Rethinking Theological Anthropology From the Notion of Imago Trinitatis: Postcolonial and Feminist Insights

We Are Cartographies

Humans are ‘being a being in the world’. As such, they are affected by that world, meaning they are ‘spatial-temporal’, located in a particular point of cosmos and history. When reflecting on themselves, humans draw a map of their existence using the coordinates marking their time and personal landscape, thus incorporating many factors that increase the complexity of their existential quest. Embodiment, social dimension, historical context, family ties, personal biography and aesthetics are only a few. As incarnate beings in the world, humans cannot escape their geographical ‘location’. In this sense, there is a certain ‘cartographicness’ about them, that is, they can be located on a map (De Sousa Santos, 2000: 224–225). As a result, they can be labelled as ‘other’ and suffer discrimination by virtue of their cartographic quality (Florio, 2000: 26–27). Ultimately, the map becomes a site for distortion: it sets fictitious boundaries that aim to institutionalise traditions, territories and rules. These boundaries are not arbitrary but construed using intelligible and controllable elements (De Sousa Santos, 2000: 227). Da Sousa Santos speaks of three mechanisms of distortion: scale, projection and symbolism (De Sousa Santos, 2000: 225–232). Since human beings are ‘cartographic’, they are intelligible – institutionalised and universalised – even when that is not their actual reality.

When the coordinates which pinpoint our location – and thus define each human person – intersect with the boundaries separating ‘me’ from ‘the other’, then conflict takes over human relations. Indeed, crossing those boundaries to reach the other may imply breaking the rules of the map. In Hannah Arendt’s words, we have a narrative identity, that is, the possibility to respond to the who I am question through our life’s narrative. In this narrative, all aspects that affect us and define who we are in all actuality are integrated, that is, our self-representation: ‘Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero – his biography, in other words’ (Arendt, 2001: 210). Conflict damages our narrative identity by disrupting the rules that promote coexistence, thereby justifying the patriarchal duality as the only possible relationality. It separates by sex, ethnicity, social class and continents while rendering ‘the other’ silent and invisible. Far from opening up opportunities and affirming biodiversity, being located becomes a boundary and a tool for violence.

At the same time, human beings exist ‘situating themselves in the world’. In other words, they are not fixed to just one place on the map. As they journey through life, they performatively inhabit other coordinates. They wander all around, never forsaking their historicity, capable of situating themselves repeatedly by harnessing transgression and similarity. Here, ‘transgression’ refers to the determined will to shatter the boundaries that perpetuate patriarchal dualities, whether symbolic or physical. Transgressing preserves life’s porosity, whether the cosmos or human, and rearranges or removes boundaries. It does so through the practice of exchange and tending to alterity, which is no longer ‘other’ but ‘we’.

‘Similarity’ refers to the personal capability to engage others’ resistances or situated transgressions, becoming ‘entangled’ with another’s life in such a way that similarity arises to build adjacency between human beings. Michel Foucault (2005 [1998] notes,

This word [covenientia] really denotes the adjacency of places more strongly than it does similitude. Those things are ‘convenient’ which come sufficiently close to one another to be in juxtaposition; their edges touch, their fringes intermingle, the extremity of the one also denotes the beginning of the other. In this way, movement, influences, passions, and properties too, are communicated. So that in this hinge between two things a resemblance appears. . . . [A]djacency is not an exterior relation between things, but the sign of a relationship, obscure though it may be. And then, form this contact, by exchange, there arise new resemblances; a common regimen becomes necessary; upon the similitude that was the hidden reason for their propinquity is superimposed a resemblance that is the visible effect of that proximity. (p. 20)

I suggest that a suitable anthropology would understand adjacency as that which situates human beings in a ‘semblance of proximity’ to the other, thus acknowledging their fragilities, quests and resistances (Foucault, 2005 [1998]: 204). Specifically, the tension between locatedness and situatedness yields a dynamic map of the human being, divested of scale (man, White, European) and entwined with humanity’s erased memory (care, body, mutuality): The memory belonging to the other end of the patriarchal duality. As situated beings, the human condition is at once individual and collective, that is, cartography embraces humanity on the whole as well as each human subject. Locatedness reveals the biographical structure of each human being, that is, their unique narrative identity. Unrepeatable on account of humans’ distinct individuality, this identity takes a particular shape depending on the successive set of adjacency entanglements that humans weave throughout their lifetime. Identity relates to self-narration and to the acts carried out in the public square: ‘Through action and speech, men show who they are, actively reveal their unique personal identity and make their appearance in the human world’ (Arendt, 2001: 203).

The Capability to Love: To Care For and Be Cared For

As a result of locatedness in the world, the body is configured as an incarnate gifted life, which we choose to live alongside others. The first constitutive capability of the human being is to love and be loved. We acquire this capability through attachment when tended to during our first years of life. The very first human experience is radical vulnerability, which we encounter when we are born and handed to our caregivers. Human vulnerability is expressed as fragility vis-à-vis the surrounding environment, a vulnerability that needs to be accompanied. It requires other people’s interactions and distinct strategies so the human can develop, grow, mature and flourish personally and communally. Human life is dependent on interrelationships thorough their upbringing until they mature as autonomous beings. Nourishing, tending to the body so it grows in a healthier manner, ensuring the healthiness of the surrounding environment and establishing the foundations for communication through the various languages of the senses constitute the pillars for identity construction. All of these comprise what we mean by initial socialisation, which is connected to the body.

The body is a biological reality with specific rules for functioning. It also possesses personal and individual features that make it different from other bodies: rhythm, resistance, longevity, beauty, health, energy and so on. It is unavoidably a sexed reality. But it is also so much more: it is an intelligent organism that creatively solves the complexities arising from interaction with the environment through will, persistence, desire and learning. Building on Husserl, M. Merleau-Ponty suggests that the body is an intentional unity in experiencing feeling and action. This author suggests that there is no duality between the perceiving subject and the perceived world, very much in the same way that there is no duality between body and soul. Furthermore, there is no separation between somatic and psychic dimensions, but a primary unit or living structure (Merleau-Ponty, 2005 [1985]: 87–91). The body articulates being-in-the-world: ‘The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2005 [1985]: 94). Others recognise us as a body in a particular place and time. Long before having consciousness of the world, even before the emergence of a reflexive consciousness, our body is already oriented towards the world (Merleau-Ponty, 2005 [1985]: 84). Through subjectivity, body experience allows the consciousness of the world – not because the body is a passive receiver of the senses, but because it makes it possible to think about myself from an ‘impersonal we’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2005 [1985]: 97; Garcés, 2013: 133). In other words, we receive the other through the body; we become adjacency or refuse it. Individually and collectively, the body configures us through experiences, options, behaviour and relations. In the body, we experience pain, joy, abuse, violence, hunger and pleasure, and we can transpose all these to universal experiences. However, it is always an unfinished configuration because the body re-creates or ‘re-constitutes us in every single moment’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2005 [1985]: 223).

In addition, we are vulnerable because we are fragile bodies. We have physical needs (to breathe, to eat, to be clean, to be healthy, protection, rest, comfort, sexual needs), relational needs (respect, belonging, acceptance, recognition; personal, sexual and collective identity) and spiritual needs (to be happy, to be free, be able to discern and develop empowerment, self-realisation and to transcend). There is within us a radical vulnerability, which is not solely expressed in specific moments of life, like childhood or old age. Vulnerability is a concept which was coined by ecofeminism. It refers to the experience of finitude as a constitutive condition of every living creature since they were born. Some human groups know vulnerability more intimately than others. For instance, the fact that women are in charge of caregiving prevents that others experience vulnerability but renders them more exposed to it because women do not receive the care they give to others. It accompanies us throughout life. Vulnerability reminds us that we can be bodies that experience violence at any given time. Discrimination based on sex, poverty, power or abuse converges in the bodies that experience violence. Bodies can be ignored, insulted, mistreated or violated. Being human also means suffering and resisting in one’s body (Chung Hyun, 2004: 39).

Therefore, we are bodies in need of care and self-realised in caring for those who need it. Comprehending the human as a conscious and thinking being has resulted in the oblivion and invisibility of the ontological dimension of caring, a care provided not only at the beginning of life or when we are ill or aged but that emerges as a suitable expression of the human. Merleau-Ponty is critical of the divide between perceiving consciousness and body-world, for the experience of perceiving entails an intentional wholeness with the body. There is no consciousness of reality apart from the body (Merleau-Ponty, 2005 [1985]: 83). Shared vulnerability offers a better understanding of life’s fragility – ours and the planet’s (Céspedes Ulloa, 2012: 48–62). By needing and welcoming others’ needs, we unveil the diversity of the human race. We seek each other and rehearse ties of care and tenderness that support the life of the weakest while teaching compassion to those who are less sensitive: ‘To build communities that recognise all the different faces and mutually help each, because they are aware of each life’s uniqueness despite belonging to a family or collective’ (Gebara, 2021: 290).

The experience of vulnerability and care influences how we ordain the notions that define the human being. If ‘human’ is to be understood along the lines of an individual consciousness vis-à-vis the world, then individual power and success fulfil the primary and fundamental meaning of life. Conversely, if ‘human’ is to be understood as radical vulnerability meeting the world, then the capability of taking care of the other orients the integral meaning of being human. In this sense, vulnerability is not limited to the individual but is instead a collective experience, a ‘plural subject’ or a ‘we’ committed to reality (Garcés, 2013: 45–46).

Surely, introducing vulnerability into the ontological definition of the human may seem bizarre. After all, it means to move away from modern philosophical definitions, perhaps because care and vulnerability reside at the opposite end of duality, the one attributed to women. And maybe because Buber only went halfway in defining human beings as an I-You encounter, for they are not just encounter but also the manner of that encounter. They are not just an action of the willing parties, but a predisposition to care understood as a gratuitous act and not only as responsibility. Caring is a constitutive element of being. Women – who traditionally have provided care and nourishment and trained others in life through socialisation, also handing down religious faith and so on – have not contributed to the philosophical and anthropological definitions of the human, for the human phenomenon was studied and understood from the point of view of the male subject (Moore, 2009 [1991]). However, vulnerability and care are not circumstantial events but express human ontology. Moreover, they are the starting point and cohesive thread for personal identity.

The practice of care promotes the emergence of an alternative rationality, so much different to the heroic rationality, which is the contemporary stereotype of the self-referential savoir (Cambell, 1984; Dumézil, 1985) that grasps life in dualities – power-submission, conquest-defeat and strong-weak. This rationality revolves around the acceptance of the superiority of the strong and the inferiority of the weak and either enables the appropriation of other bodies or presses for accepting the appropriation of one’s body. Hence, bodies are subjected to the will of the strong and alien interests. Assuming radical vulnerability and acting accordingly demands rejecting the dynamics of violence that punish human vulnerability as well as the dual dynamics of unequal dependence. In contrast, body rationality conceptualises everyday care as a fundamental human expression. The materialisation of this embodied rationality by way of care dynamics directed at others’ grounds attitudes and politics that favour cooperation and mutual support, thus counteracting domination and imposition.

The Capability to Recognise Oneself and Others: Diversity

Tending to radical vulnerability leads to the recognition of human diversity. In the same way that a diverse worldview fosters the perception of human beings as diverse: The human body is a ‘world-structure, with its two stages of sedimentation and spontaneity, [which] is at the core of consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1985: 147). It may be that pursuing a more integral vision of human life entices a better understanding of human interactions in our contemporary world. Such understanding involves recognising the interdependence between the intrapersonal dimension (personal identity and the pursuit of meaning), the interpersonal domain (relationships with others and our ability to encounter different cultures and build a consensus) and the cosmic sphere (capability to interact with one’s context and engage in eco-social exchange). This interdependence underscores the fact that humans are not a complexity of juxtaposed parts but rather an embodied reality ‘rooted in nature when it is transformed by cultural influences, never hermetically sealed and never left behind’. (Merleau-Ponty, 1985: 215). Hence, it is not enough to understand oneself as autonomous subjectivity, but as a being invested in a relational process through the recognition of diversity.

To this end, the Zubirian observation that humans are open to realise that they live in a given reality is the starting point: ‘. . . in a constitutive way, the human being is an essence that is formally open to its own character as reality’ (Zubiri, 1984: 182). According to Zubiri (2002), this locatedness, to which I have already referred, implies not only gaining consciousness of oneself and their environment but also making decisions that allow advancing in the negotiation of one’s identity: ‘[H]uman existence, we are told, is such that it consists in finding itself among things and, by taking care of them and being dragged along by them, to create itself’. Therefore, grasping reality is not only an intellectual capability but implies bodily materiality. The entire human existence – body, psyche, feelings and emotions – plays a role in understanding itself. Accounting for reality in this process means accounting for the body, the historicity of existence and the systems or collective imaginations that represent, interpret and filter our comprehension of the human and the world.

Up to this point, everything is seemingly reasonable. However, oftentimes ‘sensible intelligence’ is understood along the lines of a rational intelligence – the first half of the patriarchal duality – that commands emotions, feelings and the body, which are placed in duality’s second half. In this scenario, the human being apprehends reality in a dis-embodied manner grounded in a logic-abstract intelligence. Namely, according to a scientific and empiricist thinking that is oblivious to each and every constitutive human capability that grasps the world and communicates with it using symbolic and narrative languages. These enhance the relations between reason and emotion, speech and sentiment, evocation and incarnation. In sum, embracing reality means embracing a complex and total way to relate to reality, a way which is embodied and sentipensada. ‘Sentipensar’ (adj. sentipensado/a) is a Spanish expression comprised of two words: ‘to feel’ (sentir) and ‘to think’ (pensar). As the paragraphs emphasises, it denotes an intellective activity that integrates both feeling and thought simultaneously, thereby enabling a richer and nuanced examination of reality.

Similarly, in the experience of ‘knowing that one exists’ lays an ‘affective disposition’, that is, human beings are open to meeting with the world through their conscious intelligence. This consciousness sparks a feeling, an affective experience that moves them deeply. And because of this disposition, humans can freely choose to bond with or disengage from that experience (Zubiri, 2002: 238). With this, I refer to a ‘sentient intelligence’ that, far beyond mere contemplation of reality, actively endeavours towards the future, becoming progressively accustomed to it and shaped by it. Ignacio Ellacuría (1975) explains it in three moments: ‘[W]e know reality when, in addition to realising the weight of reality (noetic moment) and shouldering it (ethic moment), one takes charge of the weight of reality (praxis-oriented moment)’ (p. 149).

Diversity is, therefore, a precious gift to humanity. It is a legitimate reality that recognises human individuality, originality and uniqueness. To recognise diversity is to embrace it. At present, the recognition of human diversity is debated between supporters of universalism and those who uphold relativist views. While universalism espouses a human and abstract principle (unity) confronting a concrete reality (variety), relativism renounces a universal, human framework of reference in the face of a heterogeneous human difference. Establishing a relationship between the universal principle – embedded in the notion of human difference – and the production of difference – found in the universal principle of being human – could resolve the debate. The conjunction of what is universal (unity) and what is diverse (difference) bypasses the duality between an essentialist, logical reason and an unpredictable, diverse nature. The mutuality component avoids an exclusive notion of the human, instead pursuing the correlations between unity and diversity.

To understand the human as unity and diversity at once entails first accepting the ‘universal respect’ rule towards the other, allowing for communication among people to ensue. Second, it implies accepting that an ‘egalitarian reciprocity’ is needed in that universal respect (Benhabib, 2006a: 46, 2006b: 182–184). Third, it requires accepting that reciprocity is not homogeneity. Rather, reciprocity is expressed in the other’s difference as a legitimate way of being human, distinct from one’s own. This third step aligns with postcolonial feminist anthropology criticism (O’Hara Graff, 1995: 161), which conceptualises alterity as diversity, that is, it sees the other and their specific features as an opportunity to broaden one’s own worldview through their difference. The fourth and last step is recognising the difference in others as an opportunity to delve into the mystery of their being, thereby into the mystery of human’s transcendence. This movement directs the recognition of difference towards a common and ultimate search for plenitude. In this way, human unity and diversity meet.

Recognition – in the Hegelian sense, as a purely intersubjective act connecting two individuals that confront each other and pointing to a Spirit-reconciled community – shatters the mirage of the supremacy of the individual over the community. In Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 4, Hegel uses ‘recognition’ to reflect on the intersubjective formation of identities through confrontation and interaction. Charles Taylor, writing on the topic in his 1992 essay entitled Multiculturalism and ‘the Politics of Recognition’, gives the following definition:

[O]ur identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. (Benhabib, 2006b: 98–99)

Moreover, ‘the logic of recognition has the virtue of understanding equality from the vantage point of plurality while incorporating the “we” into the “I”’ (Garcés, 2013: 46). To this end, the dimensions mentioned above are critical: intrapersonal, interpersonal and cosmic. These three unfold through a non-hierarchical, non-tamed dialogue, expressing the freedom of difference. The dialogue does not involve the intellectual level solely – that is, the logical reason – for duality would once again furnish our comprehension of the human. On the contrary, the dialogue encompasses embodiment by virtue of its finitude. There is no need for the other to be present when the body articulates recognition, for the other is already before us, sharing the same material world. Accordingly, the relationship is more direct, intimate and committed.

In conclusion, recognition in diversity is a process that involves approaching the other, the practice of which can lead to elements that foster peace, tolerance, equality and justice. The age of plurality arises from a model of intercultural societies. If we assume dynamics of recognition in diversity, such societies demand engaging actively in ‘interaction, exchange, openness and effective solidarity: recognition of values, of ways of life, of symbolic representations, whether within the codes of one’s culture or different cultures’ (Nash, 2001: 21–47).

The Capability of Being Collective: Creating Community

In conjunction with the preceding points, we come to the concept of ‘impersonal we’ – the collective community urged towards transformation. This development stems from furthering the relationship between what is universal and what is diverse and recognising diversity as a way to engage the essence of the human person.

It is only possible to knit one’s own identity, to dwell in one’s skin while remaining entwined to others’ identities, in a collective consciousness of humanity, that is, in a reconciled community where ‘the opposing individuals have surrendered to and forgiven each other and embraced the absolute difference’ (Garcés, 2013: 44). In this vein, the subject is no longer individual but collective: ‘[I]t is intertwined with the subject beside it within universality’ (Garcés, 2013: 44). Consequently, the embodied being is expressed in universality, inhabiting a geography and a history; universality is a result of a subject recognising the other and self-recognising themselves in the world, in a space that allows for struggles and encounters between identities. The universality of the collective subject offers a space to rethink the I-other and us-them relationships (Garcés, 2013: 45), that is, to take intersubjectivity as a starting point as it is the fundamental essence of the human being. In this way, the community experience emerges as a result of fullness in the human person.

However, we are not solely defined by subjectivity, nor are we entirely subsumed in the collective subject. We are subjects in community, always in relation. We do not live in isolation. We rather are in need of ‘naming’, meaning that the universality I find in the other is my own intimacy. As we reach towards the other through gratuitous acts of care, we can speak better and more precisely of the identity paradox we encounter in our innermost selves (Merleau-Ponty, 1985).

As a result of the interplay between time, body, things and alterity, we are a community, though only insofar as we are traversed by the actions of the other, now scripted in our skin: ‘But if we rediscover time beneath the subject, and if we relate to the paradox of time those of the body, the world, the thing, and others, we shall understand that beyond these there is nothing to understand’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1985: 376). In this way, we uphold both egalitarian and discriminating relationships: Those that deny others the right to exist and those that create spaces to coexist and strengthen different lives. Being a community is an invitation to rethink the consequences of hate and healing.

Embodied and Dynamic Relationality

Our stumbling pilgrimage serves as the context in which a new relationship can begin to unfold between the human being and God’s action in the world. According to Gisbert Greshake (2001), we enter God’s family in a pilgrim-like fashion, that is, we are baptised, enter the pattern of trinitarian relations and welcome God to possess our whole existence. To the theologian, God’s way of relationality is plurality. If human beings let themselves be possessed by this trinitarian activity, then they can create spaces for communion (communio), thus dissolving the existing boundaries between them and others and them and God (Greshake, 2001: 383). First, humans participate in communion because ‘they realise themselves through and towards the other’. (Greshake, 2001: 301). Second, a person’s autonomy is realised by choosing a communitarian life with those that are different. In this vein, God-Trinity becomes the path and norm (Greshake, 2001: 308). Third, they participate in communion because this autonomy process is realised in freedom, for recognising the other and establishing adjacencies is a choice (Greshake, 2001: 341). Finally, this means that God’s dynamic communion (communio) already embraces the human being’s dynamic communion. As humans, we are capable of communion and collaborating in such a way that creation can ultimately participate in that communion. (Greshake, 2001)

Imago trinitatis does not allude, then, to the likeness of God through intellect and rationality (González, 2006: 186). Instead, we cultivate it through a dynamic embodiment centred on human ‘relationality’, which is the cornerstone of communitarian plenitude. This relationality is expressed through disposition towards alterity, that is, in just and compassionate relationships that convey the divine image manifested in humanity (Johnson, 2002; Oduyoye, 2001: 76). Embodied and dynamic rationality cannot be invoked to legitimate a hierarchical and abusive exercise of God’s creation. The latter is constituted as ‘body of God’, sustaining and nourishing all living beings in her (Dietrich, 1996: 82–98; McFague, 1994: 126–138). Consequently, human embodiment, male or female, and its sacred relationality – as it is imago trinitatis – are part of the compassionate relationships that foster relatedness to God (González, 2006: 191; McClintock Fulkerson, 1997: 107). Humanity’s calling is to participate in God’s communion with us, thus becoming imago trinitatis.

The key to the life that participates in the trinitarian, and divine activity is to live as Jesus did, as the perfect human whose vital praxis is the paradigm for living in God’s name: compassion and solidarity (LaCugna, 1991: 382; Medley, 2002: 47).

When humans, in their diversity, accept this calling, then they are orienting themselves towards a space of openness in relationships, which are now trustworthy and affectionate. Hence, others’ vulnerability is received as ‘mystery, compassion, reciprocity and obligation’ (Medley, 2002: 177). This human ‘personhood’ is firmly rooted in the trinitarian God. By upholding just relationships with others, in the community and with the rest of creation, the human being becomes an icon of Divine Life. The way to practice relationality will be, therefore, through care and responsibility: We are Christ for one another, instantiating the kingdom of God as we transform the world (LaCugna, 1991).

The theologian Namsoon Kang (2013) identifies five tools to advance towards a postcolonial trinitarian anthropology connected to Life: (1) deconstructing the Western construction of binary fixity; (2) decentring ethnocentrism, geocentrism, androcentism and heterocentrism; (3) promote hypersensitivity to the marginalised; (4) radical affirmation of the others, regardless of anything else and (5) reinstating the colonised/marginalised/oppressed in the imago Dei. Kang’s proposal stems from a biocentric perspective, with trinitarian Life at its centre, and focuses on human diversity and relationality as gifts of God.

Postcolonial feminist theology affirms that an anthropology of decentralisation – that is, thinking about the human being as related and interdependent with creation, which is the body of God – directly influences the transformation of the techno-patriarchal rhetoric. This rhetoric employs race, gender, sexuality, intellectual capability, class and economic status as an intersectional discourse to break apart the body of God (Kwok, 2005). In this line, the encyclical letter Laudato Si hints at the ‘technocratic paradigm’ as the underlying human cause for the current ecologic and human crisis (LS, 2015, nn. 101–136), while the encyclical Fratelli Tutti prompts the pursuit of a just and compassionate relationality (FT, 2020: nn. 198–224).

Hope: Gaudium et Spes

Rather than continuing to justify and uphold the dual structure of theological anthropology, rethinking the human being as imago trinitatis entails its reformulation from the point of view of inclusivity. By delving into embodied relationality, it becomes possible to strengthen adjacency, community and the connections that these foster when extended towards the bodies, spaces, times, emotions and intuitions of the humans on a pilgrimage to God.

The anthropology I am sketching is invested in the exploration of opportunities and in taking risks to achieve better justice. This means that the ‘communion’ between the triune God and humanity can be understood through divine perichoresis. Though human finitude precludes any perfect realisation of the trinitarian communion, humans are empowered to walk towards its plenitude by the power of the Holy Spirit (Medley, 2002: 54, 123). Thus, we envision an eschatological/prophetic anthropology (Coda, 1994: 192) that learns from mistakes, confronting these as opportunities to reflect God in the human bodies in a fuller sense, not despite the bodies but precisely because of the bodies (González, 2006: 236). To be imago trinitatis is to be an iconic and living metaphor of God’s liberating communion that transposes, redeems and reconciles historical existence and human relationships. Likewise, it is a social metaphor that envisions a community of inclusion, equality, freedom, solidarity and love. Imago trinitatis can be also expressed as imago Christi and imago Spiritus to concretise the dimensions of the Christian life: care, emancipating solidarity and participation in love (Medley, 2002). But we are not only image of God; we are also image of Christ (imago Christi) insofar as we develop our ‘emancipating solidarity’. This is a resulting effect of Jesus’ vital praxis towards others, which enables those who have received it to express their own authority while being with others. It also empowers to surpass the connexions grounded in slavery. In this way, the person is oriented towards freedom, which sparks a new kind of communion between humans that creates and sustains liberation. For this reason, we are not only image of God but also image of the Spirit, for the pneumatic dimension is expressed in ‘participation’ (Acts 2:42-41; 1 Co 12:12-28) in the liberating community. Participating in others’ lives through the Spirit is the liberating activity that leads to a process of nurturing, empowering and solidarity with others. Thus, participation transforms humans in people of/in communion, who no longer live as solitary, self-contained individuals but as a loving and caring community (Medley, 2002: 159).

Imago trinitatis offers a new formula through which it is possible to transfigure human existence with God, others and the entire creation (Johnson, 2002). It is an eschatological way of acting, a vision of humanity’s future as desired and proposed by God. Inhabiting as icon of the Trinity intermingles past, present and future, for it realises the beatific vision of communion desired by the God triune already in the historical present.

The eschatological perspective serves as a reminder that the image of God does not allude to a primordial state from which humanity fell but to the destiny to which the human community is called forth (Keller, 2008). Accordingly, the anthropology that I have outlined here is an anthropology of hope. The trinitarian iconic metaphor is hope-infused as it is realised in a person, in organic, active and dynamic form. In this vein, it replaces ‘dehumanised’ ways of being person and the endemic relationships of domination and submission grounded in the androcentric worldview – dual and patriarchal. To become human is to open oneself to a future, to God’s fullness of communion. The future cannot be entirely predicted nor realised in the present, but it is partially here in our just relationships with others and with the living beings of the entire planet.