Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Johannes-Paul II; Sakrament, der Mensch als Abbild Gottes; Abbild: geistig, körperlich (als Mann und Frau); sakramentale Dimenison d. Schöpfung

Kurzinhalt: Two elements in this passage tell us that man is constituted as a sacrament right at the outset. First, man is created in the image of God. This means that man is created to be a sign or symbol of God in creation ...

Textausschnitt: MAN: THE SACRAMENT OF GOD

68a A sacrament, as we all know, is an outward or material sign which effects or actualizes or brings into existence the grace it symbolizes. A sacrament, therefore, is a created, material entity symbolic of something that transcends the purely created order of which it is a part. In traditional language, it symbolizes and actualizes supernatural realities within the created order. Bread and wine, for example, become the Body and Blood of Christ, just as baptismal water effects or actualizes the new life of sanctifying grace in the believer. (Fs)

It follows from this understanding of sacrament that, if creation is sacramental, there must be something in creation itself that corresponds to this definition of sacrament. And in point of fact, in the creation narratives in the first two chapters of Genesis, we find one created being who is constituted in his creation by God as a sacrament. That being is man himself. The crucial text is Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

68b Two elements in this passage tell us that man is constituted as a sacrament right at the outset. First, man is created in the image of God. This means that man is created to be a sign or symbol of God in creation; indeed, man is, according to Genesis, the only being created to be a sign or symbol of God. However, this alone is not enough to constitute man as a sacrament, because a sacrament is not just a sign, a sacrament is an outward or material sign. Although man is obviously a material being, this does not necessarily also make him a sacrament. For it is possible to think that man is the image of God only insofar as man is a spiritual being, as indeed so many Christians through the centuries have thought. (Fs)

68c But the Genesis text not only says that man is made in the image of God, it also tells us explicitly that man is made in God's image as male and female. In other words, man's imaging of God is material as well as spiritual, as much bound up with his body as with his soul. (Fs)

69a It will be to the everlasting credit of John Paul II that he has made his papacy the occasion for insisting that our imaging of God, as given in the revelation, involves the whole human person in all of his psychosomatic reality. Indeed, the Pope speaks explicitly of the sacramental character of man's creation. "The sacrament, as a visible sign, is constituted with man, as a 'body', by means of his 'visible' masculinity and femininity. The body, in fact, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it."1 (Fs)

69b The second chapter of Genesis adds a new dimension to our understanding of man's creation as male and female. There, in Adam's search for a suitable helpmate, is revealed the fact that man's creation as male and female has a communal dimension to it, a communal dimension that is explicitly marital. As John Paul II puts it, "the words which express the first joy of man's coming to existence as 'male and female' (Gen. 2:23) are followed by the verse which establishes their conjugal unity (Gen. 2:24), and then by the one which testifies to the nakedness of both, without mutual shame (Gen. 2:25)".2 Herein is revealed to us, as the Pope puts it, the nuptial significance of the body which, as male and female in the communion of marital love, makes visible in the created order the invisible reality of the Trinity as a communion of love. (Fs)