{"id":6676,"date":"2025-06-16T17:54:14","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T17:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/man-created-in-the-image-of-god\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T19:19:25","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T19:19:25","slug":"man-created-in-the-image-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/man-created-in-the-image-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Created in the Image of God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Cardinal Gerhard M\u00fcller, Rome<\/em><\/p>\n\n

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844\u20131900) proclaimed the rise of the superman (der \u00dcbermensch<\/em>). After leaving the animal behind, man makes the leap beyond himself to become the \u201csuperman.\u201d The God he had once worshipped as his creator was, in Nietzsche\u2019s view, nothing but an illusion. The superman is his own creator; he himself is god. Yet what actually emerged from his disciples was not a god-like superman, but the diabolical monster of the twentieth century. Those who sought to ascend to a self-constructed paradise through a shattered Christian morality and upon enormous heaps of corpses could only end up creating hell on earth for their fellow men. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If man is no longer permitted to be a creature made in the image and likeness of the one and triune God, then he sinks into the vortex of anthropological nihilism. This absolute negation of the meaning of being inevitably arises from the denial of the existence of God and His universal will for salvation. The ideologues of a \u201cGodless modernity\u201d and the program of dechristianizing society, with all their conceited trust in reason, fall back into blind paganism. Indeed, they conceive of man as a mere coincidence of natural elements playing among themselves, as a more complex organism of evolution, as a product of society, or as a commodity selected from a catalog of goods\u2014and thus in the same way that the ancients saw man as the whim of mythical deities. <\/p>\n\n

Thus, my body is no longer my self in its material In Thomas Hobbes, we find the war of all against all; in social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest and the right of the strongest; in David Hume, the soul is no longer a substance but merely a bundle of impressions; in Karl Marx, man is nothing but the sum of his social conditions; in Freud, the self is divided between the superego and the id (Das Ich und das Es<\/em>, 1923). Instead of the omniscient and omnipresent Logos\u2014that is, the divine Logos\u2014which through His Word and Spirit bears witness to Himself and communicates Himself to the chosen people as Creator of the world and Savior of all men, it is now the finite, error-prone, and selfish human reason that ascribes meaning to itself and sets its own will to power as its goal.Man, therefore, is no longer, as at the beginning of the modern era with its anthropological dualism between mind and body, simply the \u201cmaster and possessor of nature\u201d (Descartes); rather, he is ideologically also the creator of his spiritual self, which, in an existentialist-emancipatory manner, makes its way from nothingness to (self-designed but merely apparent) being (Sartre). The self, in its state as established by God, dissolves over the course of life into self-experiences that can no longer be integrated, and into emancipated self-determinations that float on the surface without reason or destination\u2014like water flowers of every color that never put down roots. <\/p>\n\n

Then, however, my body is no longer my self in its material potential; it is linked to me only accidentally, like a garment that can be tailored to fit and given a new appearance. If, in the golden age of the self-assured bourgeoisie, it was said that \u201ceach man is the architect of his own fortune,\u201d in the age of transhumanism we have moved on to \u201ceach man is the architect of his own body.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

Posthumanism is identical to the classic anti-humanism of atheistic ideologies, only more skillfully disguised and better marketed. With it, the dechristianized \u201cWest\u201d experiences what Nietzsche called the \u201ceternal return of the same\u201d\u2014that is, its own suicidal nihilism. If Nietzsche\u2019s statement \u201cGod is dead\u201d reflects the mindset of today\u2019s world, then it is clear that, under the auspices of this nihilism, its development can only lead to worldwide catastrophes (M. Heidegger, Nietzsche\u2019s Word \u201cGod is Dead\u201d<\/em>, in Holzwege<\/em>, Frankfurt am Main 1972, 201). <\/p>\n\n

Transhumanism is the fourth sphere in the panorama of prevailing nihilisms and their all-devouring abyss. Anthropological nihilism has as its father the pride of the creature that wants to be like God and wishes to determine for itself the difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood; and as its surrogate mother the folly that exchanges \u201cthe glory of the incorruptible God\u201d for its ideological images (cf. Rom 1:20-32). But whoever confuses the truth of God with falsehood and worships the work of his own hands and thoughts instead of the Creator dishonors himself in both spirit and body. By reducing himself to an object of pleasure, he becomes a punishment unto himself, spiritually and physically sterile in his existence, because he refuses to understand that God created man for woman and woman for man (cf. 1 Cor 11:11ff). <\/p>\n\n

Anthropological nihilism, whether in its political form or in the ideological-emancipatory pathos of the woke culture, is significantly hostile to life and to corporality. This is manifest in the demand to kill\/abort children in the womb as a human right, and <\/p>\n\n

to kill out of mercy (euthanasia) those who are deemed weak or no longer useful. This is particularly evident in the relativization of marriage between man and woman, seen as merely one of many variants of orgiastic enjoyment of sexual gratification. In so doing, reference is denied to the fruitfulness with which the Creator blessed man and woman, so that they might transmit, protect, and promote the life created by Him, and so that marriage might be integrated into the family community, through the succession of generations, fulfilling God\u2019s universal will for salvation. <\/p>\n\n

Beyond the biologically proven fact that a true change of sex is impossible, the fiction of a free choice of gender arises from the denial of God\u2019s will regarding our personhood, which is always given to each individual as both a gift and a task within a physical (bodily) nature expressing either male or female form. Man is not trapped in his body as in a straitjacket. Rather, the human body is the foundation of the possibility for the concrete and historical self-realization of a created person\u2014especially in the highest form of friendship, which is attainable only in the conjugal union of a man with his wife (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles<\/em> III, ch. 123). <\/p>\n\n

For the Creator and Redeemer is One and the Same\u2014the One who created us \u201cin His image and likeness, male and female\u201d (Gen 1:27), who \u201calso predestined us from eternity (in relation to our historical existence in time and its foundation in the being of God) to be conformed to the image<\/p>\n\n

of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren\u201d (Rom 8:29).<\/p>\n\n

In the Christian sense, creation means the recognition that everything that exists came into being through the Logos, the Word through which God expresses Himself and in which His infinite reason is revealed in the meaning of all being. The natural sciences limit their possible insights to the structures and functions of the material world, but they cannot deny or obscure the awareness that the world comes to itself in human reason and necessarily transcends itself in the perception of the invisible reality of God in His eternal power and divinity (cf. Rom 1:20). The knowledge that arises from the progress of empirical and transcendental anthropologies can never call into question the truth that man is created in the image and likeness of God and the unity of his person in body and soul; rather, it can only shed a little more light on the mystery of man in all its depth. Ultimately, <\/p>\n\n

\u201conly in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light\u201d (Gaudium et spes 22). Therefore, the first principle of Christian anthropology\u2014which dispels every nihilistic tendency and the presumptuous self-creation of man as the rising sun dispels the shadows of the night and the morning mist\u2014is the natural and revealed truth: <\/p>\n\n

\u201cman, the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself\u201d (Gaudium et spes 24), that is, in the love of God above all things and in love of neighbor as well as of self.<\/p>\n\n

The reason of God in creation and in the history of salvation is unsurpassable. It does not suppress the finite reason of creatures but illuminates it like an inextinguishable light. In Jesus Christ, \u201cthe true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world\u201d (John 1:9). He is the Word made flesh, the Logos of God His Father. He reveals to us the idea that God has of us, expressed in our physical and social nature, when He asks the speculative sophists of all times: \u201cHave you not read that from the beginning the Creator \u2018made them male and female\u2019?\u201d thus unveiling the mystery of marriage: \u201cFor this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh\u201d (Matt 19:4-5). There is no clearer answer to the falsehood of gender choice at will, or to the theory of homosexuality as a variant of creation, or to the blasphemous deception of invoking divine blessing on the farce of marriage between persons of the same sex. All this stands in stark contrast to the understanding of revelation and of the Church as taught by the Second Vatican Council, which some claim to wish to develop further in a strange outburst of arrogance and ignorance. No one can modernize the teachings of Christ, \u201cfor He Himself (in His incarnation) brought with Him every novelty, to renew and revive mankind.\u201d Neither the Magisterium nor the Church as a whole can teach anything that goes beyond the Word of God, improves upon it, or seeks to reinterpret it (cf. Dei Verbum 10). <\/p>\n\n

The Pope and the bishops, despite their authority to preserve and faithfully interpret the faith, \u201cdo not receive any new public revelation as part of the divine deposit of faith\u201d (Lumen<\/p>\n\n

gentium 25). The texts of the Synod of Frankfurt completely misrepresent the sensus fidei<\/em> of the whole People of God if they interpret it as a filter through which a majority allows previously rejected heresies to pass as new enlightenments of the Holy Spirit and sells them to an unsuspecting public as democracy in the Church. Rather, it concerns the supernatural sense of the entire People of God (and certainly not of the laity in opposition to the bishops), in which the infallibility of the Church is expressed in the knowledge and preservation of God\u2019s revelation given once and for all in Christ. <\/p>\n\n

\u201c\u2026through that sense of the faith which is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth, and under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, to which it loyally defers, the People of God accepts not the word of men but truly the word of God (cf. 1 Thes 2:13); it clings unerringly to the faith once for all delivered to the saints (cf. Jude 3), penetrates it more deeply with right judgment, and applies it more fully in daily life\u201d (Lumen gentium 12).<\/p>\n\n

The supernatural sense of faith is therefore anything but an escape route for the self-secularization of the Church or for its worldly transformation into a party in which its factions struggle for interpretative sovereignty driven by a will to power, or in short, by \u201cplacing the wisdom of the world above the wisdom of God\u201d (cf. 1 Cor 1:20).<\/p>\n\n

The real problem, whose manifestation is anthropological nihilism with its destructive potential, is that even some Catholics no longer believe in the historical and eschatological self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Creation, the Old and New Covenants, the Incarnation, the <\/p>\n\n

death of Jesus on the cross as His sacrifice for the reconciliation of humanity with God, His resurrection, and ultimately our bodily resurrection are regarded by them merely as reinterpretable or interchangeable symbols of mythical quality. If Christianity were simply a collection of disparate opinions about an unknowable divine being, diffused through our theoretical interpretation of the world and our practical management of contingency, then it would truly not be worth struggling and suffering for the truth of Christ. \u201cIf the dead are not raised, \u2018let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die\u2019\u201d (1 Cor 15:32), as the pagans do. Faith in the real and true God, who has revealed in His Son Jesus Christ the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6), dissipates nihilism like the rising sun dissipates the mist from our minds. <\/p>\n\n

Nihilism, \u201cthe sentiment of the new age\u201d according to which \u201cGod Himself is dead\u201d (G. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, Ph B 62b, 123), will lead only to the conviction that consequently there is no longer any responsibility toward human beings and that everything that pleases is lawful. But if we believe in the infinite reason of God and in His revelation, which is also manifest in His creation, nihilism is overcome by the salvific and eschatological horizon, and the words of the Book of Wisdom remain true:\u201cFor God did not make death, and He does not delight in the death of the living. For He created all things that they might exist; and the creatures of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, nor is the dominion of Hades on earth, for righteousness is immortal\u201d (Wis 1:13),and further: \u201cFor God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of His own eternity\u201d (Wis 2:23). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Cardinal Gerhard M\u00fcller, Rome The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844\u20131900) proclaimed the rise of the superman (der \u00dcbermensch). After leaving the animal behind, man makes the leap beyond himself to become the \u201csuperman.\u201d The God he had once worshipped as his creator was, in Nietzsche\u2019s view, nothing but an illusion. The superman is his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conference-may-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6677,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6676\/revisions\/6677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}