Quiz: On God, the Creator and Provider

The image of God is reflected in man through the numerous attributes and faculties of his nature. The principal features of the divine image in man include: reason, free will, the capacity to love, creative ability, moral consciousness, royal dignity, the immortality of the soul, and others. Likeness to God, however, is what man may attain through spiritual growth in communion with God.

In other words, the image of God in man is a given — bestowed by God at creation — while theosis (divinization) is the path and goal to which man is called. Indeed, man was originally summoned to this likeness, but by transgressing the command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he fell. In doing so, he ruptured the divine-human union and severed himself from the Creator. Outside of communion with God, man is capable only of spiritual degeneration, not growth. The God-human union, broken by Adam, was restored by Christ. Through His ministry, suffering, and death, the Lord redeemed the world. He established the Church, within whose embrace — by living according to Christ, in Christ — man is transformed, deified, conformed to God, christified, and brought into trinitarian harmony; he becomes god (not in essence, of course, but by grace).