To be or not to be godlike

Whether and in what way divine actions and attributes are to be imitated by human agents is not a straightforward  matter to decide. God being God, he is able to do the kinds of things that are forbidden to his creatures.

For example, the exercise of judgment and the exaction of vengeance are, if not forbidden in the first case, certainly circumscribed, and forbidden in the second. The whole question of the image of God and its fate in Genesis 3 hangs upon a distinction between the ways in which it is and is not right to seek to be like God.

Man, created male and female together, is created, according to Genesis 1, to be like God, while the serpent's temptation is for Adam and Eve to be godlike in ways other than that laid down for their condition as creatures.

Their succumbing to temptation has the consequence that the succeeding episodes in Genesis and beyond take their relentless course down hill: murder and other offenses follow, and in Babel the pretension to divinity sums up the consequences, taking shape in a parody of the story of creation, so that the "let us make a name for ourselves" ironically echoes the divine "let us make" of Genesis 1. There are, then respects in which imitation of God is expressly forbidden.

In our case, however, there is no doubt that the opposite is the case. Human trust, both in God and towards others, is part of what it means to be human. Human relations are to take a form similar to those intrinsic to God's triune being and actions alike. Yet how do we bring all this to bear within the constraints of living in a world that appears to privilege other forms of human being and action?

Intrinsic to the crisis of modernity is its rampant individualism, and its implication that the aim of life is the self-fulfillment of the individual, all other considerations being secondary to that. If, however, men and women are like the persons of the Trinity in being bound up in one another's being, then the matter is rather different.

Mutuality and trust are of the essence of being made in the image of the trustworthy God. That brings me to another topic...that of the Church. Are not the congregations that make up that far-flung and diffuse body called the Church simply ways of being human in community? Are not those congregations primarily indeed dedicated to the worship of God, but also, and as a result of that, bound up together in a life of faith and love to which relations of trust are intrinsic?

When trust is lost elsewhere, it is therefore of the essence of the Church's mission to be godlike: to demonstrate both the necessity and viability of trust in congregations formed by that Word and those sacraments that make present the utter reliability of the God whose Son's faithfulness took him even to the cross.

-- Colin Gunton, "Trinity and Trustworthiness" in The Trustworthiness of God: Perspectives on the Nature of Scripture (pp. 283-84)