The Exciting New World of the New Testament

A book from the ancient East, and lit up by the light of the dawn, a book breathing the fragrance of the Galilean spring, and anon swept by the shipwrecking north-east tempest from the Mediterranean, a book of peasants, fishermen, artisans, travellers by land and sea, fighters and martyrs, a book in cosmopolitan Greek with marks of Semitic origin, a book of the Imperial age, written at Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, a book of pictures, miracles, and visions, book of the village and the town, book of the people and the peoples, the New Testament, if regard be had to the inward side of things, is the great book, chief and singular, of human souls.

Because of its psychic depth and breadth this book of the East is a book for both East and West, a book for humanity: a book ancient but eternal.

And because of the figure that emerges from the book -- the Redeemer, accompanied by the multitude of the redeemed, blessing and consoling, exhorting and renewing, revealing Himself anew to every generation of the weary and heavy-laden, and growing from century to century more great -- the New Testament is the Book of Life.

Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East (1908), p. 392.

Gregory of Nyssa on the Imago Dei

If, then, man came into being for these reasons, viz., to participate in the divine goodness, he had to be fashioned in such a way as to fit him to share in this goodness. For ... something akin to the divine had to be mingled with human nature. In this way its desire [for divine goodness] would correspond to something native to it. Even the natures of irrational creatures, whose lot is to live in water or air, are fashioned to correspond with their mode of life. In each case the particular way their bodies are formed makes the air or the water appropriate and congenial to them. In the same way man, who was created to enjoy God's goodness, had to have some element in his nature akin to what he was to share. Hence he was endowed with life, reason, wisdom, and all the good things of God, so that by each of them his desires might be directed to what was natural to him. And since immortality is one of the good attributes of the divine nature, it was essential that the constitution of our nature should not be deprived of this. It had to have an immortal element, so that it might, by this inherent faculty, recognize the transcendent and have the desire for God's immortality.

The account of creation sums all this up in a single expression when it says that man was created "in the image of God."

Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration (4th C AD), p. 276 in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. E. R. Hardy. Phildelphia: Westminster, 1954.