To register interest in attending, please visit our main 2025 Conference page

‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’, the Psalmist asks. In July 2025, Pusey House will host the fourth in a series of theological conferences, Restoring the Image: Creation, Salvation, and the Human Person. Theologians from the Academy and the Church will meet to consider Christian theological anthropology – the doctrine of humankind’s creation and restoration in the image and likeness of God.

The Church confesses that human beings are made in both the image and likeness of God. The restoration and perfection of this image in the human person and in the whole body of Christ, knit together in one, is fundamental to God’s purposes for humankind and the whole cosmos.  Our conference will consider how the creation and salvation of the human being is revealed and taught in both the Old and New Testaments, and its reception by the Fathers of the Church. We will discuss how theologians through the ages related the divine image and likeness to the developing dogmas of the Triune deity and of Christ as the Incarnate Word.

We will further consider how the Church, as well as drawing on Jewish and Christian sources, also received ancient philosophical notions of human nature and personhood, and how these notions were developed to articulate a fuller Christian anthropology. Speakers will draw on both the riches of the catholic tradition and contemporary philosophical theology. All this will also enable us to consider current debates about the human person and community.

Great questions of Mediaeval Catholic, Reformation, and modern theology will be posed: how is the image damaged by sin? How are humans restored by faith and participation in God’s sacramental economy to grow in the likeness of God? How does grace use human nature, and how is human nature perfected by grace? How is the human person conformed to Christ, and brought to participate in the divine nature?

The Conference will feature opportunities to meet and socialize with theologians from both the Academy and the Church, to foster friendships across different parts of the Church, and to share in the liturgical life of the House. All conference delegates are warmly invited to join the Pusey House community in worshiping at the daily offices and mass.

We hope that the conference will serve not only the furnishing of our minds, but also the transforming of our lives and communities by the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit, that we may all grow together in the image and likeness of God. We welcome theological students, lay members of the Church, clergy, academic theologians, and all those interested in the subject.

The Conference follows previous Pusey House Theological Conferences on the Holy Trinity (The Transforming Vision, 2016), the Person of Christ (Totus Christus, 2018), and the Holy Spirit (Descent of the Dove, 2022).

It is our hope that this conference and others like it in the future will contribute in a small way to that serious, disciplined, and patient recovery of the Church’s memory, which shapes and encourages a renewed and renewing encounter with the risen and ascended Christ, present in the Church and the world through the Holy Spirit.