If any book could be said to condemn the whole idea of human beings attempting to become like God, then surely it is the Bible. At the very beginning of Genesis, a serpent (later identified as Satan) tempts Eve with the promise that, if she disobeys God by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then she will be “as a god.” According to the Bible, the root of all evil is pride; and pride means precisely thinking that we could become divine. Jesus himself is condemned by the Jewish priests for the blasphemous arrogance of claiming to be divine. And yet, the Bible also promises the faithful that they can become “partakers of the divine nature.” What the Bible condemns, of course, is self-deification. If we surrender to God’s love and seek intimate relation to him, God promises to transform us into creatures who possess divine sanctity and everlasting life. The biblical God is less a paradigm of perfection that we might imitate and more a divine person with whom we might have a loving relationship. According to the Bible, we are divinized not by merely imitating God but by loving and being loved by him.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

The icon, like all artworks, enacts an aesthetic transformation of the world, which is structured by the community, space, and time of those who engage with it. As the use of icons in church architecture suggests, these worldly dimensions are also transfigured in an eschatological way when the icon is taken up in the liturgy, joining in the community of saints centered around Christ. As the iconostasis helps illustrate, the eventual result is a “transfiguration of the gaze” which transforms the entire world of experience, making every finite thing a site of potential “iconic mediation.”

This chapter argues that there are two basic approaches to natural law, especially but not exclusively in the Jewish tradition. In the first, natural law is essentially concerned with human goods. In the second, natural law is essentially concerned with human rights. The first approach is that of ‘natural theology’. The second approach is what is called here ‘normative theology’. For natural theology, natural law is rooted in a larger, beneficial, teleological Nature, ruled by the Creator-God. For normative theology, the ‘nature’ in natural law is human nature, which is essentially lawful, having been made in God’s image by the lawgiving Creator-God. The chapter analyses and critiques the first approach to natural law, while the second is analysed and its theological and philosophical preferability advocated. From a theological perspective, rights are more closely related to divinely commanded duties (mitsvot) than goods are. From a philosophical perspective, connecting natural law with human rights as divine entitlements avoids the problem of deriving prescriptions from descriptive states of affairs; a problem natural law based on natural theology does not seem able to overcome.

Maimonides never wrote a commentary on the Hebrew Bible or on any part thereof. That literary choice is belied by the influential legacy of Maimonides’ biblical hermeneutics as developed in the Guide. For the Guide is a work that is declaredly about Scripture. This claim merits emphasis: The Guide is first and foremost an exegetical work. In the general introduction, Maimonides writes that the two primary purposes of the Guide are: first, to explain the meaning of certain terms that appear in the Bible; second, to explain the meaning of meshalim, or parables that appear in the Bible. However, in terms of form, the expected approach for an exegetical work, in light of Maimonides’ intellectual background, would have been to compose a commentary on all or part of the Bible. Jewish biblical commentary was a sophisticated art by Maimonides’ time, originating as far back as Saadia Gaon’s (882–942) commentary on the book of Job, which adapted the genre of formal commentary for Hebrew biblical texts. In such formal commentaries, which harken back to models of ancient Greek and medieval Arabic philosophical commentary, three features stand out. One, there is a clear division between text and commentary, between chunks of text (lemmata) and their interpretation, between author and commentator. Two, the commentator follows the order of the text as a structural principle for the commentary. Three, the commentary is the product of one interpreter and reflects an individual reading. Often the commentator adds a preface of some sort, whose structure and themes were guided by a number of conventions. Saadia’s commentary features all of these elements, including an extensive introduction. As far as Greek commentaries on the philosophical-scientific canon, it is a matter of some contention whether Maimonides was familiar with commentaries on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias. We do know that he was familiar with Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates’ aphorisms, in Arabic translation, since he himself authored a commentary on Galen’s commentary.

Chapter five inspects ancient Israelite conceptions of human nature. I argue that YHWH enjoyed the same fluid constitution of other near eastern deities. As such, he could install himself within multiple cult objects on earth simultaneously, whilst always retaining his individual identity. While Israelites were largely aniconic, they did recognise one 'image' as a legitimate theomorphic cult object. That was the human self. Israelites believed that God created the body to resemble him physically. Upon breathing his essence into the human-image, God not only brought it to life but infused it with his own presence. He installed himself within it as he did in other cult objects like'houses of God' and asherahs. According to the Israelites, the self was literally a composite of earth and deity, a commixture of nondivine and divine. YHWH created the cosmos as his temple residence. Inside this temple, he installed a cult statue to be his physical body. Upon installing himself within the human statue, YHWH both deified it and commissioned it as his temple attendant. In this physical image, he therefore manifested himself in his temple and expanded his rule throughout creation.

In this chapter, the author offers grounds for belief that, in the eschatological end, God will resurrect, transform, and include all non-human creatures and things in the messianic kingdom of God. Besides philosophical-theological and moral grounds, he appeals to doctrines of the “image of God,” the atonement, and the resurrection in support of this eschatological proposition. Next, he discusses recently offered scenarios of animals in Heaven. He focuses on the identity-problem of predation: will predators transformed into non-predators still be themselves?Finally, he offers his own scenario of God defeating Darwinian evil for animals by elevating them to a stature analogous to the exalted place of martyrs according to Christian tradition.

Chapter 3 examines the creation of the image of God, pointing to the significance of the materiality and visibility of the image when compared with the invisibility of angels. This relates to how Gregory depicts the image of God as divine. Due to his narration of how God mixes the spiritual image with the dust, we shall see that Gregory portrays the image and the dust as becoming a unity, and thus a single, living human person. Drawing from Genesis 1, Gregory argues explicitly that God creates women and men equally as images of God; moreover he writes about the female image in a manner which demonstrates further his view of the image quite literally as a physical, living and divine image of God.

Chapter 4 explores Gregory’s re-telling of the fall against the backdrop of the ‘garments of glory’ tradition. After being persuaded by the devil to eat the fruit in paradise, the image of God is banished and clothed in garments of ‘thick, dull flesh’, which equates to being shrouded in sin. This renders the human person at greater risk from the devil. Here, we examine the way in which Gregory discusses the devil, arguing that Gregory attributes to the devil a diminishing existence. The battles with the spiritual powers of darkness form a primary strand in Gregory’s narrative of the image of God’s existence, in which the devil hovers behind conversations of sin, the flesh, the world and the passions.

Chapter 5 describes the restoration and theosis of the image God which, Gregory stipulates, begins at baptism. The chapter’s argument proceeds as follows: if we consider together a) Gregory’s theological anthropology in which God creates the human person specifically to be vulnerable or porous (borrowing these terms from Charles Taylor) to the spiritual realm, b) Gregory’s high pneumatology, c) his ideas about the sacrament of baptism and d) the interaction between the image of God and the devil, we can interpret the divinity of the image literally and in the broadest terms, since it incorporates the ontological, functional, ethical, relational and experiential aspects of being a divine image.

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Gregory’s hermeneutics, arguing that Gregory interprets the whole biblical narrative in light of Christ and the salvation story. We move on to establish the predominant biblical themes which feed into Gregory’s multifaceted account of the image of God. These include beliefs about the divine presence manifested through images and idols; ethics; and an interesting thread which concerns the spiritual warfare between the image of God and powers of opposition, of which ‘the devil’ is common epithet used by Gregory.

Chapter 2 establishes that Gregory considers anthropology within the theological framework of his doctrine of God who is Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in particular the Son, who is the ‘identical Image’. Through examining how Gregory speaks about Christ as the Image of God, we discover significant aspects of his thought about the human person as an image of God: Christ is a divine, living and dynamic Image, which differentiates Christ from motionless images. Gregory goes to great lengths to argue that Christ is unified, which has significant implications on the way in which Gregory considers the physicality of the image of God. Christ’s kenosis makes possible the theosis of the human image of God. Finally, Christ battles with and defeats the devil, restoring the potential divinity of the image and securing the human person’s victory over the devil.