4E Cognition and Humans as the Image of God: Enacting What We Share with the Divine

My paper explains how 4E Cognition can illuminate a Christian understanding of humans as the image of God. My paper has three parts. First, I situate recent scholarship in comparative psychology, which has argued that humans are unique due to a capacity for shared intentionality, within a 4E Cognition framework. Second, I show how, for Christians, the triune God may be conceived as an eternal act of shared intentionality, which the trinitarian persons eternally enact. Finally, I argue that humans are the image of God because of their capacity to dynamically couple with, and enact in humans, the shared intentionality with the divine.