An Anglican thought on “the image of God”

Last updated on: August 30, 2017 at 8:30 pm by Dan Peterson

An Anglican thought on “the image of God” 2017-08-30T20:30:29-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Rev. Dr. N. T. Wright in 2007, while he was serving as the Bishop of Durham. Previously, he had taught at Oxford. Subsequently, he’s been teaching and researching at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Jeff Lindsay makes an important point here, one with which (for reasons that will rapidly become obvious) I completely agree:

“The Human Cost of Drawing People Away from Faith”

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Meanwhile, David French asks an increasingly urgent question:

“Can a Progressive’s ‘Inclusive Values’ Include Christianity?”

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I like this passage from a lecture given in New York City by the great British New Testament scholar (and former Anglican bishop) N. T. Wright:

“Humans are made to reflect God out into the world — and at the same time, to reflect the rest of the world back to the Creator in worship and praise.

“Let me explain. I’m an ancient historian by training. Once, when I was going through the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, it struck me that all the greatest statues of Roman emperors and their families they’ve got in that museum were found, not in Rome but in Turkey, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa: all over the place, in other words. In Rome, they knew who their emperor was. But out there in the provinces, the emperors put images of themselves so as to say to all the cities and countries over which they ruled, ‘This is who your boss is.’

“And the point about Genesis 1 is that the gracious God, who is as unlike a Roman emperor as you could wish him to be, has put into his world an image of himself called men and women made in his image to show his world what he is like. Tragically, we humans decided we would prefer to turn it around and reflect the world back to itself and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, as Saint Paul puts it. This has caused the image to be fractured and broken, distorting human rule over the world. But the point is that once we listen to those echoes of a voice [intimations of divinity that he has previously discussed] and once we are renewed and refreshed in listening to the story of Jesus, then we begin to be able to reflect the image once more.”

N.T. Wright, in Eric Metaxas, ed., Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011), 216.

It’s slightly non-Mormon, of course, but still intriguing (to me, at least).

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