We can say that the man who appears in Scripture has not respected certain deadlines – let us think of original sin – but he has not had to take away freedom, because it has been given to him by God when he was created. In this sense, the idea of conquest is not found in the Bible, because for the Bible freedom is original (“In the beginning, God created”).
After having concluded the creation of man, who was totally new and beautiful, God said to him: “Man, you will be like me, your God. And as a testimony of your likeness to me, I give you from now on the prerogative par excellence: freedom” (St. Gregory of Nyssa).
Freedom is certainly inscribed in man’s being, but in the form of virtuality, of a promise or project to be realized and, in this sense, as something to be conquered. Freedom rises from existence. Man is a being who must make his freedom exist.
“God creates the world as the sea creates the beach: by withdrawing.” In bringing forth man, God has created a free being, like Himself. If the future is something that must be created, if it is the future, it must come: the possible does not precede the real. According to Christian intuition, God, the “Lord of the possible,” wanted us to be authors of the possible, not executors of a reality already imposed by a jealous and narcissistic God. St. Paul has described the Christian God, as present in Jesus, as a God of kenosis, a God of dispossession, who has “emptied himself, emptied himself,” unwilling to consider anything of his own “as a prey” to be jealously guarded for himself (Phil 2:6-7).
God created man “in his own image and likeness” (Gen 1:26). Theology generally understands this passage in the following way: man has received his being from God (he is his image), but then he must always act according to that image (becoming like God).
There is, therefore, in man at the same time something that he has received and something that he must acquire, so that it may bear fruit. This is the whole task of freedom. In this sense, not everything has been given, but man appears as a being who must become that which he is. And this change belongs to your freedom. Finally, it should be noted that there is no such thing as an abstract human being, regardless of his or her sexual condition, and that both men and women are equally the image of God and his collaborators in the construction of the world.
Fr. Welton Cavallini, OAR
(Article published in the Yearbook 2023)