A former student, Stephen Long, writes the following in response to my post about the image of God and Adamic stoicheia:
“You list two aspects of the image of God in Gen 1 — Making and Speaking. Perhaps you see it as implicit to Speaking, but might it be worth bringing out separately that God is also an Evaluator (“And God saw that it was good”) — seven-fold-ly so (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31)?
“The trinity formed by Making-Evaluating-Speaking is curiously mutually-constituting. (i.e. The Image is trinitarian. And Augustine is on the right track.) My Makings are articulated to myself in Speaking — in fact, I can imagine very little Making without some form of articulation to myself. (Better makers may well have a different experience — but that is mine.) Evaluation happens during and guides every moment of my Making (not just the end, though certainly then too). And of course Evaluation is articulated (at least to some degree) in Speaking.
“Perhaps that bears on the stoicheia line of thought too. Man-made-in-the-image is placed under angels (Ps. 8 and Gal 3:19), but will ultimately judge/evaluate the world and the angels (1 Cor 6:2-3). (Not that we have to wait till the NT to see man-made-in-the-image judging/evaluating: to name just one small example, there’s all that repeated use of the phrase ‘good in the eyes of ___’ throughout the OT. Man’s been an assigner of value from the get-go.)”
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