Community and the Image of God

One of the things I love best about my work is studying and preparing to teach. Today I am preparing to teach on gospel-saturated community at First Pres Opelika in February 16-17. I found this excellent thought by Cornelius Plantinga in Engaging God’s World. Since one of the more common pains of Christmas is loneliness, I am thinking today of those who don’t have community and desperately need it.

“…we image God when we live in loving communion with each other. Because God is triune, the image of God is social as well as personal. God lives in the perichoretic glory of a three-person community, radiant with love, joy, power, and beauty. Each person is God only with the other two. Each of the persons is essentially divine by the same pattern of excellences, such as sovereign love and power….

Thinking of his relationship with God the Father, Jesus prays that ‘they may be one, as we are one’ (John 17:22). By ‘they’ Jesus means the community of believers. Jesus’ prayer reveals that when we live in strong unity and harmony with others we are something like God. Perhaps this might be true of a marriage, for example, or of an extraordinarily faithful and intimate friendship. But the one biblically authorized analogy for the Holy Trinity is the church, the new ‘community’ that Jesus prays for and with which he compares his life with the Father.”