Status Updates From The Triune Creator: A Histo...

meh

The gnostic despising of the body led to either an ethic of license (if your body is not really you, it doesn't matter what you do with them) or an extreme asceticism (one way to demonstrate the irrelevance of the body is to do without it). Today we see these gnostic tendencies: our bodies are, in a deep sense, not really ourselves. Either we have absolute control over them or they over us.

To be made in the image of God involves four interrelated concepts: 1.) an inescapable relation to the Trinity; 2.) a project perfected to God's glory; 3.) we are created to be with and for God in Jesus Christ and so for one another; 4.) we are ethically responsible for one another and creation.

Image of God -- counters the popular Platonic and gnostic ideology of gender--that the "real" self of a man or a woman is therefore the genderless psychic particle dwelling within and distinct from the body.

"The real threat to human uniqueness arose long before Darwin was born." Newtonianism-->mechanistic view of the world-->Deism
But what Darwinism brought was an alternative to the doctrine of providence-->catapulting the God of deism into time.

Finally getting to some of the payoff. This is tough sledding.