God-Human Development (Evolution)
By St. Justin Popovich
Letter to a Student (Nov. 19, 1968)
By St. Justin Popovich
Letter to a Student (Nov. 19, 1968)
My most precious child in the Lord. You wish me to tell you what questions the “Theological Circle” concerns itself with. Here they are: can the scientific understanding of the evolution of the world be reconciled with the Orthodox feeling and consciousness founded on Divine Revelation? How did the Holy Fathers speak about this? Is there any need at all for such a reconciliation?
Briefly. New Testament anthropology is inseparable from Old Testament anthropology. The good news of the Old Testament is this: man is the image of God. The good news of the New Testament is this: the God-man is the image of man. The heavenly, divine, immortal, eternal, and unchangeable human element in man is the image of God: the God-likeness. This God-likeness of the human being has been disfigured by voluntary human sin, by his union with the devil through sin and its consequence — death. God therefore became man “in order to renew once again His own image, which had been corrupted by passions.” God therefore became man, and remained in the human world as the God-man, as the Church, in order to give man — the image of God — all the necessary means: the Holy Mysteries and the holy virtues, by which the disfigured yet God-like human being, within the God-Human Body of the Church, might grow into a perfect man, into the measure of the full stature of Christ (the fullness of Christ). This is God-human development (evolution) of man; this is God-human anthropology.
