30 August 2016
One of my favorite philosophers asks, and answers, "If man is made in God's image and likeness, does it follow that God is essentially embodied?"

"[The] ‘reasoning’ [goes] along these lines:

        1. Man is made in God’s image.
        2. Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
    Therefore
        3. God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.

"But that’s like arguing:

        1. This statue is made in Lincoln’s image.
        2. This statue is composed of marble.
    Therefore
        3. Lincoln is composed of marble.

"[The] mistake...is to take a spiritual saying in a materialistic way. The point is not that God must be physical because man is, but that man is a spiritual being just like God, potentially if not actually. The idea is not that God is a big man...but that man is a little god, a proto-god, a temporally and temporarily debased god who has open to him the possibility of a Higher Life with God, a possibility whose actualization requires both creaturely effort and divine grace.

"[The] point of imago dei is not that God is an anthropomorphic projection whereby man alienates his best attributes from himself and assigns them to an imaginary being external to himself, but that man is a theomorphic projection whereby God shares some of his attributes, such as free will,  with real beings external to him though dependent on him." ~ Bill Vallicella

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James Frank Solís
Former soldier (USA). Graduate-level educated. Married 26 years. Texas ex-patriate. Ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.
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