Like Father, Like Son
Like Father, Like Son In the preface of his book, Like Father, Like Son, Tom Smail gives us the reason for his writing: "This book is an attempt to discover what it might mean for our humanity that God is Trinity."(p. xi) He goes on to give his readers a general outline of what he'll be covering, beginning with how the view of Trinitarian doctrine has changed in recent times, and ending with a discussion on what we say about the triune God has deep implications with how we handle our relationship with others. The first chapter, Whose Image, deals with the issue of who made whom. Smail begins by giving an example of a mother and a child. The mother claims that her son looks the same as the father, but the viewer can only affirm that if he/she knows what the father looks like. He sums this up by saying "what you can say about the image depends on what you know about the original. We can tell whether and in what ways we are like God, only if we also know what God himself is like...Our being is dependent on his being."(p. 2) The basic Christian doctrine of humanity is that we are made in the image of God. But that doctrine isn't necessarily held outside of the Christian faith, as Smail points out. The opposing argument is that "God has not made us in his image, but rather that we have made him in ours."(p. 3) This view was first upheld by Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach's argument is that "when we think we are talking about God, we are, in fact, just talking about ourselves...Just as a film projector throws images on to a blank screen, we project these ideas on to that ultimate reality and call them God."(p. 5) This view has been adopted and adapted, as Smail points out, by two contemporaries of Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Both Marx and Freud push this argument further by saying that "God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father..."(p. 8) In refute to these arguments, Smail points out that Paul, in his writing in Ephesians,