The Imago Dei as Rhemantic Capacity: A Constructive Proposal for Soul, Spirit, and Participation in Trinitarian Communion

This paper argues that many accounts of the imago Dei suffer from a narrative category displacement: features belonging to the image’s expression, vocation, impairment, renewal, or fulfillment are treated as though they specified the image’s basic ontological constitution. Rationality, moral agency, dominion, relationality, and self-consciousness each identify genuine features of human creaturely life, but none by itself specifies the respect under which such features cohere as image or become ordered toward union with God. The present account locates the image more basically in the creature’s capacity for rhemantic reception: the finite aptitude by which the invariant divine reality may be received under a communicative respect without introducing change, sequence, production, or reciprocal modification in God. This capacity is not self-actualizing; its realization depends wholly upon the gracious economic work of the Spirit. The image names the creature’s structural capacity for communicative participation; the soul names the intrinsic, non-spatial locus in which that capacity is borne; and the Spirit names its economic actualization. Union with God is therefore not a further metaphysical achievement beyond communication and indwelling, but the fulfilled terminus of rhemantic reception itself. The result is a unified participatory grammar in which theological anthropology, pneumatology, and communion with God become intelligible as differentiated expressions of one structure ordered toward Trinitarian communion.