# Summary The [[Image of God]] is identified in a certain way with perfect rational capacity. Wesley makes an A, Therefore B, Therefore C, Therefore D argument for this. Perfect capacity to discern truth from falsehood, therefore "perfect will" or an affection solely possessed by Love, therefore perfect freedom in what they wanted to do, therefore perfect happiness. Wesley says that perfect freedom required the opportunity to choose poorly, so God places the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden and duly warns humans of the death it will bring. Wesley teaches that there was something physically poisonous about the fruit of the tree of knowledge that infects the body and makes it, like, not good. The corrupted body then corrupts the soul, and the corrupted knowledge causes problems in the same therefore chain from before. Because Wesley identifies the image with rational capacity, he's also teaching that the Image was lost in the fall, and must be recovered. The recovery has a similar ABCD format that is parallel with the previous. Recovery through Jesus Christ starts with Humility, self knowledge, therefore the will is reformed by charity, therefore freedom from sin and death by the law of the Spirit, therefore a measure of the perfect happiness original to human before the fall. He then spends a bit of time talking about how it's a good thing to preach the [[gospel]]. ## pro - wonderful composition with the triple ABCD structure. Masterclass. - strong statements about the redemptive action being an act of God - II.4 has a great image contrasting the grace of living as a subject of the King vs the awful suck of being a slave to sin/death ## con - tough to support the identification of the image with rational capacity, or as something that was had, then lost. Implications for people with cognitive disabilities or people at the end of their lives and how much value we have for them are sadly clear to us in a way they wouldn't have been for Wesley, seeing the mass exterminations of "useless mouths" by Nazi Germany or the modern normalization of "euthanasia" for disabled or terminally ill people and being rightly appalled. - The time spent in the sermon identifying how the fruit of the tree of knowledge must have had a "juice" that lodged itself in the body, and that's what caused the corruption of the fall, is bizarre to modern ears. I've always been taught that the disobedience of man and the relational damage between man and God is what caused the fall of man. I wonder if J Wesley continues to develop this idea/lets this idea go.