THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MAN - Tyndale House

THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MAN 103
shall also bear the image of the man of heaven' (1 Cor. 15:49).
Complete conformity with the image of Christ is not yet
attained but already 'as we behold the glory of the Lord we
are being changed into the same likeness from one degree of
glory to another' (2 Cor. 3:18).
The protological doctrine of the image, which retains its
existential implications, has become transformed in the New
Testament into an eschatological doctrine itself with existential
implications; for example, 'He that has this hope (of eventual
likeness to Christ) in him purifies himself' (1 Jn. 3:3). Man is
God's representative on earth; Christ in a sensus plenior is God's
'one' representative on earth and the community of believers
becomes the dwelling-place of God on earth. The Spirit, if
we have rightly interpreted the image, is the life-force or vitality
of human kind, yet in a sensus plenior He indwelt Christ, and
hence those who are 'in Christ' 'live by the Spirit' (Rom. 8:5) in
a fuller sense than that in which Genesis 1 and 2 can say that
man lives by the Spirit. Just as man's creation as image of God
spells the equality of all men before God, so within the com-
munity of the new humanity there can be no divisions of race
or class: 'You have put on the new man, which is being renewed
in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there cannot
be Greek and Jew, circumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave,
free man, but Christ is all and in all' (Col. 3:10f.; cf. Gal.
3:28). Man is still lord of creation, and Psalm 8 is still true, yet
in a fuller sense, as Hebrews 2 reminds us, 'we do not yet see
everything in subjection to him' (2:8). Here is the tension of the
new age, between the now and the not yet. The hope that the
not yet will presently become the now lies in the next verse,
'But we see Jesus, for a little while made lower than the
angels, crowned with glory and honour'.
In Christ man sees what manhood was meant to be. 199 In
the Old Testament all men are the image of God; in the New,
where Christ is the one true image, men are image of God in
so far as they are like Christ. The image is fully realized only
through obedience to Christ; this is how man, the image of
God, who is already man, already the image of God, can become
fully man, fully the image of God.
199 In the New Testament the image doctrine is brought into the realm of
soteriology, as it never was in the Old (P. Humbert, Etudes 175).