclusion
that the Holy Spirit should form an important aspect of our understanding of the imago Dei.4
3
N.T. Wright “Lecture 2: ‘Living in God’s Moment: Becoming Truly Human in a Demanding World,” Video
Lecture, St. John’s Cathedral Hong Kong, March 20, 2019, 42:26, http://ntwrightpage.com/2019/04/14/st-
johns-cathedral-public-lecture-series.
4
Marc Cortez, “Idols, Images, and a Spirit-ed Anthropology; A Pneumatological Account of the Imago Dei”,
https://www.academia.edu/15056353/Idols_Images_and_a_Spirited_Anthropology_Connecting_Christology_
3
This thesis will evaluate this logic and discuss how an incarnational theology of the Holy
Spirit and a “Spirit-ed Anthropology”5 may relate to a trajectory from Imago Dei toward
Imago Christi.
The final chapter will postulate a compassionate model for mission and ministry by
examining Christ’s compassionate motivation to act in the world. Through an examination of
Christ as “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) I will contemplate the characteristics,
actions and teachings of Jesus, with a particular focus on ‘the parable of the good Samaritan’
(Luke 10:25-37) and σπλαγχηνιζομαι as a model for ministry. That is, compassion as integral
to how God’s people bear Imago Christi and participate in the Missio Dei.
Compassionate spirituality is at the heart of this thesis as it posits the transformational
qualities of compassion for both those who are moved by it and those who are on the
receiving end of compassionate and loving acts. Henry Nouwen states that “Compassion
means full immersion in the condition of being human.” 6 This thesis will consider the
implications of this being the very nature of the incarnation and Christ’s mission. It will
reflect on the meaning of Imago Christi in that context and consider what that means for
believers who claim to follow Christ.
This thesis will demonstrate how compassion critiques the underlying motivations for
mission and many of the activities undertaken by the Church, particularly in protestant
denominations in the West. Harvey Cox notes a gravitational shift in the centre of
Christianity away from the West, saying, “The era of Christianity as a Western religion is
Pneumatology_and_the_imago_Dei?email_work_card=view-paper (accessed 4 September 2019).

5
Ibid.
6
Henri Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill and Douglas A. Morrison, Compassion: A reflection on the Christian life
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008), 4.
4
already over.”7 Nonetheless, as Christianity declines in the West a new popular model of
Church, the mega-Church is growing, and this thesis questions the underlying impulse for
that growth. Newbigin anticipated the decline of the Church saying, “the number one
question is, can the West be converted?” 8 Given that many people are being converted using
models that employ church growth techniques that foster numerical growth, this thesis will
ask exactly what it is that people are being converted to. This is a missiological focus and
challenge for Church leaders today. Should the Church adopt secular means for the purpose
of numerical growth?
I will contribute to the missional conversation by contending that compassionate spirituality
and compassionate ministry are truly Christocentric expressions of mission. Various attempts
have been made to explain what ‘missional church’ is and how the Church should be
‘shaped’ to address Western culture. Alan Roxburgh highlights the difficulty of this stating,
“the word ‘missional’ seems to have travelled the remarkable path of going from obscurity to
banality in only one decade.”9 Some churches have placed an emphasis on discipleship and
others an emphasis on justice issues, whilst others are oblivious to the cultural shift all-
together. Van Gelder and Zscheile explain, “this word, for most everyone using it, represents
a changed relationship between the church and its local context, one that calls for a renewed
understanding of the Church’s identity in God.”10
7
Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 177.
8
Lesslie Newbigin, “Can the West be converted?” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 11, no. 1
(January 1987): 2.
9
Alan Roxburgh, as quoted in Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile. The Missional Church in Perspective –
Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation. (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2011), 1.
10
Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile. The Missional Church, 1.
5
This thesis will contend that a focus on Imago Christi and “conformity to the image of
Christ” is unequivocally related it to an incarnational Pneumatology which transforms
disciples as they engage with others and participate in the Missio Dei.
Chapter 1
Theological approaches to Imago Dei.
Karl Barth taught that scripture does not explicitly tell us what the image of God is and he
cautioned people that they might find themselves committing idolatry if they try to explain
it.11 Others, such as Kelsey, downplay any emphasis on image at all, stating, “Exegetical
debates about Genesis 1:26–28 are simply too inconclusive to warrant giving 'Image of God'
the central, anchorlike role it has traditionally played in theological anthropology's account of
what human being is.”12 Even still, the creation narrative has continuously captured people’s
attention as human beings search for identity, personhood and meaning. Scholars such as
Cortez argue that Imago Dei should be treated Christologically, that it has ontological
significance as being “an eternal truth about what it means to be human.”13
Contemporary scholarship around the Imago Dei began in the patristic era as the Church
fathers reflected on the meaning of Genesis 1:26-27;
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over
all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image,
11
Charles Sherlock, The Doctrine of Humanity: Contours Of Christian Theology (Illinois: InterVarsity Press,
1996), 89.
12
David Kelsey, as quoted in Cortez, Resourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity
in the Light of Christ (Michigan: Zondervan, 2017), 100.
13
Marc Cortez, Resourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ
(Michigan: Zondervan, 2017), 101.
6
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Irenaeus espoused the idea that there is an explicit connection between Imago Dei and human
reason. Human rationality is the basic tenet of the substantive approach. Irenaeus’ viewpoint
set the conversation on a course that would span at least the next fifteen hundred years and
possibly the entirety of Christian theological anthropology.14 The following discussion will
look at these developments in their historical context and compare the nuances of various
approaches.
The question of image and likeness.
One of the contentious areas in Genesis 1:26 is the question surrounding ‘image’ and
‘likeness’. What is the disparity (if any) between the two as well as the descriptions of ‘in’
our image and ‘according to’ our likeness?
Irenaeus made a distinction and it is accepted that his writings are the origin of the debate. 15
Irenaeus’s proposition was that that prior to the fall, both image and likeness were present in
humanity but after the fall God’s ‘image’ was retained, yet his ‘likeness’ was lost. He
perceived a connection between likeness and human rationality and the suggestion he made
was that after the fall, human beings lost ‘true rationality’ and therefore live ‘irrationally’. 16
Irenaeus points to Christ as the Word become flesh in which imago and similitudo become
fully integrated. In the incarnation, Imago Dei is effectively reassigned from Adam to Christ
as he writes;
14
Stanley Grenz, The Social God and The Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei (London:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 144.
15
Grenz, Social God, 145.
16
Ibid.
7
When, however, the Word of God became flesh, He confirmed both these: for he both showed
forth the image truly, since He became himself what was His image; and He re-established the
similitude after a sure manner, by assimilating man into the invisible Father through means of the
visible Word.17
Stanley Grenz argues that Irenaeus viewed Adam as perfect in the sense of being what God
wanted him to be, yet, like an infant having the need to mature, stating, “God created Adam
with a future goal in view – namely, that he develop into the fulness of the divine image and
likeness, which is the Son.”18 With this eschatological goal in mind, a Christological re-
orientation is suggested; the idea that humanity’s ultimate telos is Imago Christi.
Morag Logan asserts that the critical biblical scholarship has not maintained the idea of
distinction between image and likeness and the exegesis of early Greek and Latin Fathers has
been rejected.19 Nonetheless, Irenaeus’s distinction contributes to the structural view of
Imago Dei as his focus on living rationality as inherent to Imago was widely adopted by both
his contemporaries and subsequent Church Fathers.
The structural (substantive) approach.
The structural approach relates to the inherent aptitudes and competencies of a person to be
creative and cogent, which seemingly correlate with God’s own attributes. In other words, the
capacity for reason and rational thought are inherent to humanity bearing God’s image. The
structural view is sometimes referred to as the ‘substantive’ view as highlighted in Ramsay’s
17
Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.16.2 (ANF 1), Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
https://ccel.org/ccel/irenaeus/against_heresies_v/anf01.ix.vii.xvii.html (accessed August 2, 2019).
18
19
Morag Logan, “Made in the Image of God: Understandings of Genesis 1:26-28,” in Theological Anthropology:
a collection of papers prepared by Faith and Unity Commissioners of the National Council of Churches in
Australia. http://www.ncca.org.au/files/Departments/Faith_and_Unity/Anthropology_Study.pdf (accessed
August 3, 2019).
8
definition, “something within the substantial form of human nature, some faculty or capacity
that man possesses.”20
The patristic fathers were immersed in Greco-Roman culture which was intrinsically shaped
by Greek philosophy. Grenz asserts that it was cultural influence that sustained a wide
acceptance of the substantive view, stating, “So influential was this approach that the church
fathers in both East and West took for granted that the human person was a rational animal.”21
The term ‘rational animal’ emerged through Aristotelian philosophy which the Church
fathers associated with free will, that is rational choice, as the distinguishing feature between
human beings and other creatures.
Throughout the course of time, the structural view maintained its continuity through the
writings of Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa and Cyril of Jerusalem, but
it was through the writings of Augustine that it established its dominant place in Christian
thought. Augustine writes, “for although the human mind is not of the same nature with God,
yet the image of that nature than which none is better, is to be sought and found in us, in that
than which our nature also has nothing better.” 22 Augustine’s theology of Imago Dei became
the standard to which others referred and this carried on through to the medieval Church.
Aquinas, who lived over seven hundred years after Augustine maintained the structural view.
It was his understanding that intellect and free will caused one to bear the image through
love. Love was the primary resemblance to God and an act of free will which revealed Imago,
20
Paul Ramsay, Basic Christian Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1950), 250.
21
22
Augustine, On The Trinity 14.4.6 (NPNF V1-03), Christian Classics Ethereal Library
https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf103/npnf103.iv.i.xvi.viii.html?highlight=same%20nature%20with
%20god&queryID=2493930&resultID=164186#highlight (accessed August 2, 2019).
9
as he states, “the image of God is present in all humans as the power to know and love
God.”23 Aquinas asserted that the intellect was the vehicle by which human beings could
come to know and love God. It was the “Highest (human) functioning” 24 by which people can
receive God’s grace for this life and the next. According to Grenz, Aquinas’ contribution
marked the end to the flourishing of the structural view that had begun almost one thousand
year earlier.25
The relational approach.
The substantive view remained dominant until the reformation birthed a revision of long-
standing doctrines. Luther was at the forefront of this quest and he proposed a radically
different understanding of Imago Dei that attacked human reason. He contends, “when we
speak about that image, we are speaking about something unknown … a lost treasure.” 26 For
Luther, Imago Dei was governed by nothing less than a person’s response to God and thereby
it was entirely relational. The relational approach assumes an association between God and
the human where the focus is less on what the human has or does, but more on their position
before God as they ‘image’ him.27
Although Luther was revolutionary in his ideas, it was Calvin who expounded further and
established a reformed understanding of Imago Dei that became widely used throughout
theological scholarship. Calvin set forth a new path in theological anthropology 28 and
challenged the structural approach in writings pertaining to the debate between image and
likeness, as stated by Niesel, “The divine similitude consists not in the fact that man is
23
24
25
Ibid.
26
Luther, as quoted in Grenz, Social God, 164. Taken from Martin Luther, “Lectures on Genesis,” 1:90.
27
28
10
endowed with reason and will, but in the fact that these faculties in original man were
directed wholly toward the knowledge of and obedience to God.”29
Calvin used the metaphor of a mirror to know and image the divine, as Torrance explains,
“That is man’s rectitude: to be created in the image of God is to be opposite to or to respond
to Him in such a way that God may be able to behold himself in Man as in a mirror." 30 For
Calvin, the reflecting of God’s image was entirely dependent on one’s orientation toward
God31. In that sense, sin and its consequences had devastated the image of God in humanity.
The first human beings relinquished the right relationship with God through disobedience and
as a result became alienated from him. Calvin’s approach is firmly fixed to his Christology in
that Christ’s atonement of sin mediates restoration of the Imago Dei and he preludes the idea
of an eschatological fulfilment which is a renewed Imago Dei for believers by noting,
“Therefore in some part it now is manifest on the elect, in so far as they have been reborn in
the spirit; but it will attain its full splendour in heaven.”32
Søren Kierkegaard considered that human beings ‘image’ God in the context of loving and
worshipping him. Proponents of the structural view placed rational humanity at the top of a
hierarchy over and above other creatures, in a position of power. Kierkegaard on the other
hand, located ‘image’ toward God’s existential presence in the human interior. This approach
is entirely relational as it requires the human to be willing to become humble in a posture of
29
Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin, trans. Harold Knight (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 1956), 68.
30
Thomas Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1997), 51.
31
Although Calvin uses the metaphor of a mirror, it is interesting to note that in all of his writings he does not
make any explicit correlation between Imago Dei and 1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly,
but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully
known”. Nonetheless, the same idea is implicit in his writings for example, “Now God’s image is the perfect
excellence of human nature which shone in Adam before his defection, but was subsequently so vitiated and
almost blotted out that nothing remains after the ruin except what is confused, mutilated, and disease-
ridden.” Taken from Donald McKim, Calvin’s Institutes abridged edition 1.15.4 (Louisville: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2001), 25.
32
Donald McKim, Calvin’s Institutes Abridged Edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 25.
11
worship, as he states, “Only when God has become the eternal and omnipresent object of
worship in an infinite sense and the human being has become and forever remains a
worshipper, only then are they like each other.”33 The spiritual dimension of allowing God to
permeate one’s being makes way for God’s love to be ‘imaged’ as he asserts, “God is love;
therefore we can resemble God only in loving.” 34 This implies that Imago is realised through
the act of loving, and the feeling of love, experience of love, which leads to an action of the
will. This is to say that when a believer experiences feelings of love or compassion and are
moved within themselves to respond and do something with those impulses, they are imaging
God. In that sense, Kierkegaard’s relational proposition is leaning slightly toward a functional
interpretation of Imago Dei.
Emil Brunner’s view of Imago Dei is also relational. Even though humans are rational
creatures they are called by God (his Word) and therefore have the capacity to respond to that
call (human answer). This call and response impulse is central to Brunner’s concept of Imago
Dei. Grenz describes it this way, “Brunner notes that the ‘distinctive quality of human
existence’ is ‘that its structure is a relation: responsible existence, responsive actuality’.”35
Brunner’s view aligns very well with Kierkegaard in that love becomes a central facet of
bearing Imago Dei as he contends, “Man is destined to answer to God in believing,
responsive love, to accept in grateful dependence his destiny to which God has called him”. 36
In that sense too, Brunner’s relational interpretation is leaning toward a functional approach
to God’s Image.
33
Kierkegaard, as quoted in Peter Kline, “Imagine Nothing: Kierkegaard and the Imago Dei,” Anglican
Theological Review 100, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 697-719,
http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.divinity.idm.oclc.org/eds/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=82749d76-2f7f-41d0-a88e-
27d48b2d7520%40sessionmgr4007&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU
%3d#AN=ATLAiC9Y181210000828&db=lsdar.
34
Kierkegaard, as quoted in Grenz, Social God, 174.
35
36
Brunner, as quoted in Grenz, Social God, 176.
12
The Trinitarian shape of the Imago Dei.
In keeping with the relational approach, modern scholarship has highlighted the significance
of God’s own relational nature and any discussion regarding the Imago Dei should be deeply
rooted in a Trinitarian context.
Drawing upon Augustine’s Trinitarian theology, McGrath says, “Augustine insists that the
action of the entire Trinity is to be discerned behind the actions of each of its persons. Thus
humanity is not merely created in the image of God; it is created in the image of the
Trinity.”37 Karl Barth also approached Imago Dei through a Trinitarian lens which is highly
relational and takes that relationality from the self-relationship of the Triune God. Through
this, Barth elicits an analogy between “the mutual life of the distinct divine persons, and the
mutual life of humankind as male and female.”38 The relational interconnectedness of the
Trinitarian image forms the basis of God’s intention for the relationship between humanity,
male and female, in the creation narrative. The notion of a Trinitarian God marked by unity is
evident as the human pair are also marked by unity, highlighted in Genesis 2:23-24;
Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.”
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one
flesh.
37
Alister McGrath, Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 258.
38
Sherlock, Humanity, 89.
13
McGrath notes the unifying role of the Spirit in both the Godhead and humanity, stating,
“God already exists in the kind of relation to which he wishes to bring us. And just as the
Spirit is the bond of union between God and the believer, so the Spirit exercises a comparable
role within the Trinity, binding persons together.” 39 Love becomes the unifying impulse; that
the two human beings love one another. This is in keeping with Augustine’s idea that God’s
greatest gift is love and his greatest gift is the Spirit, therefore the Holy Spirit is love. 40 When
God sent the Son into the world he did so because of love (John 3:16) and the mission of the
Son, the “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) was one “to reconcile to himself all things”
through an act of bearing sacrificial love “by making peace through the blood of his cross”
(Col 1:20). God is glorified by Christ entering into the world of human suffering and bearing
its sin on the cross. This act of loving compassion reclaims the unity and love which is
present in the creation account before the fall, that which is present in the Trinitarian life of
God.
Augustine’s Trinitarian theology is particularly applicable to the Western Church, but the
Eastern Church also strongly emphasises unity and love, particularly as a characteristic of the
Trinitarian nature. Eastern Trinitarian theology emerged through the Cappadocian Fathers;
Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. 41 John Zizioulas, the Eastern
Orthodox metropolitan of Pergamon has written extensively on the subject of the relationship
between Eastern ecclesiology and Eastern Trinitarian theology. For Zizioulas, “Outside the
Trinity there is no God. In other words, God’s being coincides with God’s communal
personhood.”42 The communal aspect is the significant factor for him, and it is a special kind
of communion, an existence in koinonia. Volf explains it this way, “it is inconceivable to
39
McGrath, Christian Theology, 258.
40
Ibid.
41
McGrath, Christian Theology, 17.
42
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 96.
14
speak of the one God independent of the communion that is God.” 43 The significance of the
koinonia relationship in Eastern theology is its correlation to the idea of unity in love as a
Trinitarian image, the image in which humanity is created.
A Correlation: The Trinitarian shape of the Church.
Volf argues that the Trinitarian shape of God’s image is reflected in the Trinitarian shape of
the Church. In his book ‘After our Likeness’ he aims to “spell out a vision of the church as an
image of the Triune God.”44 He points to the “reciprocal interiority of the trinitarian
persons”45, the notion of perichoresis as “co-inheritance in one another without any
coalescence or commixture.”46 Interceding for his coming church, Jesus prays “that they may
all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” (John 17:21),
which on face value would seem that God’s people are invited into the very life and unity of
the mutually indwelling Triune God. One might even say that the acts of the Church in the
world are in perichoretic union with the acts of God in the world.
Volf refers to this divine unity as catholicity, where “the one divine person is not only itself,
but rather carries within itself also the other divine persons”. 47 But one must ask, how can a
human person or even a community of people who of themselves are not God share in the
reciprocal interiority of the trinitarian persons. Volf acknowledges this problem, that in and
of themselves human beings have individual agency and “are always external to one another
as subjects.”48 Nevertheless, he offers the model of the Church as people who mutually give
of themselves, one to the other, as an image of the interiority of the divine. In this way, “each
person gives of himself or herself to others, and each person in a unique way takes up others
43
Miraslov Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing, 1998), 77.
44
Volf, After Our Likeness, 2.
45
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid.
48
15
into himself or herself.”49 This is ultimately a work of the Spirit who “opens them to one
another and allows them to become catholic persons in their uniqueness.” 50 This is entirely a
relational image of Imago Dei that integrates both corporate and individual human agency.
For Volf, it is the ministry of the Holy Spirit that establishes the relational interconnectedness
between God and his Church. It is an incarnational theology of the Spirit as having a Church
which is constituted by Holy Spirit , gifted by Holy Spirit for God’s mission and purpose.
Volf asserts that the Church is truly Trinitarian shaped and image bearing;
Human beings can be in the triune God only insofar as the Son is in them (John 17:23; 14:20); and
if the Son is in them, then so also is the love with which the Father loves the Son (John 17:26).
Because the Son indwells human beings through the Spirit, however, the unity of the church is
grounded in the interiority of the Spirit – and with the Spirit also the interiority of the other divine
persons – in Christians. The Holy Spirit is the “one person in many persons.” It is not the mutual
perichoresis of human beings, but rather the indwelling of the Spirit common to everyone that
makes the church into a communion corresponding to Trinity, a communion in which personhood
and sociality are equiprimal.51
The Church is Trinitarian shaped through the inspiration and empowerment of the Holy Spirit
incarnate. As the church in both individual and corporate agency embodies the will of God
through the Spirit it is participating and sharing in the mission of God. This discussion is
pertinent as it relates to an incarnational theology of the Holy Spirit to be outlined later in this
thesis.
The functional approach.
Traditionally, the functional approach has been linked to the notion of royalty in the Ancient
Near East whereby “a human being could be the dwelling place of a deity and hence function
as the image of the god … the king as image of the god is his representative.” 52 This idea is
49
Ibid.
50
51
52
16
distinctly different to the structural and relational view because it asserts that ‘image’ is not to
be understood ontologically but rather in terms of its function. 53 In this sense, Imago Dei is a
representational undertaking like that of a vice-regent and has been connected with the
following commission by God, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and
have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living
thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen 1:28). This is echoed in Psalm 8 which denotes
humanity’s “dominion over the works of your hands” (Ps 8:6). Modern history connotates
‘dominion’ with colonialism, environmental degradation and abusive relationships but that is
not the kind of dominion Jacob is suggesting, but instead humanities “status as the Creator’s
representatives called to steward his creation.”54
Jacob supports the functional approach. In her treatment of Romans 8:29b, ‘conformed to the
Image of his Son’, she states that the heart of Paul’s teaching is reference “to a functional
conformity; that is, when believers are conformed to the Image of the Son, they are
conformed to his status and function as the Son of God who rules over creation.” 55 This is of
course a very “Christocentric view of the image (defined) in terms of the ultimate vision of
salvation in Christ. It connects Imago Dei to Imago Christi”56, and importantly for Jacob, the
reign of Christ. Central to her argument about ‘image’ is the link Paul makes between the
believers’ conformity (Rom 8:29) with glorification (Rom 8:30) and co-glorification (Rom
8:17). Jacob denotes Romans 1-8 as a “’narrative of glory’ – a theological storyboard …
(which supports) Paul’s new-Adam Christology.”57
53
54
Jacob, Conformed, 117.
55
56
David Tarsus, “Imago Dei in Christian Theology: The Various Approaches” Online International Journal of Arts
and Humanities, Volume 5 (2016): 18-25,
https://www.academia.edu/26235190/IMAGO_DEI_IN_CHRISTIAN_THEOLOGY_THE_VARIOUS_APPROACHES.
57
17
In her exposition Jacob uses the Jewish literature to make a distinction between God’s
glorification and human glorification.58 Most often we think of glory as something that God
has, possesses and expresses in ways that human beings cannot. There are connotations of
blinding splendour associated with God’s presence along with theophanies59 such as Moses’
radiant face (Exod 34:29) or Christ transfigured with a changed face and dazzling white
garments (Luke 9:29). Jocob asserts that biblical scholars have paid little attention to ‘glory’
and specifically how it is associated to humans and being God’s ‘image’. She states that the
terms ‘glory’ and ‘glorify’ “have for centuries been used within Christian theology and
jargon basically without question. It is one thing for God to receive glory and be glorified; it
is another thing entirely for humanity to do so.”60 Because our notions of ‘glory’ are abstract,
scholars have imagined that ‘God’s’ glory will be fully realised at the eschaton when all
things are consummated. Indeed this is how most people read and understand the glory of
God, yet, when human beings are glorified in Jewish literature it is not associated with
theophany at all apart from the exception of Moses.61 Jacob corrects the record in her
argument that theophanic glory is almost exclusively ascribed to God but human glory is
distinctly different, “it is almost entirely the case that glory given to a person (or a person’s
glorification) either constitutes or is closely related to the honour, power, wealth, or authority
associated with an exulted status of rule.”62
Based on this treatment, Jacob is asserting that Paul would have assumed a functional role for
the ecclesia and the people within it because of his own Jewish interpretation of human
glorification. For Paul, humanity forsake the glory of God at the fall. Not some “prefall
58
Ibid, 29-39.
59
E.F. Harrison, “Glory,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Michigan: Baker Book
House, 1984), 443-444.
60
61
Ibid, 62.
62
Ibid.
18
visible splendour”,63 but instead, their created purpose as keeper of God’s reign and
representation in his creation. Through a lens of ‘Conformed to the image of His Son’,
participation in the firstborn Son’s glory and the adoption of believers into God’s
eschatological family64, Jacob leans on Psalm 8 to argue that believers rule with Christ in the
here and now and that this “rule is the reinstitution of humanities dominion over creation as
God’s viceregents.”65
Jacob contends that being ‘conformed to the image of his Son’ (Rom 8:29) and the idea of
‘co-glorification’ as expressed by Paul in ‘we may also be glorified with him’ (Rom 8:17), is
correlated with what she describes as vocational participation. She states, “in the resurrection
life and rule of the Messiah over creation in fulfilment of God’s originally intended Adamic
vocation.”66 Grenz explains it this way, “Paul presents Christ as the last Adam, who, through
his resurrection as the inauguration of the eschatological resurrection of the dead, stands as
the great contrast to the first Adam.” 67 This participation in Christ signifies a renewed
humanity and describes a salvation arc from Adam to new Adam, Imago Dei to Imago
Christi. Jacob describes this as “a transformation of status in Christ.” 68 Not some future
reality but a present eschatological experience for those in Christ and attained through
“transition from bondage to sin to life in the Spirit to adoption into God’s family (and)
sharing in the inheritance and glory of the Son (by) participating in the universal sovereignty
of the Son.”69
63
Ibid, 101.
64
Jacob, Conformed, 202-227.
65
Ibid, 266.
66
Ibid, 169.
67
68
69
Ibid.
19
Wright also conveys a present eschatology of participation in what God is doing in the here
and now. His contention is that it is through his image bearers that God will re-create and
reconstitute a new heaven and a new earth as stated,
God builds God’s Kingdom. But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within
that world takes place not least through one of his creatures in particular, namely, the human
beings who reflect his image. That, I believe is central to the notion of being made in God’s image.
God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected – imaged, if you like –
into his world through his human creatures.70
A composite view of Imago Dei
Given the expanse of views surrounding Imago Dei it is unsurprising that contemporary
scholarship should try and correlate them with a composite (multifaceted) perspective. Each
of the anthropological propositions outlined above have merit. How can humanity relate to
the creator without rationality? How can humanity reflect God’s image, like a mirror, without
participating in what God is doing? In these questions alone we see the salient affiliation
between the structural, relational and functional aspect of bearing the image. Given that, the
composite view seeks to remove the prominence of any one approach and attempts to
integrate the structural, relational and functional approaches.71
The idea is that an over emphasis on any one view could detract from the meaning of
‘image’. For example, Jacob makes a strong case for the functional view but an overemphasis
on the ‘rule’ of humanity as a ‘reinstitution of dominion’ could be construed as saying that
rule and dominion are a consequence of what it means to be created in God’s image, “but this
function remains distinct from the meaning of the image itself.”72
Chapter 2.
70
N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New
York: HarperCollins, 2008), 207.
71
David Tarsus, “Imago Dei in Christian Theology: The Various Approaches” Online International Journal of Arts
and Humanities, Volume 5 (2016): 18-25,
72
Cortez, Resourcing, 113.
20
Imago Dei to Imago Christi
The previous section considered various approaches to understanding the Imago Dei through
their historical development. This chapter will explore the nuance between Imago Dei and
Imago Christi and propose a trajectory from one to the other in the frame of the Adam-Christ
typology.
The Adam-Christ typology.
The Adam-Christ typology refers to scriptural references in Romans 5:12-21 and 1
Corinthians 15. Both of these scriptures are similar in that they compare Christ with Adam
and portray the life of Christ as salvific to Adam’s fallenness;
Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness
leads to justification and life for all. (Rom 5:18)
For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a
human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. (1 Cor 15:21-22)
Although they both discuss the relationship between Adam and Christ in terms of salvation,
they each follow a different emphasis. Romans addresses the context of sin and redemption
whilst 1 Corinthians 15 “has a broader frame of reference, dealing with the parallel from the
perspective of creation as well as sin.”73 This is to say that Paul’s proposition is that Christ is
the fulfilment of God’s human creation ultimately realised through his resurrection. The
significance of the resurrection cannot be understated as it is the only means by which human
beings attain an eschatological fulfilment as ‘for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive
in Christ.’ (1 Cor 15:22). According to Cortez, this raises an essential question for
contemporary theologians; “If Jesus is the ‘second Adam’ with respect to creation and not
73
Ibid, 69.
21
just redemption, does this not suggest that the Son would have become incarnate even if
humans had not fallen into sin?” 74 This idea of ‘Incarnation Anyway’ challenges some
theologies of atonement75 but is necessary to consider as it is central to formulating a
Christological anthropology.76 Even so, or the purpose of this thesis I am following Cortez’s
view that, “(1) eschatological consummation is the telos that God has chosen for his people,
and (2) this eschatological consummation only comes about through Jesus Christ.”77 That is,
Jesus came not only to redeem humanity from sin, but is also to become the realisation of
God’s plans for the creation of humanity.
Paul describes the resurrected Christ as the ‘firstborn over all creation’ (Col 1:15), the
‘firstborn from among the dead’ (Col 1:18)78. Jacob refers to this as “language as referring to
the Son as the image of God who is the archetype of all redeemed humanity”. 79 Christ’s
resurrection has had the efficacy of establishing a ‘new humanity’ (Eph 2:15). This is what
O’Brien calls “a new eschatological race of people.”80 It is to say that those who are included
in this new eschatological race are imprinted with Imago Christi. Dunn describes it this way;
Although there is a clear sense that the sonship of believers is derived from Jesus’ sonship, is
sharing in Jesus’ sonship, there is no clear implication that the sonship of believers is of a different
order from Jesus’ sonship. If anything, the thought is rather of Jesus as the eldest brother in a new
family of God.81
Jacob says it similarly, stating;
74
Ibid.
75
This debate rests on the side lines of this thesis and further research is warranted but it is not principally
connected with my topic.
76
Ibid.
77
78
The authorship of Colossians is contested but for the purpose of this I am attributing it to Paul.
79
80
Peter O’Brien, as quoted in Jacob, Conformed, 200.
81
James Dunn, as quoted in Jacob, Conformed, 200.
22
Paul also presents Jesus as the new Adam, the paradigmatic and pre-eminent representative of a
new, redeemed humanity. Jesus is the perfect image of God, who in his resurrected and exalted
state is the firstborn of both a new humanity and an eschatological family of God – brothers and
sisters who participate in the life of this resurrected Son.82
This raises the crucial question of when this eschatological family begins. Is it inaugurated at
the moment of Christ’s resurrection for human beings who are living the earthly life in the
present, or, do human being need to wait for their own death and resurrection to obtain this
inheritance?
N.T. Wright undertakes this question by considering Paul’s teaching on the resurrected body.
Wright suggests that Platonic thinking has clouded the Western mind from being able to fully
comprehend what Paul is saying,83 that it is dualistic in its approach and presumes the
eschaton as a separate and future event to the present. Wright argues that the Pauline texts,
particularly 1 Corinthians 15, should not be approached that way, stating, “The dominant
cosmology of his day, which was Stoic rather than Platonic. Still less was it so in Jewish
creation theology, which formed the seedbed out of which, because of the resurrection of
Jesus himself, Paul grew his theology of new creation.” 84
This is to emphasise that Paul’s understanding of the inauguration of this new body, new
creation, new heaven and earth, even the ability for living beings to be endowed with Imago
Christi, is not something for the future but something that is evidenced in the present. The
particular feature of this for Paul is the life giving presence of God’s Spirit in the process of
this transformation, as Wright states, “Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that
82
83
Wright, Surprised By Hope, 153.
84
Ibid.
23
what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the
eventual future in ways at which we can presently only guess.”85
Fee says something very similar in his definition of the eschatological goal of salvation
stating, “God's eschatological salvation, effected through the death and resurrection of Christ,
and resulting in an eschatological community who live out the life of the future in the present
age by the power of the Spirit, as they await the consummation.”86 The idea of living out the
future in the present affirms the notion that the eschatological family that images Christ has
already been instituted in Christ’s bodily resurrection.
Because of Christ’s resurrection, Bosch can speak about the church as having, “an
eschatological horizon and is, as proleptic manifestation of God’s reign, the beachhead of the
new creation, the vanguard of God’s new world, and the sign of the dawning new age in the
midst of the old.”87 This is to mean that through his resurrection Christ has instituted the
correct order of God’s creation and is re-instituting things that properly belong in the present.
This is the future epoch penetrating the present, or as Bosch says, “the incursion of the future
new age into the present old age.”88 This unfolding of the kingdom is a work of the Spirit in
participation with believers as they act with the Spirit in perichoretic in obedience.
Jacob approaches the question by emphasising the advent of human glorification as inter
tempora (between time).89 The glorification of God’s people has arrived, yet it is not fully
realised, expressed in the idea that the present is an ‘in between’ time which has sometimes
85
86
Gordon Fee, To What End Exegesis? Essays Contextual, Exegetical and Theological. (Michigan: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), 214.
87
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. (New York: Orbis Books, 2011),
146
88
Ibid, 145.
89
24
been referred to as now but not yet. Although some scholars would question the proposition
of the now but not yet, 90 Jacob argues the case by citing Paul’s inter tempora statement in
Romans 8;
In Romans 8:17-18, the glory of believers is yet to come; according to Romans 8:30, believers
are already glorified. The same scenario exists with believers’ adoption: in Romans 8:15
believers have already received adoption, but in Romans 8:23 that adoption is yet to come. 91
Fee relates the same concept differently by describing the eschaton as already stating, "The
believers present existence is entirely determined by the future that has already been set in
motion"92, yet concurrently describes the eschaton as not yet, "the future that has begun and
absolutely conditions present existence still awaits its final consummation."93 Theoretically, it
frames the Pauline texts as having been written from both the perspective of a future
eschatological event, yet also, in the present, described by Dunn as an “two ‘ages’ … (that)
overlap and co-exist in the present time.”94
Through the lens of Paul’s Adam-Christ typology, Grenz brings attention to the
transformational work and ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life of believers;
The eschatological destiny of bearing the divine image is present in the here and now as the
Spirit is at work transforming those who are in Christ into the image that Christ bears. …
Those who are destined to be the new humanity and as such to reflect the divine image, and
therefore are already in the process of being transformed into that image, carry the ethical
responsibility to live out that reality in the present.95
This idea is significant as it is intrinsically related to the transformation which takes place in
the life of the believer who acts upon the Spirit driven compassionate impulse. It is the Spirit
90
91
92
Fee, Exegesis, 215.
93
Ibid.
94
James Dunn, as quoted in Jacob, Conformed, 233-234.
95
Grenz, Social God, 251-252.
25
who is transforming the Church into the Image of Christ. Principally, the Spirit is conforming
Imago Dei to Imago Christi and along with that transformation comes the responsibility of
believers to image Christ in their attitudes and behaviours. Not that this is done through the
effort of each believer, but rather, their willingness to commune with the Spirit, hear from the
Spirit and be led by the Spirit because it is the Spirit who is God present with and in his
people. This dynamic relationship between the Sprit and believers is dynamic at both the
individual and corporate level.
To sum up, the pivotal feature of a trajectory from Imago Dei to Imago Christi is that the life
and ministry of Jesus Christ (the image to which believers have been conformed), was
Trinitarian, in that Christ exhibited the will of the Father through the life of his Spirit. Buxton
articulates it this way, “In the same way that Jesus did only that which he saw his Father
doing, the church is given the gift of the Spirit to do only that which is in the Fathers heart,
neither more the less.”96 Therefore the believers life is a recapitulation of Imago Christi, also
Trinitarian shaped in that they do the will of the Father through the life of the Spirit.
An incarnational theology of the Holy Spirit.
The previous section proposed a salvific arc whereby God transforms people from Imago Dei
to Imago Christi. This follows the Adam-Christ typology, creation to new creation, heaven
and earth to a new heaven and a new earth, humanity to a new humanity. This section will
focus on the ongoing work of the Spirit within Corpus Christi as the agent of transformation
in the inter tempora and explore how ecclesiology might be informed by a pneumatological
Christology.
96
Graham Buxton, Dancing in The Dark (Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 2001), 34.
26
Buxton adopts an incarnational theology of Holy Spirit, even suggesting that the role of the
Spirit has gone unnoticed in many systematic theologies. Noting that Jesus has been placed in
a superior role than the Spirit in many cases. 97 Buxton argues that “this imbalance needs to be
corrected, for ‘it was the anointing by the Spirit that made Jesus “Christ” … and made him
effective in history as the absolute Saviour."98 If one is to assert that Imago Christi is an
eschatological reality in the present as it is imaged in the people of God, then an incarnational
pneumatology has to inform ecclesiology. An incarnational theology of the Spirit needs to be
further explored and supported.
Zizioulas is a major contributor in this field and he argues that that, “Christ exists only
pneumatologically … Thus the mystery of the Church has its birth in the entire economy of
the Trinity and in a pneumatologically constituted Christology.”99 In the same way the
Church, Corpus Christi is also pneumatologically constituted. That is, the Spirit of God was
given to the Church by Christ in such a way as to confer his own mission upon the disciples
when he breathed on them saying, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send
you” (John 20:21). Again this is fully realised at Pentecost when all the believers were
together in one place and were filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-4). For Zizioulas the
Church is “‘instituted’ by Christ and ‘constituted’ by the Spirit… (hence) pneumatology must
qualify the very ontology of the church.”100
Drawing on the work of John Taylor, Buxton forms an ecclesiology wherein the Church is
given over to the Spirit for his purposes rather than the Spirit being given to the Church for its
purposes. Buxton explains, “when the Church is given to the Spirit, Christians are caught up
97
Ibid, 31.
98
Buxton, Dancing in The Dark, 32.
99
John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 1985), 110-111.
100
Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology, 99-100.
27
in the life of the Trinitarian God, who is ‘God-in-community’. As the Church lives out the
life of ‘God-in-community’, mission and ministry become the inevitable outflow of that
life.”101 This order in giving echoes the notion previously discussed, that the Trinitarian shape
of Imago Dei correlates with the Trinitarian shape of the Church. Yet in this case ‘God-in-
community’ and his mission in the world only becomes incarnate in the people of God. In
their participation with the Spirit, believers are drawn into the purposes of God and are being
conformed fully to the image of Christ. Simply put, God is present in his people, by his Spirit
as he transforms them and enables them to ‘image’ Christ, as Volf asserts, “human beings can
become persons only in communion with the personal God, who alone merits being called a
person in the original sense.”102
Chapter 3.
Divine Presence and the human idol
Image and idols in the ancient world
The supposition that the Spirit is incarnate, or made flesh, in the life of believers is to argue
that God is divinely present in their bodies. Scripture teaches that Jesus is not bodily present
in the world but rather seated in at the right hand of God in the heavenly realms (Eph 1:20).
101
102
28
Yet, Jesus is present in his people now as they live move and have their being in the Spirit
who is within them (Acts 17:28, John 14:17). This is to explicitly say that the same Spirit that
dwells in the Trinitarian life, the one who overshadowed Mary, incarnated Christ and
remained with him throughout his earthly ministry,103 also dwells in people’s bodies, thereby
willing them to bear God’s image. Put succinctly, the real divine presence is within God’s
people as they bear the creator’s image. Given the nature of this proposition, it would be
remiss to neglect contemporary research surrounding the ontology of idols as not only the
image of a deity but possibly something that also embodies the deity’s real presence.
In a recent lecture series, N.T. Wright highlights the Hebrew understanding of creation as
being God’s temple. He stated that “the wilderness tabernacle and then the Jerusalem Temple
were designed as small working models of creation… creation itself is spoken of as a temple,
a heaven and earth place.”104 In the Ancient Near East there were many pagan gods and they
too had temples. Indeed the Hebrew scriptures outlaw any form of idolatry and there are
various accounts in the Old Testament the Israelites destroying these temples and the
‘devoted’ items within them. Wright highlights, “In any temple in the Ancient world there
would be one object in the inner sanctum which would tell you who the God was who was
supposed to live there. In other words, an image.” 105 The distinguishing feature of the Hebrew
temple was the fact that it did not have an idol or an image of God because humanity
themselves are God’s image bearers in his creation. Dumbrell supports this point of view
pointing towards Psalm 78:54, “And he brought them to his holy hill, to the mountain that his
right hand had won”, stating that the mountain is representative of, “Palestine itself; the entire
103
104
N.T. Wright “Lecture 2: ‘Living in God’s Moment: Becoming Truly Human in a Demanding World,” Video
Lecture, St. John’s Cathedral Hong Kong, March 20, 2019, 38:28, http://ntwrightpage.com/2019/04/14/st-
johns-cathedral-public-lecture-series.
105
Ibid, 38:57.
29
Promised Land is the point of contact between the divine and human worlds, the place where
the God of Israel could be met.”106
Recent scholarship has taken a unique approach to understanding Imago Dei in light of the
practices “within the broader conceptual framework of idols and divine presence in the
Ancient world.”107 Cortez has argued that pneumatology is directly related to the very
meaning of Imago Dei with a particular focus on divine presence.108
Referring to the idols worshipped in Greco-Roman times Gupta asserts, “the cult statue was
treated with a unique ontology, as if a bridge between two worlds.” 109 He notes the common
perception that “there was something unique about these objects – inexplicably, they
transferred the god into the mortal realm for access and efficacy.” 110 In that sense there is the
notion that the deity is somehow present in the statue (image of the god) itself.
Drawing from the work of Catherine McDowell, Cortez states, “More than just wood or
stone, an idol was a manifestation of divine presence in the world.” 111 McDowell has
reviewed primary sources from the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt to discover
the cultic rituals that idols would undergo in order to become infused with the divine
presence of a deity. In her studies she outlines the mis pî pit pî – “washing of the mouth and
opening of the mouth” and Egyptian wpt-r – “opening of the mouth” ceremonies that;
106
William Dumbrell, The Search for Order: Biblical Eschatology in Focus (Michigan: Baker Books, 1994), 41.
107
Cortez, “Idols, Images,” 10.
108
Cortez, Resourcing, 99-129.
109
Nijay K. Gupta, “’They are not Gods!’ Jewish and Christian Idol Polemic and Greco-Roman use of Cult
Statues,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 76, (2014): 719,
http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.divinity.idm.oclc.org/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=88e0827c-0beb-4b2d-
9150-5965cc8772f3%40sessionmgr4007
110
Ibid, 709.
111
Ibid, 109.
30
functioned concurrently to produce not a representation of the divine but, as indicated by the
birthing language and imagery of the pit pî, as well as the animation of the images sensory organs
and the offerings of food, drink, clothing, and shelter (in the temple), what was considered to be a
physical, living manifestation of an otherwise invisible reality.112
This is to say that McDowell asserts that idols are imbued with the divine presence of the
deity and animate its presence. For Cortez, pagan understandings of image such as this are
wholly relevant to how we should read the Genesis account as they provide a “background of
ancient Near Eastern views on the nature and function of idols, viewing the creation of adam
in Genesis 2:7 as God fashioning his own idol in the world” 113 Alternate to the common
biblical understanding that idols are simply metal or wooden images, in no way animated and
with no real power, through cultic ritual the idol becomes more that a symbol or a
representation, but rather, a “living being”.114 This framework correlates the notion of God’s
image bearers being the idols in God’s temple (creation), as animated and imbued with God’s
divine presence.
Cortez indicates that this conceptual framework of idolatry is the appropriate context by
which we should understand the language of image in the Old Testament. Human beings
through the infusion of God’s own breath, through the nostrils, are imbued with something of
God’s own self. Cortez notes the parallels between the ‘mouth washing’ and ‘mouth opening’
ceremonies of pagan idols and the Genesis account of human creation 115 and suggests that
“even though Gen. 2:7 does not refer explicitly to the Spirit, we are justified in understanding
this as a story of God filling his designated image-bearers with the Spirit of his presence.”116
112
Catherine McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden: The Creation of Humankind in Genesis 2:5-
3:24 in light of the Mis Pî Pit Pî and Wpt-r rituals of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, (Indiana : Eisenbrauns,
2015), 85, http://web.b.ebscohost.com.divinity.idm.oclc.org/ehost/detail?sid=ca9b4e36-9331-4000-b5ba-
561240a89416@pdc-v-sessmgr03&vid=0&format=EB&rid=1#AN=1051768&db=nlebk
113
114
Cortez, “Idols, Images,” 6.
115
Ibid, 7.
116
Ibid.
31
The reality of divine presence within image bearers is one aspect of contemporary debate. In
relation to the Greco-Roman idols in the book of Acts, Gupta states, “We can say with good
confidence that Greeks and Romans did not think that a deity exclusively and internally
existed as a statue in a temple”, 117 however, this does not invalidate the assertion made by
Cortez as he refers to the idols of a different and previous culture.
For the purpose of this thesis, the reality of divine presence in an idol informs the concept of
the Adam-Christ typology outlined in chapter 2, specifically in relation to the infilling of
Holy Spirit in the life of the believers in the embryonic Church community. Cortez highlights
the association between Imago, divine presence and the ministry of the Holy Spirit, “If the
imago Dei denotes the idea that humans are a primary means through which God manifests
his own presence in the world, then the imago is inherently pneumatological because of the
intimate link between God’s presence and the Spirit throughout the Old Testament.” 118 To be
truly human, to be Imago Christi, one will be in union with the Holy Spirit as Christ was.
Craig Keener draws the parallel by reorienting the Genesis 2 creation narrative
Christologically. In his commentary on John 20:22 he states, “Jesus breathing on them recalls
Genesis 2:7 when God breathed into Adam the breath of life.” 119 The argument as to whether
one agrees or disagrees that God’s presence was imbued in God’s image bearers before
Pentecost is one thing, but certainly after Pentecost, the divine presence is incarnate in God’s
people, the image bearers who now more specifically bear the image of Christ as they are
indwelled by the same Spirit of Christ. As God’s image bearers remain in step with the Spirit
this indwelling is a continuous refilling in the present as they incarnate the compassionate
will of the Trinity.

117
Gupta, “They are not Gods!”, 719.
118
119
Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 317.
32
Unlike the Pagan idol worshippers of their time, the Hebrews knew that idols were simply
made of wood and stone. To associate the real presence of a deity in a man-made object is the
sin of idolatry in Jewish law as there is only one true and living God, the creator of all
creatures. The incarnation changes this as Christ is fully imbued with the Spirit in Trinitarian
relationship. Christ is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Col 1:15). The hypostatic union
unveils the true Imago Dei in the man Jesus Christ, literally walking the earth and instituting
his Lordship over it. Jesus Christ the true human, the new Adam, fully alive in the fullness of
God imbued with the Spirit of God incarnate.
Imago Christi and True Humanity
The Adam-Christ typology proposes that the destiny of believers who participate in Christ is
to bear the image of Christ. This is what Grenz describes as “the divinely given goal from the
beginning.”120 Through Christ, God’s people are transformed, converted, conformed into a
new humanity. God’s purpose is that Imago Dei becomes transmuted to Imago Christi. The
anthropological concept is that Jesus is the new Adam, the human who took sin into himself
to realise what Adam could not, which shows what it is to be truly human. This trueness has
been accomplished in Christ and the believers have also been converted, transformed,
transmuted, through his life, death, resurrection and ascension. Grenz explains;
Jesus Christ now radiates the fullness of humanness that constitutes God’s design for humankind
from the beginning. Yet God’s purpose has never been that Christ will merely radiate this human
fullness, but that as the Son he will be preeminent among a new humanity who together are
stamped with the divine image. Consequently, the humankind created in the divine image is none
other than the new humanity conformed to the Imago Christi, and the telos toward which the Old
Testament creation narrative points is the eschatological community of glorified saints who have
joined their head in resurrection life by the power of the Spirit.121
120
Grenz, Social God, 230-231.
121
Ibid, 231.
33
The logical conclusion of this argument is that Adam was intrinsically good, yet, intrinsically
imperfect from the start. The first humans bore Imago Dei, yet that was not God’s final
creative move for humanity. This logic points to Christ as the centrepiece of God’s creative
power and fulfilment of human destiny; God’s re-creation of humanity and the revealing of
this great mystery that God is fully human. This is to say that humanity was only fully created
in Christ, and Adam was “a type of the one who was to come” (Rom 5:14). This telic
understanding of Imago Dei is not a new one and was succinctly expressed by Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) in his famous dictum, “we are not yet human beings, but are
daily becoming so.”122
Pannenberg, who has been described as Herder’s “twentieth century disciple”, 123 also
contends that participation in Christ is necessitous to becoming that which God has called
every human to be. According to Pannenberg, it is God’s inspiration that causes human
beings to be “lifted above what they already are. But they must also be participants in this
process”.124
Michael Gorman also speaks about participation as transformative, specifically in the
adoption of Paul’s language of being ‘In Christ’. He speaks about the people of God as being
cruciform, which he describes as a ‘cross shaped’ life or “the form of life inspired and shaped
by Jesus’s crucifixion.”125 This is to say that the new humanity, God’s people, are living the
life of Christ now. That is, Christ being incarnated in the present through the Church and in
tandem with the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Gorman recounts Paul’s ‘in Christ’ language
122
Johann Gottfried Herder, as quoted in Grenz, Social God, 180.
123
Ibid.
124
Wolfhart Pannenberg, as quoted in Grenz, Social God, 180.
125
Michael Gorman, Participating in Christ: Exploring Paul’s Theology and Spirituality (Michigan: Baker
Academic, 2019), 11.
34
living with him and in him as “Participation”. 126 Paul even goes so far to say that “I have been
crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal
2:19b-20).
The next chapter will explore what it means to ‘participate in Christ’ and to ‘image Christ’ as
central to participating in God’s mission. It will consider the impulse for Christ’s own
mission and ministry and apply it to the Corpus Christi. It will suggest that compassionate
spirituality expressed in loving service is not just a good model for ministry, one that imitates
Christ, and works to conform the believers’ identity to the image of Christ and fashioning
them to become truly human.
Chapter 4
A model of Compassionate Mission
What I have attempted to illustrate up to this point is that participation in Christ is
participation in the life of the Trinitarian God.127 The work and ministry of the Spirit is
126
Ibid, 3-6.
127
This discussion around participation in the life of the Trinity naturally leads into debate about ‘Theosis’, an
Orthodox teaching which refers to the divinization of creation and particularly the human soul. This thesis
could easily branch into this direction as it is deeply associated with bearing Imago Christi but instead I have
chosen to allocate more time to the link between Imago Christi and God’s mission. Michael Gorman defines
theosis as ‘Transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through the Spirit-enabled
35
embodied in the people of God as God outworks his mission, incarnationally through them.
Grenz puts it this way, "The eschatological destiny of bearing the divine image is present in
the here and now as the Spirit is at work transforming those who are in Christ into the image
that Christ bears."128 The salient point here is that it is through participation in the mission of
God that this transformation takes place. If one is not ‘in Christ’ or living and sharing ‘in the
Spirit’ then it would be incongruent to say that one is sharing in God’s mission.
Consequently, if one is not sharing in God’s mission, then it would be incongruent to say that
the transforming work of the Spirit can transpire. Therefore, if one is not being transformed
by the Spirit, they may not attain true humanity, Imago Christi.
Mission and the Transformational Ministry of the Spirit.
Drawing from Philippians 2:1, Gorman correlates the term ‘in Christ’ with ‘sharing
[participation, koinonia] in the Spirit’ stating that the Church is able “to embody in their
corporate life the narrative of the Messiah. The indwelling Messiah creates and shapes a
community that manifests his presence in concrete practices of Messiah-like love.”129 Indeed,
Gorman asserts that each person ‘in Christ’ is called and enabled to live, stating, “the fully
human (incarnate) one, the Jesus of this Christ-poem defines and reveals what true humanity
looks like: self-giving love.”130 It is important to note that this’self-giving’ can only take
place when the believer is willing to respond to the movement of the Spirit within.
conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ’ (Gorman 2009, 7). Jacob questions
Gorman’s approach suggesting a conflation between ‘like Christ’ and ‘incorporation into the divine identity’
stating, “Participation in Christ does not blur the ever-present distinction between God in Christ and believers
in Christ” (Jacob 2018, 134-135). A good explanation of theosis is given by Richard Rohr and can be found at
Centre for Action and Contemplation, https://cac.org/theosis-2018-09-12/
128
129
Gorman, Participating, 35-36.
130
Ibid, 36.
36
Jacob maintains that the transformation which takes place in those who are in union with
Christ is an ontological conversion.131 This is to say that Paul’s statement, “if anyone is in
Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become
new!” (2 Cor 5:17) is to be taken literally. Like Gorman, Jacob correlates participation with
Christ and union with Christ;
Participation is not somehow outside union with Christ or something different from union with
Christ; it is a logical consequence of certain ontological transformations that take place in union
with Christ, namely those that imply an active rather than passive reception of such
transformations. For example, justification, sanctification, adoption, and traditional understandings
of eschatological glorification “In Christ” are all passive. In each case, it is an ontological
transformation that happens in union with Christ and that implies no logically subsequent activity
on the part of the believer.132
The mission of God is one of heartfelt love and compassion and it is manifested in the world
as the believer is in union with the Spirit and what the Spirit is doing. Buxton argues that “we
cannot put a wedge between the Spirit who draws us into intimate communion with God and
the Spirit who leads us out into compassionate involvement with the world”. 133 The work of
the Spirit in the life if the Church is expressive of Christ’s own love and compassion. In other
words, compassion becomes the impulse for mission and ministry in the Church as the
continuing work of the Godhead is pretheoretically expressed by the Church as it participates
in the life of the Spirit. Through perichoretic union with the Holy Spirit, Jesus’s ministry was
mediated in the world before ascension and continues to be mediated in the life of the
Church, the body which images Christ today. Buxton describes it this way; “The Spirit is the
one who not only invites us to participate in the exhilarating dance of the Trinity; he also
invites us to take the light of that life into a suffering, cruel and confused world.”134
131
132
Ibid, 133-34.
133
134
37
Bosch reminds us that “The entire Christian existence is to be characterised as a missionary
existence”,135 quoting the words of the Second Vatican Council, “the church on earth is by its
very nature missionary”.136 This is to say that mission is God’s activity in which the Church,
both individual and corporate, is an active participant. It is God’s mission, not an array of
programs and activities that are entirely born from the mind of human beings, but rather, the
sharing in God’s life, God’s intentions and what God is doing in the world that he created and
loves. Bosch states it like this;
(Mission) refers primarily to the missio Dei (God’s mission), that is, God’s self-revelation as the
One who loves the world, God’s involvement in and with the world, the nature and activity of
God, which embraces both the church and the world and in which the church is privileged to
participate.137
The Church looks to and is determined by Christ in whom the nature of this mission is
revealed. As the mission of Christ was pneumatologically propelled when he was bodily
present, so is Christ’s mission in the Church today as it is bodily present. Wright explains,
“what the church does, in the power of the Spirit, is rooted in the achievement of Jesus and
looks ahead to the final completion of his work. This is how Jesus is running the world in the
present.”138
Cox explains the activity of the Church in the context of being an ongoing work of the
resurrected Christ, stating, “the life Jesus lived and the project he pursued (The Kingdom of
God) did not perish at the crucifixion, but continued in the lives of those who carried on what
he begun.”139 Again, this refers to the Church as the extension of Christ’s incarnation. 140
135
Bosch, Transforming Mission, 10.
136
Ibid. This quote was preceded and influence by Johannes Blauw’s book ‘The Missionary Nature of the
Church’ which was commission by the WCC and influence both Catholic and Evangelical perspectives.
137
Ibid.
138
N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A new vision of who he was, what he did, and why he matters. (New York:
HarperCollins, 2011), 230.
139
Cox, The Future of Faith, 52.
140
Ibid.
38
Newbigin puts it this way, “the mighty works of Jesus are the work of God’s kingly power, of
his Spirit. So also with the disciples. It is the Spirit who will give them power and the Spirit
who will bear witness.”141
Importantly for this thesis, by drawing a correspondence between the work of the Spirit
through Christ during his earthly ministry and the work of the Spirit in Christ’s ongoing
earthly ministry through God’s Spirit filled people today, we may obtain a deeper
understanding of what it is to be fully human; that is to bear Imago Christi.
The Compassion of Christ
The very word ‘compassion’ in its Latin derivation means “to suffer with”142 and Christ
expressed it through his mission and ministry as he entered into the suffering of others and
ultimately himself. Jesus knew that he would endure great suffering. He told his disciples that
he ‘must’ suffer (Matt 16:21, Mark 8:31, Luke 9:22, 17:25). Christ’s passion which finds its
zenith in the crucifixion, embodied the extremity of suffering that the Godhead endured. In
the mockery, rejection, abandonment, physical abuse, shame and the pain of God
forsakenness,143 Christ’s kenosis, his emptying of himself (Phil 2:7), takes place for the sake
of fulfilling a compassionate Trinitarian purpose. Christ’s divine suffering demonstrated
God’s solidarity with the human suffering that came into the world through Adam, but it also
encompasses more. Gorman reminds us that “it was an event of obedience and faithfulness to
the Father and of love for humanity, for us.” 144 The passion and death of Christ was an act of
141
Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in Pluralist Society. (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1989), 117-118.
142
Ibid, 3
143
Jürgen Moltmann’s book, ‘The Crucified God’ provides an in-depth study of the mutual suffering and
forsakenness within the Godhead at the cross. He states, “In the forsakenness of the Son the Father also
forsakes himself” (Moltmann, 2011: 251).
144
Gorman, Participating, 21
39
compassionate service to a humanity who was helpless, ‘like sheep without a shepherd’ (Matt
9:36).
The compassion of Christ was not constrained to the cross event. Henri Nouwen picks it up in
the synoptic gospels where the word itself, σπλαγχνίζομαι – splanchnízomai – compassion, is
used to describe the impulse that stimulated a salvific response from Jesus;
There is a beautiful expression in the Gospels that appears only twelve times and is used
exclusively in reference to Jesus or the Father. That expression is “to be moved with compassion.”
The Greek verb splanchnízomai reveals to us the deep and powerful meaning of this expression.
The splangchna are the in trails of the body, or as we might say today, the guts. They are the place
where our most intimate and intense emotions are located. They are the centre from which both
passionate love and passionate hate grow. When the Gospels speak about Jesus’ compassion as his
being moved in the entrails, they are expressing something very deep and mysterious. 145
In its common use, the word ‘compassion’ fails to fully interpret σπλαγχνίζομαι. This
compassion is an interior movement and there is no single English word that properly inflects
the Greek meaning. This deep and mysterious impulse of compassion stirred Jesus to provide
miraculous provisions of food for the hungry (Matt 14:14, 15:32; Mark 6:34, 8:2), to release a
demon possessed man from his bondage (Mark 9:22), to heal blindness and leprosy (Matt
20:34; Mark 1:41) and even to raise a boy from the dead (Luke 7:13). When Jesus looked at
the crowds, he experienced splanchnízomai (Matt 9:36).
This impulse of compassion is not restricted to Jesus. It is a Trinitarian compassion. A
perichoretic impulse where each person, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united. Christ’s
ministry was in obedience to the Father and sharing in the Spirit, God’s expression of
compassionate love. According to Luke, Jesus began his ministry filled with the very
presence and power of the Spirit, as Jesus expressed, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim
145
Nouwen, McNeill and Morrison, Compassion, 14.
40
release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Luke
4:18). The Spirit ‘upon’ Jesus prompted his compassionate response and actions he took were
the evidence of that stimulus.
Nouwen states, “Jesus' compassion was born of an intimate listening to the unconditional
love of God, we can understand how servanthood can indeed be the full expression of
compassion.”146. Considering the ‘in Christ’ language of Paul, Nouwen places compassion at
the heart of Christian life. In a similar way to Jacob, he distinctly correlates it with human
identity, suggesting that there is an ontological change that takes place within the self when
one is ‘in Christ’ and that this new self enables the believer to experience the very nature of
Christ. He states, “this is the mystery of the Christian life: to receive a new self, a new
identity … this new self, the self of Jesus Christ, makes it possible for us to be compassionate
as our loving God is compassionate.”147 This compassion – splanchnízomai – unfolds from
within the unconditional love of God and is overtly displayed in the ministry of Jesus through
the Spirit and is still outworked in the life of God’s Church today.
Paula Gooder has recently highlighted the fact that Jesus also uses the word splanchnízomai
in two of the most widely treasured and cherished parables; the parable of the good Samaritan
(Luke 10:25-37) and the parable of the prodigal and his brother (Luke 15:11-32). 148 What
makes it interesting is that the term, splanchnízomai, which is usually associated with the
compassionate mission of Christ is this time associated with the actions of other characters.
Splanchnízomai is associated with the father in Luke 15:20 and the Samaritan in Luke 10:33.
In Luke 15, the father character is often treated as an allegory of Christ’s heavenly Father.
146
Nouwen, McNeill and Morrison, Compassion, 36-37.
147
Ibid, 19.
148
Paula Gooder presented her work on parables to members of the Anglican Diocese of Bendigo at St Paul’s
Cathedral on 6 August 2019. Her book, The Parables, is available for pre-release on 30 August 2020.
41
Leon Morris notes, “Jesus is not dealing here with the whole gospel message but with the one
great fact of the Father’s pardoning love.”149 Splanchnízomai expressed by a character so
closely related to our understanding of the Father is compatible to Christ by the very nature of
the hypostatic union. Conversely, splanchnízomai expressed by another, particularly a
Samaritan, seems to be incompatible and out of place.
For this reason, the Samaritan parable can be read Christologically because the Samaritan is
portrayed as a Christ-like figure. In parallel to what Christ would do, the Samaritan heals the
wounded traveller by anointing him with oil and wine (Luke 10:34) and he provided
resources, two denarii, for the man’s food and shelter. This is an extraordinarily generous act
(corresponding to the generosity shown in the feeding of the five thousand) because that sum
of money amounted to around two months board and accommodation. 150 There are many
correspondences between the identity of the Samaritan and the identity of Christ. Hence, the
Samaritan is a Christ figure, representing Imago Christi.
The lawyer who engages Jesus with a question pertaining to eternal life quotes God’s
commands “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” (Deut 6:5;
Lev 19:18). This gives rise to the question ‘who is my neighbour?’ Jesus then goes on to
narrate the parable and turns the lawyers question back upon himself, ‘Which of these three,
do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ Powell
asserts that by doing this;
Jesus challenges his audience (the lawyer) to identify not with any of the three persons who walk
down the road … but with the person in the ditch. … the main point of the story is that religious
149
Leon Morris, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: Luke (Grand Rapids: Inter-Varsity Press, 1984), 239.
150
Ibid, 190.
42
leaders (and by implication or religious people) need to evaluate their faith and life from the
perspective of the most marginalised and vulnerable people on earth.151
Identification with the marginalised and vulnerable is a compassionate impulse. Whilst the
parable is being narrated by Jesus one might expect that the lawyer would find his identity in
either of the two Jewish characters, the priest or Levite, certainly not the Samaritan. The
compassion showed by the Samaritan, one who was not culturally understood as neighbour,
causes an existential conflict for the lawyer as Morris highlights, “Now he must think
whether the priest and the Levite, who scrupulously retained the moral purity required by the
law, really kept the Law, which likewise enjoined love of the neighbour.” 152 Jesus’ instruction
to ‘go and do likewise’ (Luke 10:37) is to say, ‘follow me’ because the Samaritan is a Christ
motif. The splanchnízomai of the Samaritan is the compassion that abides within God’s
missionary agents as they bear the Imago Christi. To bear Imago Christi is to participate with
Christ in his compassionate impulse.
To sum up, the reasoning is that the splanchnízomai parallel outlined above indicates that the
character of the Samaritan is Christological. Being a Christological figure, the Samaritan is
bearing Imago Christi as a compassionate missionary agent. Christ’s command to ‘go and do
likewise’ (Luke 10:37) declares that the splanchnízomai impulse, which emanates from the
heart of the Trinitarian God, reveals Christ’s true image in the life and actions of missionary
agents who themselves become Christological figures bearing the image of Christ.
The Transformative quality of Compassion
151
Mark Allan Powell, as quoted in Joshua Marshall Strahan, “Jesus Teaches Theological Interpretation of the
Law: Reading the Good Samaritan in Its Literary Context,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 10.1, (2016):
71-86, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.divinity.idm.oclc.org/eds/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=e20319ba-e59b-4069-
bc2c-1bc4ce0083c6%40sessionmgr4006&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=ATLAn3878927&db=lsdar
152
Morris, Luke, 190-191.
43
One could be mistaken for reading the New Testament accounts of splanchnízomai as simply
an emotional response to a situation that one encounters but its meaning is more profound.
This compassion is a physical gut reaction where one’s bowels yearn. 153 This is to mean that
whatever the circumstance is, it causes one to engage with the pain of the other in such a way
that it evokes a response; one that expresses tangibly the dissatisfaction with the status quo
inherent within the circumstance at hand. Brueggemann describes it this way, “compassion,
splanchnízomai, means to let one’s innards embrace the feeling or situation of another.” 154
Simply put, splanchnízomai compels a person to do something about unjust situations they
encounter in daily life, situations that dehumanise and diminish the dignity of others.
The unsettling truth is that people are often ignorant to injustices that surround them. They
are not looking for them because the primary motivation is to protect the self, and injustices
that harm others fall that framework of self-security. Nouwen asserts that “competition, not
compassion, is our main motivation in life.”155 The consumerist culture of the West
propagates this competitive impulse as people compare themselves with others and compete
for status and wealth. Profession, wealth and possessions become a means by which people
establish a sense of identity, which not only lifts self-esteem, but also becomes an
announcement of their individualised self-identity to others. These highly valued
commodities become a foundation for life’s purpose that needs to be protected.
Individualism, consumerism and materialism make meaning in the Western mind. There is no
room for compassion in a life grounded in competition. According to Nouwen, “being
153
James Strong, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007),
1670.
154
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination: 40th anniversary edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2018), 89.
155
44
compassionate would require giving up dividing lines and relinquishing differences and
distinctions. And that would mean losing our identities!”156
John Swinton, commenting specifically on Western values points out, “We are oddly
comfortable with truths that, on reflection, are deeply dissonant and even disturbing. For
example, we seem quite comfortable with the knowledge that up to twenty thousand children
die every day from preventable disease.”157 Many are anesthetised to the sufferings of others.
People accept the status quo and can become numb toward the pain of others. It is less
confronting to shun and avoid rather than to allow one’s self to feel and experience the
compassionate impulse and be moved to respond with remedial action. Indeed to do so, to
show solidarity with the ones who are oppressed and marginalised is to divest the competitive
nature and connect with suffering. Compassion calls out the deformity of suffering and
announce that it is incongruent with God’s love for humanity.
This is indeed what Christ has done throughout his earthly ministry. Brueggemann states,
“Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his compassion takes the first
step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become business as usual.” 158 Christ’s
followers do the same as they engage the suffering around them and by doing so announce
salvation and become Christ’s representatives. They bear Imago Christi. Consequently,
compassionate mission is Christological and Spirit driven. Acts of solidarity and love become
a catalyst for conversion as Brueggemann asserts, “The replacing of numbness with
compassion, that is, the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals
a social revolution.”159
156
Ibid, 18.
157
John Swinton, as quoted in Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The
prophetic witness of weakness (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 11.
158
Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 88.
159
Ibid, 91.
45
Commenting on splanchnízomai in the stories of the prodigal son and the Samaritan,
Brueggemann notes that they “bring together the internalisation of pain and external
transformation.”160 This is to say that instances of compassion have a redemptive quality in
that they restore human dignity. This existential change is the fruit of participation ‘in Christ’,
what Gorman describes as, “a new self, reconstituted by the crucified and resurrected
Messiah Jesus, in whom believers live and who lives in them by his Spirit. This spirituality of
mutual indwelling will mean that participation entails transformation.”161
Brueggemann even contends that compassion has the power to transform the social order as it
critiques base assumptions of a dominant culture, stating;
The imperial consciousness lives by its capacity to still the groans and go on with business as
usual as though none were hurting and there were no groans. If the groans become audible, if
they can be heard in the streets and markets and courts, then the consciousness of domination is
already jeopardized … In like manner, Jesus had the capacity to give voice to the very hurt that
had been muted, and therefore newness could break through. Newness comes precisely from
expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate
of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into the pain and giving it
voice.162
Agents of mission who enter into the sufferings of others and disregard the framework of
competition are agents of the very ‘newness’ that Brueggemann is talking about. They are
agents of the kingdom of God expressing the life of God dwelling within and through
themselves in such a way that they do the things Christ does, and in doing so bear Christ’s
image. Through their compassionate action they proclaim that “the kingdom of God has come
near” (Mark 1:15).
160
Ibid.
161
Gorman, Participating, 137-138.
162
Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 91.
46
Those who practice compassion are also indelibly changed in the process. As previously
stated, compassion has its origin in God and emanates from the life of the Trinity and the
compassionate will of God is revealed to God’s people through the indwelling of the Spirit of
God. Fee highlights the dynamic nature of Spirit revealing the Trinitarian will to human
agents by leaning on 1 Corinthians 2:6-16, stating, “The Spirit ‘searches, knows, reveals and
teaches’ the ‘mind of God,’ so that having received the Spirit ourselves, ‘we have the mind of
Christ’”163. Therefore it is through obedience to the will of the compassionate Spirit within
that God’s agents fulfil God’s purpose as they feel “the interior expression of the unseen
God’s personality and (become) the visible manifestation of God’s activity in the world.”164
It is in obedience to the voice of the Spirit/Christ that one is called to enter into the suffering
of another and in doing so there is a sacrifice. Nouwen uses the term ‘voluntary
displacement’165 to describe this sacrifice whereby one steps out of “the comforting illusion
that things are under control and that everything extraordinary and improper can be kept
outside the walls of our self-centred fortress.” 166 Compassion, in this context, requires the
laying down of one’s own self-interest by the choice to serve another, akin to Christ not
coming “to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
Nouwen highlights the incarnation as God’s own example of voluntary displacement, stating,
“God did not remain in the place that we consider proper for God but moved to the condition
of a suffering human being”167 and in doing so Christ experienced the fulness of the human
condition and engaged with the pain and suffering of the world. Voluntary displacement is an
obedient sacrifice, to enter into the experience of another and to put aside the competitive
163
Fee, Exegesis, 344.
164
Ibid.
165
166
Ibid, 61.
167
Ibid, 62-63.
47
interests of the self. The contradiction in it is that by giving one’s self over to the needs of the
other, one realises that the perceptions of identity, security and status are illusionary. Nouwen
puts it this way, “the paradox of voluntary displacement is that although it seems to separate
us from the world – from father, mother, brother, sisters, family, and friends – we actually
find ourselves in deeper union with it.”168
As a consequence of voluntary displacement the things that were previously important
become less important. The culture that was known and understood, and the values of that
culture become less significant. Instead, values taught by the Spirit; love, empathy, kindness,
genuine concern and care for other human beings become the new values which underpin
what is meaningful and they become the source of a new identity. To this end, it is the one to
whom we show compassion who has the privilege of causing us to change and become more
like Christ. The recipient of our compassion becomes our teacher as we acknowledge their
dignity and humanity, and in doing so we encounter Christ himself. As an image bearing
proleptic manifestation of Imago Christi we are changed, converted, transformed, born
again... and again... and again! We have a new identity as Nouwen explains;
The new self, the self of Jesus Christ, makes it possible for us to be compassionate as our
loving God is compassionate. Through union with God, we are lifted out of our
competitiveness with each other into divine wholeness. By sharing in the wholeness of the one
in whom no competition exists, we can enter into new, compassionate relationships with each
other. By accepting our identities from the one who is the giver of all life, we can be with each
other without distance or fear. This new identity, free from greed and desire for power, allows
us to enter so fully and unconditionally into the sufferings of others that it becomes possible for
us to heal the sick and call the dead to life.169
Imago Christi and the Church
Given that mission and ministry of Christ was predicated on the compassionate impulse it is
fair to argue that the same compassionate impulse should underpin the mission and ministry
168
Ibid, 64.
169
Ibid, 19.
48
of the Church. N.T. Wright argues, “when the church does and teachers what Jesus is doing
and teaching, it will produce the same reaction that Jesus produced during his public
career.”170 As many segments of the post-modern Church have moved beyond Christendom
there has been a renewed self-reflection within Churches of the West. Many of the
assumptions that have previously supported ministry have come under scrutiny. Whether it be
the organisational structures of diocese and parish, the agile church planting efforts of
contemporary congregations or the rise of mega-church denominations, each one is
susceptible to adopting values of Western culture and allowing them to become the impulse
for ministry instead of God’s compassion and love for creation.
Acts of compassion are salvific acts. They rescue people from circumstances that do not fit
within the framework of God’s kingdom order and the Church is called to proclaim and be a
living sign, a witness, and agent of God’s redemptive mission. N.T. Wright has exposed one
of the Church’s great failures over the last century in allowing a distorted view of salvation to
permeate its way into accepted theology, stating, “the work of salvation, in its full sense, is
(1) about the whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present , not simply the
future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.”171
Indeed, Wright argues that most Christians in the West hold to a gnostic view of salvation
where the soul, the most important part of the human, escapes to a better reality upon
death.172 Unfortunately that theology has profoundly influenced the shape of the mission and
ministry of the modern Western Church where the concept of ‘winning souls’ is about the
eschatological future rather than tangible salvation, healing, redemption and reconciliation for
people in the present. Bosch argues the sentiment succinctly stating that conversion is, “not
170
Wright, Simply Jesus, 220.
171
172
Ibid, 94-95.
49
the joining of a community in order to procure ‘eternal salvation’; it is rather, a change in
allegiance in which Christ is accepted as Lord and centre of ones life.”173
Over recent years a missional conversation/missional movement has emerged in reaction to
that long held model of salvation. Van Gelder and Zscheile point to previous movements
such as, Church renewal in the 1960’s, Church growth and Church effectiveness movements
from the 1970’s through to the 1990’s as movements that focus “primarily on strategy … that
tends to concentrate heavily on technique … to help the church remain successful within a
changing context.”174 One of the distinguishing factors of these contemporary movements is
an emphasis on evangelism by way of increasing the numerical growth of congregations.
Numerical growth has been taken as a sign of advancing the kingdom and the primary means
by which to measure the success of mission, however, Howard Snyder argues against this
stating, “the thesis that numerical growth of the church is the primary cutting edge of the
kingdom of God needs critical examination.” 175
The contemporary missional conversation/missional movement has addressed this challenge
by reframing the mission and ministry of the Church from within a theology of God’s own
mission; Missio Dei. It is in this environment of re-framing (missional church approach) that
this thesis seeks to engage by suggesting a greater emphasis on compassion as integral to
mission. It point to Christ’s compassion as the underlying standard for the Church and its
ministry. If it is the Missio Dei that the Church is engaged in, then it stands to reason that the
Church should be motivated by the impulse which moved the Son of God to act.
173
174
Van Gelder and Zscheile, The Missional Church, 8.
175
Howard A. Snyder, Models of the kingdom: Gospel, Culture and Mission in Biblical and Historical Perspective
(Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1991), 73.
50
Recent history and the rise of mega-church denominations has proven that lean organisational
structures and highly crafted Church growth and marketing techniques work when it comes to
numerical growth. The question remains as to whether or not numerical growth equates to
kingdom growth as Snyder emphasises, “churches may be faithful or unfaithful to the
kingdom, and the growth of an unfaithful church is not particularly good news.” 176 A strong
emphasis on organisational growth that employs highly targeted secular marketing and
communication techniques, which are designed to tap into the deeply embedded needs of
spiritual seekers, simply adopts the values of individualism, consumerism and status. This
ecclesiology may facilitate a self-focused, consumer spirituality that overshadows the very
nature of God in whose mission believers are called to engage with. Believers are called into
participation with the compassionate, self-sacrificing and voluntarily displacing heart of
God’s missional impulse but a theology that accentuates the fulfilment of one’s own needs as
the primary motivation fails to adequately do that.
Ian Jagelman, a Pentecostal pastor and critic of the church growth/numerical growth
movement has stated, “the Church Growth movement may have benefited fewer than 5% of
our churches’, mainly the larger ones, and ‘the few outstanding large growing churches are
masking the struggles experienced by the Pentecostal movement as a whole.” 177 This is not to
criticise the Pentecostal movement but to simply explain that it has undergone much change
since the early nineteenth and twentieth century. Harvey Cox stresses the change when
speaking in the context of the Azusa street revival. He states that the revivals purpose was;
176
Snyder, Models of the kingdom, 74.
177
Ian Jagelman, as quoted in in Jon K. Newton, “Spiritual Explosion: A Review of the Literature on the Sudden
Growth of Pentecostalism in Australia,” Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 31.1, (2018): 75-96,
http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.divinity.idm.oclc.org/eds/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=209fcf2a-9d3a-4b6f-b3f9-
0a1147faddf2%40pdc-v-sessmgr02&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU
%3d#AN=ATLAiA14181231000711&db=lsdar
90.
51
no less than the coming of the kingdom of God as it had been taught and demonstrated by Jesus …
the poor would be lifted up, the hungry fed and the broken hearted comforted … but now things
have changed … in most churches today the message centres on the immediate presence and
compassionate availability of the Spirit of Jesus Christ as helper, healer, and companion … today
many middle-class Pentecostal congregations appear very much at ease with the status quo …
nothing will interrupt their pursuit of success and self-indulgence. The Kingdom Now movement
and the ‘name-it-and claim-it’ preachers have elevated this complacency into a theology.178
Cox’s observation infers that an ecclesiology which caters to the needs of spiritual consumers
rather than the call to solidarity with the poor and marginalised, is an inferior representation
of the initial Spirit inspired ‘coming of the kingdom of God’ experienced in Pentecostal roots.
Clearly, the organisational theory model of Church growth employed by large churches
across many denominations works to build numbers but Van Gelder and Zscheile have
suggested that they lack a “decidedly theological focus,”179 specifically that, “the assumption
is often that the world is a target for the church’s mission.” 180 The missional church approach
they offer is not one that target’s the world but rather, one that seeks to serve the world,
beginning with a focus on the churches identity and purpose as found in participation in God’s
mission (which) leads in different, deeper directions … It is God’s coming reign, as embodied
and proclaimed by Christ and manifested partially in the here and now through the presence of
the Spirit.181
This thesis is in agreement with that sentiment and contends that a starting point for knowing
the Church’s identity and purpose is to know that it is rooted in Christ. Therefore if it is
rooted in Christ it will be moved to do what Jesus did and moved by the compassionate
impulse which emanates from the life of the Trinity and was expressed in the life and
ministry of the Son of God. In this way the Spirit of God becomes incarnate through the life
of Church as it goes about bearing Imago Christi.
178
Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: the rise of Pentecostal spirituality and the reshaping of religion in the
twenty-first century (Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2001), 317-318.
179
Van Gelder and Zscheile, The Missional Church, 163.
180
Ibid.
181
Ibid.
52
53
Conclusion
Bosch describes the incarnation as God’s “definitive and eschatological course of action …
extending to human beings forgiveness, justification, and new life of joy and servanthood,
which, in turn, calls for human response in the form of conversion.” 182 This conversion is a
change of course, a shift in the trajectory for the spiritual and temporal life of the believer and
it is one which conforms the believers life to the pattern of Christ. Specifically, what Bosch
has highlighted is that the incarnation requires action, a response. Newbigin defines
conversion this way;
Conversion is to Christ. It is primarily and essentially a personal event in which a human person is
laid hold of by the living Lord Jesus Christ at the very centre of the persons being and turned
toward him in loving trust and obedience … Conversion to Christ is therefore also commitment to
be with him and with all who are so committed in continuing in the power of the same anointing,
proclaiming, and bearing.183
This bearing, as a response, has been at the heart of this thesis as it postulates the idea that
there is an ontological transformation associated with participating in Christ and his mission.
This conversion/transformation is the change from Imago Dei to Imago Christi. It is an
eschatological shift and a new reality for humanity in that it has been finished by Christ, yet,
human beings existing inter tempora live out the re-formation of their very selves from day to
day as they participate with the Holy Spirit, in Christ and his mission.
Various attempts have been made to explain what it means to be created in God’s image and
they have been canvassed in this thesis, suffice to say that the purpose of humankind is to
image God. By imaging God human being are glorified as they fulfil their ontological
function as image bearers. The incarnation revealed God’s perfect image, the one in whom
“the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19) as truly human because he completely
182
183
Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Michigan:
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1995), 139-140.
54
fulfilled the will of the Father as ushered by the Spirit. Jesus Christ is God’s predestined
design for humanity and arguably more human than the sons and daughters of Adam.
By account of Christ’s solidarity with humanity and his resurrection, believers in him have a
new ontological trajectory (Adam to Christ) to become conformed to the image of Christ and
to thereby image God fully as well. This is what Jacob refers to as vocational participation as
she states, “to live out the new identity or participate fully in the new identity that is already
present within them and that will be brought to its completion with the future transformation
of the body.”184
Accordingly, the mission of God is one of conversion/transformation of human beings, using
human beings as agents of that change as facilitated and inspired the by Spirit of God. This
thesis reasons that agents who participate in God’s mission would be motivated by the same
impulse that moved Christ to participate in God’s redemptive project for humanity and the
world at large. Christ’s response to a broken world was a compassionate one, to voluntarily
displace himself, entering the world “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a
ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Compassion is not only the motivator for participation in
what Christ/The Spirit is doing to redeem the other, it is also the means by which God’s
agents are oriented toward Christ and themselves transformed/converted as they voluntarily
displace themselves and engage with an-other in need. This is true for all believers both
individually and corporately as they enter into God-in-community, the Corpus Christi.
With this in mind I contend that Christ’s motivation, the compassionate impulse,
splanchnízomai, also becomes the standard motivation by which for activities deemed as
184
55
‘missional’ should be undertaken. This thesis asks the question; if mission is not motivated
by the same compassionate impulse as Christ, then whose mission is it?
56
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Minor Thesis RQ9748M

Brendan McDonald – Student ID: 201619862

Imago Christi, Conformity to Christ, and Compassionate Mission

story of redemption, of conversion and transformation instigated through a single act of

bearing that image?

actually look like vocationally.

Christ framework outlined by Paul in the New Testament.

transformed in the process.”3

between the Spirit and the Imago. Marc Cortez writes:

examining Christ’s compassionate motivation to act in the world. Through an examination of

Compassionate spirituality is at the heart of this thesis as it posits the transformational

believers who claim to follow Christ.

Pneumatology_and_the_imago_Dei?email_work_card=view-paper (accessed 4 September 2019).

I will contribute to the missional conversation by contending that compassionate spirituality

understanding of the Church’s identity in God.”10

Christ” is unequivocally related it to an incarnational Pneumatology which transforms

Theological approaches to Imago Dei.

significance as being “an eternal truth about what it means to be human.”13

fathers reflected on the meaning of Genesis 1:26-27;

So God created humankind in his image,

The question of image and likeness.

our image and ‘according to’ our likeness?

been rejected.19 Nonetheless, Irenaeus’s distinction contributes to the structural view of

his contemporaries and subsequent Church Fathers.

The structural (substantive) approach.

structural view is sometimes referred to as the ‘substantive’ view as highlighted in Ramsay’s

that man possesses.”20

human beings and other creatures.

The relational approach.

before God as they ‘image’ him.27

directed wholly toward the knowledge of and obedience to God.”29

“That is man’s rectitude: to be created in the image of God is to be opposite to or to respond

of an eschatological fulfilment which is a renewed Imago Dei for believers by noting,

the spirit; but it will attain its full splendour in heaven.”32

is entirely relational as it requires the human to be willing to become humble in a posture of

interpretation of Imago Dei.

existence’ is ‘that its structure is a relation: responsible existence, responsive actuality’.”35

bearing Imago Dei as he contends, “Man is destined to answer to God in believing,

rooted in a Trinitarian context.

Then the man said,

of communion, an existence in koinonia. Volf explains it this way, “it is inconceivable to

Trinitarian image, the image in which humanity is created.

A Correlation: The Trinitarian shape of the Church.

persons”45, the notion of perichoresis as “co-inheritance in one another without any

The functional approach.

representatives called to steward his creation.”54

8:17). Jacob denotes Romans 1-8 as a “’narrative of glory’ – a theological storyboard …

(which supports) Paul’s new-Adam Christology.”57

associated with an exulted status of rule.”62

reconstitute a new heaven and a new earth as stated,

A composite view of Imago Dei

integrate the structural, relational and functional approaches.71

on the ‘rule’ of humanity as a ‘reinstitution of dominion’ could be construed as saying that

function remains distinct from the meaning of the image itself.”72

The Adam-Christ typology.

The Adam-Christ typology refers to scriptural references in Romans 5:12-21 and 1

and portray the life of Christ as salvific to Adam’s fallenness;