So the "racket", the legerdemain that duped the West, is the substitution of a translation for the original, which transferred the attention to the meaning rather than to the text. On the other hand, staring at the text alone caused self-hypnosis, with its attendant problems. But if we are to understand truth, neither falling into the Charybdis of stasis with a rigid framework around the original text, nor into the Scylla of change where the meanings morph in some evolutionary fashion, then we must find a third leg of the stool, a third star of navigation, a third person of the Trinity. And if that Truth is what we comprehend in Heaven, then it must be woven into the fabric of our being, we must be made of heavenly stuff. That is the purpose of this post, to examine Man in the reflection of God, to find the Trinity in the imago Dei.  And to do so, we continue with our book review of Orthodox theologian, Vladimir Lossky's "In the Image and Likeness of God".

Chapter 5: Redemption and Deification

Lossky is addressing two issues Catholics raise about Orthodox thought: the apparent neglect the Orthodox have toward the Atonement (which the Catholics view as the acme of the passion of Christ); and the (seemingly) semi-idolatrous insistence on the deification of the saints. Lossky argues that the over-emphasis on the "legal" view of the atonement starting with Anselm (conservative Anglican and Bp Tom Wright's take) comes from this same 2+1 theology that reduces the Atonement to some sort of legal pact between the Father and the Son sans the Spirit. But the Spirit had quite a bit to do with it, and still does, Lossky writes,

The Son has become like us by the incarnation; we become like Him by deification, by partaking of the divinity in the Holy Spirit, who communicates the divinity to each human person in a particular way. The redeeming work of the Son is related to our nature. The deifying wok of the Holy Spirit concerns our persons. But the two are inseparable. One is unthinkable without the other, for each is the condition of the other, each is present in the other; and ultimately they are but one dispensation of the Holy Trinity, accomplished by two Divine Persons sent by the Father into the World. This double dispensation of the Word and the Paraclete has as its goal the union of created beings with God.

Therefore looking at the Cross from the vantage point of Heaven, the Spirit is directing us toward glory (deification appears to be the Orthodox way of saying sanctification), whereas from the vantage point of Earth, Christ at the Cross redeems us from our very real destruction. Even more importantly than expanding our view of the Atonement to consider the work of the Spirit, Lossky is expanding our view of Man, as to what it is that was saved at the Cross. If you have ever, like me, wondered what Baptists do for an encore after salvation, (as opposed to what they don't do), Lossky is giving us an answer.

Now I told you several blogs ago that Lossky was like a drink of water, because I have felt, well, ever so slightly oppressed by Anselm's view of the Atonement, even if I didn't really care for the NT Wright version either. As in so many of these theological issues, Lossky brings a fresh and stimulating view backed with 1500 years of experience that make the Church Fathers so relevant, I wonder why my seminary education neglected them. However, after slaking my thirst, I discover that in reintroducing the Trinity, Lossky left no place for the Father. Surely there is more to sainthood than the trajectory from salvation to deification? What is the Father's role in my new found life? How does human life reflect the full Trinity? Lossky addresses this in his next two chapters.

Chapter 6: The Theological Notion of the Human Person
 
Lossky begins by saying he wants to avoid the error of projecting onto theology, the connotations of modern, secular anthropology, sort of the way that Hugh Ross finds Genesis in the Big Bang.  It is not that God didn't describe the Big Bang, He may have, but that the Big Bang is just a theory, and the Bible isn't. So if we are to find the Trinity in anthropology, we must be sure to start in Trinitarian theology and proceed to anthropology,  and not the other way around. And this warning applies especially to the words that have a bad habit of smuggling in unwanted baggage.

Accordingly, Lossky starts with the distinction between ουσια and υποστασιs in Trinitarian theology. After all manner of caveats, such as,

 If this is so, the theological truth of the distinction between ουσια and υποστασιs established by the Fathers is not to be sought in the letter of its conceptual expression but rather between that expression and the identity of the two concepts which would have been proper to `secular philosophy.' That is to say, one must situate this theological truth beyond concepts: concepts here divest themselves of regular meaning to become signs of the personal reality of a God who is not the God of the philosophers nor (very often) the God of theologians.

He finally gets around to applying this (non-conceptual) concept to people, focussing on the distinctive, individual "personality" of the Three as expressed in Christ, the God-Man.

 ...we will be asking whether Trinitarian theology has had any repercussion on Christian anthropology--whether it has opened up a new dimension of the `personal' by discovering a notion of the human hypostasis not reducible to the level of natures of individual substances,...

He starts by saying it seems that Person = Individual, and then asking if Jesus were schizophrenic, reviewing the Nestorian debate and the council at Chalcedon. Restating their conclusion that Jesus was not formed from two natures but is in two natures, he then concludes,

 And this refusal to admit two distinct personal beings in Christ means at the same time that one must also distinguish in human beings the person or hypostasis from the nature or individual substance. ...We understand why Richard of Saint-Victor rejected Boethius' definition [individual substance of rational nature], remarking with finesse that substance answers the question quid, person answers the question quis [who]. Now to the question quis one answers with a proper noun which alone can designate a person. Hence the new definition (for the divine persons): persona est divinae naturae incommunicabilis existentia [no, my Latin is too limited.]

The point of all this, please!

Well finally to the President's Panel on Bioethics. Is humanity determined by what an embryo is made of (full complement of genes), or who an embryo is (son of John and Mary)? How are the two natures of an embryo related (hypostatic union)? And if you are a Materialist who admits to only "what", then how do you answer the phone? 

The post-Materialist response might be that man is more than body, he is a self as well. And with a little Sunday School training, he might even admit that self could be described as "soul" and "spirit." Does this tri-partite description of man--body, soul and spirit--answer to who? Is it your body that answers the phone, or your soul, or your spirit?  Is an embryo a "who" even without a concept of self, or without a soul? Or does it have a soul because of its chromosome mixture or some other added immaterial ingredient?

Lossky now shows the power of the Trinitarian approach by taking the answer to that question and applying it to Christ. If who Christ is depended on any of those qualities, then we are led into the heresies condemned by Chalcedon.  In order to be fully God and fully man, who he is must be independent of what he is. Lossky argues

If this is so, there will be no place for the idea of the hypostasis or person of man as one element in the composite of his individual nature. Now this corresponds exactly to that irreducibility of the human hypostasis to the human individual which we had to admit in speaking of Chalcedon. ...The creature, who is both `physical' and `hypostatic' at the same time, is called to realize his unity of nature as well as his true personal diversity by going in grace beyond the individual limits which divide nature and tend to reduce persons to the level of the closed being of particular substances.

So Lossky ends this chapter saying that what makes man special is his ability (his purposeful design) to go beyond what he is made of, by the grace of God, into the image and likeness of Christ. The embryo is a who not because of what it is, but because of the purpose of who made it. And that purpose is revealed in a deceptively simple verse from Genesis, Then God said,`Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.'

Chapter 7: The Theology of the Image

Lossky begins this chapter by defending Orthodoxy against such heavyweights as Karl Barth, who had declared the teaching of the Church Fathers on the "theology of the image" was entirely invented, without scriptural foundation. Lossky points out that this theology plays a part in the Apocryphal book "Wisdom" composed in Greek in the century before Christ. Apparently, as the Diaspora lost its ability to read Hebrew, the Torah was translated into Greek, the Septuagint, and a whole new philosophical tradition arose in Jewish tradition. Was this accidental or purposeful? Should we ignore the transformation in Jewish theology because it was lacking in the original Hebrew? Lossky argues

But people want at all costs to oppose the `God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob' to the `God of the philosophers and scholars,' without, however, meeting as Pascal did the living God of a living Bible. For there is also a dead God, the God of a particular school of Biblical purists who are too wedded to the Hebraic letter, which they study in the historical context of its redaction, to be able to recognize the life (dynamic, and this sense never `pure') and the living tradition which leads to the discovery in the most ancient texts of a meaning ever new, adapted to each new stage of the divine economy before Christ. It is in the name of a God reduced to the categories of an abstract Judaism, the God of an inert book duly studied, that Biblical science, setting itself up as a theology, wants to proscribe the theology of the image by declaring it foreign to Revelation. [e.g. Barth]
   It is true that the God of Greek thought who admits images is not yet He of the Jewish Revelation who forbids them: an act of folly is needed to reach Him by faith, by crossing an abyss....What was allowed to the Greeks was forbidden to the Jews, but this prohibition was their privilege as well as restriction.

After establishing the authority of a "theology of image", Lossky goes on to discuss how one can be an image of something without being a bad replica. That is, if Christ is the image of the invisible God, in what way is he inferior to God? Lossky argues that we need a new category of image, that perfectly reflects the essence while remaining distinct. He then applies that formula to us, and says that we too can reflect God's essence while remaining distinct.

Personhood belongs to every human being by virtue of a singular and unique relation to God who created him `in His image.' This personal element in anthropology, discovered by Christian thought, does not indicate, in itself a relationship of participation, much less a `kinship' with God, but rather an analogy: like the personal God, in whose image he is created, man is not only `nature.' This bestows on him liberty in regard to himself, taken as an individual of a particular nature.... What is important to notice, in speaking of the theology of the image applied to man, is how the human person manifests God. ... theologians who try to find the `image of God' (or `what is in the image') in the human being by distinguishing it, as `a certain something,' from the rest of human nature which `is not in the image,' will never succeed in freeing themselves entirely from the συγγενεια of Greek thought. ...Man created `in the image' is the person capable of manifesting God in the extent to which his nature allows itself to be penetrated by deifying grace.

So we see how Orthodox thought moves from the non-conceptual meaning of persons based on the nature of the Trinity, bypassing all the scientific questions of quality and nature directly to the goal of deification. Man reflects the Trinity, man's humanity, says Lossky, is revealed by the purpose of his design--deification. Yet somehow, it gives me the same feeling as Baptist theology, rushing me from the Cross to Pearly Gates without much time to enjoy the scenery.

My Conclusions

If I read Lossky aright, he is saying that the Jewish scriptures improved in translation, and that it is a dead historicism that denies it.  But it is a conclusion which seemingly contradicts his earlier assertion that the Greek theology suffered in translation into Latin. Or perhaps, it is not an accident that the Bible comes in two (or three) languages, revealing that the Truth is multilingual.

For unlike Barth, we reject the alternate conclusion that the Truth is supra-lingual, because all our thinking is by words, and we would then be required to cross an impassable gulf of comprehending transcendent knowledge without words. Rather, the multilingual nature of Truth means He speaks our language, and can make Himself known in it. Then our knowledge becomes completely dependent upon His Revelation. Not supra-rational, nor even ir-rational, but in words, recognizable words, spoken to us.

Words cannot be reduced to body, to soul or spirit, but contain all three attributes without being an attribute themselves. They are physical syllabifications expressed with lips, tongue and pen. They are also full of meaning, content and philosophy. They are also flirtatious, shy, and sometimes perspicuous.  Yet they do not answer to "what" but to "who". And their goal is to bring Him glory. For the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.