John Behr

From the early centuries, the Evangelist John has been referred to as “the theologian.” And rightly so, for Christian theology, as we have come to know it, is inconceivable without his Gospel and especially its Prologue. Its words have provided the vocabulary for theological reflection thereafter, and it seems certain that, until the middle to the end of the second century, the annual celebration of Christ’s Passion, Pascha, was only celebrated by those who recalled how John had worn the distinctive headdress of the high priest in Jerusalem: the only disciple to remain at the foot of the cross, John was, for them, the high priest of the paschal mystery. It is thus perhaps not surprising that it was especially in John, and his words about the revelation of Christ, the Word and Life, that Michel Henry found a vision of Christianity that resonated with the phenomenology that he had been investigating from his initial magnum opus, The Essence of Manifestation, through to his final Christian trilogy: first, I Am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity, then several years later, during which time he read Tertullian and most importantly Irenaeus, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, and finally, appearing in print posthumously, Words of Christ.

This essay explores the way in which early Christian writers held an eschatological understanding of what it is to be human, something that is to be attained, through the transformation of death and resurrection, and something that requires our assent. In this context, the article offers a new reading of the late fourth-century work entitled On the Human Image of God (otherwise known in English as On the Making of Man) by Gregory of Nyssa. It argues that Gregory structured his text in parallel to the three parts of Timaeus’ speech in Plato's dialogue. The resulting picture sees creation as a dynamic ascent from the lower forms of life to the higher, a growth which is recapitulated in the life-span of each human being, and also the growth of the human race into the totality of human beings that together constitute the human being in the image of God, the body of Christ.