Imagers of God

GENESIS 1:27 (CEB)

God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them.

Notice the sentiment in Genesis 1: God created humanity in God’s image. Not just white people, not only Europeans, but all of humankind. All of us are created in God’s image.

Since we all look different, though, the “image” spoken of in the Bible cannot be purely physical. Too often, our image of God looks just like us physically and despises the same people as we. We make God in our image instead of considering what we might look like if we lived up to the biblical ideal that we are created in God’s image.

Our image of God has too often reflected our human self. God is humanoid, even in our classical paintings. God is emotional. God lives in Heaven. We worship God because we believe God demands worship, or bad things will happen to our planet and us. We claim to love God, but the truth is we’re afraid of God, and afraid that if we don’t worship correctly or say the right magic words, we’ll spend an eternity in Hell, an idea that moronically contradicts the idea that “God is love.”

So, what is it, people? Is God vengeful or forgiving, wrathful or compassionate, all-loving, or the most judgmental being in the universe? Is God a Jew? A Catholic? A Protestant or Muslim? Is God Hindu or Buddhist?

If we attempt to image God based on the limitations of human understanding, the only God we will ever meet will be some super-powered version of ourselves. In order to truly have a God experience, we have to let go of our anthropomorphic, patriarchal images of God. To fully achieve the humanity of Jesus, we have to stop making God into a superhuman.

This is a pretty difficult ask because generations of people have been raised in Catholic and Protestant traditions that refer to God as “Him” (the capital “H” is important for some reason) or “Father” (again with the capital letters subtly implying the dominance of the patriarchy).

One of the realities to which we are awakening as a species is a better understanding of the subliminal workings of our mind. In fact, we understand so well the workings of the subconscious, that advertising uses algorithms based on neuroscience to manipulate us into wanting things. The light in that horrifyingly dark tunnel, though, is that we are also beginning to recognize the subtle implications of our language in general, and this trend is creating new and fresh approaches to scripture, which are in truth a return to the way the original people read them. The original Hebrew and Aramaic texts almost always use non-gendered language to refer to God in terms like “Divine Birther,” or even “Father-Mother of the Cosmos.”

I think of God as a conscious energy flow, which to me is still very personal and often in the form of Jesus or Buddha or other spiritual energies, but they are still personalized energies. For many people, God as energy is sometimes too ethereal and sometimes too limiting, but at least it’s not “God the Father.” Speaking of far too limiting.

This is just some typing in Logos to see how it handles different things. There isn’t any spell check or any grammar check though.