An Idiots Guide to Theology: Anthropology

God in the Image of Man
Often in our search for God we try to define him, we try to personify him with words that make Him (i.e. Him) more human. But if we look to scripture we see that God is more like intangible things, in scripture it describes God as Love, Jealous, Light, and the Logos. These are not human physical qualities like the picture of an old man with a great beard and lightening bolts in his hand but rather I would say these are more like ideas. In reality to really understand the nature of God we need to understand the nature of man and how he responds to God.
The duelist view of man is the idea that there is a physical man and an ideal or immaterial form somewhere in the land of ideas. But if we look to scripture we find that we are all soul and all man/woman. In class it was described in this way. “The soul is something that is part of us. We are a unitary whole that can be viewed from different angles. The idea that the soul is a separate entity that is disconnected from our bodies this idea comes from classic Greek dualism, which draws from Plato. Rene Descartes brings this into the for front of philosophical theology leaving a distinct divide between matter and spirit.” But there just could not be a division between our souls and ourselves because there is something that draws us in on the teachings of Christ and I believe that if our soul and our bodies are disconnected that personal draw just would not be there. Thomas Aquinas described our connection with God as follows “When we are trying to order our desires we need to remind ourselves of our orientation of our goals. Every aspect of our lives need to love God. And if we set these as our goals we shall be good.” With each generation we begin to look at God through the lens of that generational cultural phenomenon and the God of that generation, but today we are slowly coming to the realization that we are historical beings. Again in our notes there is an explanation of this that I find very helpful, “The post modern world has not caught up with the idea that we are historical beings. Much of post modernism is modernism warmed over, yet as post moderns we realize that we are historical beings we will have a huge shift in all parts of our culture. Most philosophers are being challenged with the ideas that we see all things through our own lenses of our history. Our identities are constituted by our traditions, or histories.” Later on in class we discussed the ideas that Paul posses in Ephesians, “we are created in God’s image but we are corrupted by our sin in Ephesians it talks about our lives as children of wrath like the rest of mankind. Paul later talks in Ephesians about were greedy to practice every kind of impunity throw off that life and be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” What we need to do as faithful beings is construct our ideas of God in new ways but recognizing that many ideas and traditions about God have come from the past and we can ride those waves into the present.