ABSTRACT
Instead of adhering to a traditional view that speaks of the restoring of the original state lost through the fall, Pannenberg emphasises the image of God as both the fount and destiny of humanity. As the fount, the image of God is already present in human beings in outline form at creation, thereby providing to human lives a direction; as the destiny, the definitive form of the image of God has yet to be realised fully at the eschaton. An important corollary arising from this argument is that something which tends towards the realisation of the purpose of creation exists in the being of the human person; that is, a disposition pointing to the image of God. On that basis, human essence consists in openness for God. Openness for God, says Pannenberg, “is the real meaning of the fundamental structure of being human, which is designated as openness to the world in contemporary anthropology, although this designation means an openness beyond the momentary horizon of the world.”1 The human person’s question about his destiny expresses itself in this openness. Only when he lives in the openness of this question, when he is completely open towards God, does he find himself on the way leading towards his destiny. Admittedly, this goal of human openness is not yet universally actualised. Indeed, this is the reality of sin, the subject matter of the next chapter. It is perhaps worth clarifying at this stage that contrary to what Worthing seems to suggest, the image of God does not have, as it were, a twofold definition, when he says, “… not only does the concept of imago dei point to the human destination to communion with God but also to an openness to the world. Here we return to Pannenberg’s concept of the image of God as worldopenness …”.2 Rather than simply equating one with another, to be precise on the intricate relationship between those key expressions, for Pannenberg it is by way of our human essence, as derived from our incomplete image of God and as expressed in openness beyond the world, that we are destined for fellowship with God as the full realisation of that image.3
