Weekend Reads: The undamaged image of God and who, what, and 'how' of the Holy Spirit

Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God

By John F. Kilner

“This is what a well-researched book looks like,” you will think to yourself as you read John F. Kilner’s Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God (Eerdmans, 2015). Fifty-one pages of bibliography for 330 pages of text, averaging a dozen or more citations on every page, is very impressive.

What is all this research about? In brief, Kilner wants to show that the image of God is God’s standard for what humanity ought to be. It is not a list of attributes. It is not ways people are currently like God. It is not subject to damage or to degrees. Rather, the image of God is and always remains perfect and complete because it is ultimately about God’s intention that humanity have a special connection to Him and that humanity reflect Him. Whether humans exercise this connection or show this reflection is in some sense a moot point. Understood this way, the disabled, the wicked, and the unborn are just as much in God’s image as smart, powerful, good people.

What does Kilner make of the fact that virtually every theologian in history (and he cites hundreds of them) says that God’s image can be and has been damaged? Kilner implies that he himself believed in a damageable image until he began to study the issue. He found that the Bible never says God’s image was damaged by sin. In fact, humanity is in God’s image—not vice versa. Hence, damaged humans do not prove a damaged image. Rather, the Bible repeatedly says believers are renewed according to the (undamaged) image of God.

If you want to know everything there is to know about the image of God, Dignity and Destiny is for you. Kilner is orthodox, biblical, and easy to read. And his research skills are jaw-dropping.

The Holy Spirit

By Christopher R.J. Holmes

Zondervan begins a series of New Studies in Dogmatics with Christopher R.J. Holmes’ The Holy Spirit (2015). Holmes, an Anglican and a theology professor in Dunedin, New Zealand, has written a book that engages Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Karl Barth on the third person of the Trinity. At 213 pages, Holmes’ work is not even a summary of each theologian’s contribution. Rather, it is a quest to answer the who, what, and “how” of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit is God; “that is what the Spirit is,” as Holmes says. The Spirit is a subsistent relation proceeding from what is common to the Father and the Son, having the divine nature that each Person has; this is who the Spirit is. Finally, the Spirit acts as God in everything He does, especially in building up the church. “The Spirit acts as God in this history on the basis of the relation to Father and Son that the Spirit is,” Holmes writes.

Why does Holmes speak in this way? “Because the New Testament encourages such talk,” he says. Without the divine Spirit, neither the mission of the Son nor the reality of the church in union with the Son through the sending of the Spirit could take place.

There is a solid serving of theological meat in Holmes’ book. What he says is helpful, orthodox, and devotionally rich. He writes as one filled with the Spirit of Jesus. But don’t make him your go-to theologian on the Holy Spirit. That’s not his goal, nor is this work fitted for it.

Like too many other books, Holmes’ greatest contribution is to remind us of the theological insights granted to Augustine, Thomas, and Barth. If you want to know the Spirit, read them. Unless you’ve pursued “Old Studies in Dogmatics,” New Studies in Dogmatics will mean little to you.