This paper critiques Barth’s Christological Anthropology against Bavinck’s Trinitarian Anthropology, highlighting a potential problem with Barth’s Relational view of the Imago Dei and human nature. In a respectful continuation of Bavinck’s work, I will present what I call a typological relations model that grounds the Imago Dei in the Triune God instead of the Covenant, avoiding problems associated with Barth’s relational view of human constitution. Furthermore, I will argue that by following Bavinck’s imago Trinitatis instead of Barth’s imago Christi view, one avoids collapsing Creation and re-creation, the Elect and the Reprobate, into one another by taking into account that Christ is both exemplar and telos of humanity by trading in Barth’s Christocentric anthropology for a Christo-telic one.
This typological relations proposal borrows aspects of Bavinck’s organic ontology to show correlations between God’s archetypal “unity in diversity, diversity in unity” of God’s trinitarian nature and the organic nature of humanity’s unity and diversity. The typological relations model suggests the generative and productive relationship between Adam and Eve is analogous to the eternally generative and productive intra-trinitarian relations within the Godhead and that the relation between Adam and Eve is a type and foreshadowing of the telos of man in the union between Christ and His Bride.