Theologians normally call human uniqueness imago Dei or the "image of God." The Greek translation of the Hebrew tselem ("image") is Eikon, and it is this term that will carry what follows...

"Now the Lord is the Sprit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit." - Paul II Cor. 3.17-18

The work of the Spirit, the apostle Paul tells us, is the ongoing redemptive transformation of the community of Christians into the glorious Eikon of Jesus Christ himself. Paul shifts the emphasis of the word Eikon from the ruling-representative human Eikon to the redeemed Eikon because he believes Jesus Christ is the perfect God-Man Eikon.

Let me now sum up the biblical understanding of humans as Eikons of God in four stages: humans are created as Eikons, cracked in their present Eikonic struggle, shaped into Christ-like Eikons as they follow Jesus, and desitined to be conformed to Christ in union with God and communion with others in eternity...

To be an Eikon means, first of all, to be in union with God as Eikons; second, it means to be in communion with other Eikons; and third, it means to participate with God in his creating, his ruling, his speaking, his naming, his ordering, his variety and beauty, his location, his partnering, and his resting, and to oblige God in his obligating of us. Thus, an Eikon is God-oriented, self-oriented, other-oriented, and cosmos-oriented. To be an Eikon is to be a missional being - one designed to love God, self, others and to represent God by participating in God's rule in this world. We are now back to perichoresis: to be an Eikon means to be summoned to participate in God's overflowing perichoretic love - both within the Trinity and in the missio Dei with respect to the cosmos God has created. When we participate in this missio Dei we become Eikonic. To be an Eikon means to be in relationship.

Now, what about atonement and the Eikon? The atonement is designed by God to restore cracked Eikons into glory-producing Eikons by participation in the perfect Eikon, Jesus Christ, who redeems the cosmos. To be an Eikon, then, is to be charged with a theocentric and missional life. Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve did what they were supposed to do: they "eikoned.' And cracked Eikons are being restored so that they can eikon now and so that they will eikon forever. As Cherith Fee Nordling puts it so well in her insightful and suggestive essay on "Being Saved as a New Creation": "I contend that to be saved is to be renewed in the true image of God as women and men in Christ, to have our relationality restored so that our sinful selves, hopelessly incurvatus in se (turned in on themselves), are set free to be new creations in the true divine and human koinonia."

Precisely!

(Copied from Scott McKnight's book A Community Called Atonement)