Never Forget The Gospel

Today is September 11th. Today many will post pictures of the twin towers, many will recall what they were doing during the attack, and many will reaffirm that they are ever-vigilant and will never forget that around 3000 Americans died that day. Anyone reading this blog likely knows my politics, so I am not going to hash out my views of foreign policy or our country's role in the middle east. I am not going to comment on our relationship to Islam, or anything really pertaining to American current events. That being said, I am going to think about that phrase: "never forget".

The I Am And The Image

I'm currently reading God With Us by K. Scott Oliphint. In summary, the book is about how God's attributes can be completely independent of creation, yet how his actions can interact with creation. To (over) simplify, how does an infinite, eternal, and unchanging God interact with space, time, and ever-changing creation? Oliphint spends a lot of time unpacking the name of God, "I AM WHO I AM". Without getting into the argument of the book, one thing in particular was driven home in the chapter "I Am ... Your God": creation is a translation of the thoughts of God. Oliphint uses the Eimi/eikon ("I Am"/image) distinction. God is the Eimi and creation is the eikon. While creation reflects God, it is not God. Building upon the notion that creation was in the mind of God before it existed, Oliphint says, "No matter how accurately [creation] represents God's thoughts (and it does represent them accurately), the fact of the matter is that it re-presents those thoughts; it re-presents them as created, which, in their original form, they were not." This Eimi/eikon distinction is a part of the Creator/creature distinction.