"God" is not the burning bush, not is the thunder "God", nor is nature "God'. I don't believe God is anti-physical or anti-natural or "corporeal" in a certain sense, but rather that God is above and beyond our natural world or physicality. Beyond rather than "Anti". Supernatural. God is more than noncorporeality. God is supercorporeality.
But, the very first parsha of the Torah teaches us that God made Adam (Man) in His own image.
There it is plainly seen that the image of God can only be "replicated" by living flesh, and not just any flesh, but the flesh of a being made expressively by Him in His image out of the soil (adamah), namely, "Man".
But, it is only for God the Creator to make anything into His image. We cannot do the work of "replication" or "imitation". And that simply what God did in the person of Jesus Christ. His essence, His nature, and His image, was partially (not totally, for no one human being can bear the image of God) revealed to man. Jesus is not a "replica" but the physical embodiment of the "real thing", the "Word of God", the "Son of God" which came forth from God.
The only perfect dwelling-place and "Temple" for God are human beings. That is the difference. We don't have idols in a temple what we worship as God. We bear the image of God - we are the "idol" in the sense of representing Christ to the world, and we are the Temple of the Holy Spirit of God who dwells in us.
"Christ in us, the hope of glory".
We are not "gods" or "demigods" on our own. Quite the opposite. We cannot be anything apart from God because who we are in Him derives completely from Him. We, human beings, cannot be worshipped apart from God as if the "Christ in us" is a separate deity, because God is One, God is echad - a unity- one, comprehensive, and inseparable.
We, the Body of Christ, are the image, reflection, and bearer of God so long as we look only to Him and who He is, depending and trusting upon Him. The moment we look to our own selves, depending and trusting upon our own selves, we have cut ourselves off from God. In God, there is no "me", there is only "Him".
Bonhoeffer said, at the end of the Cost of Discipleship,
"It is only because He became like us that we can become like Him. It is only because we are identified with Him that we can become like Him. By being transformed into His image, we are enabled to model our lives on His. Now at last deeds are performed and life is lived in single-minded discipleship in the image of Christ on whom our gaze is fixed. The disciple looks solely at His Master..."
No matter how I try to explain, it is very difficult to explain without the possibility of my phrases becoming distorted and warped into some kind of heresy. No, I'm very Orthodox, Orthodox to the Whole of Scripture, even/especially the principles of Torah. May God take my every failure and inability of expression and turn it to nothing as He turns chometz into dust.
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