The Blog That Speaks: When I Create False God Images
Darkness closed in.
Feelings of disorientation, confusion, and anxiety overwhelmed me as darkness’s intimate companions of chaos, unpredictability, and uncertainty accompanied me in the void.
Image by Jenny Shead from Pixabay
I clawed in the blackness for something, anything, familiar that I could firmly grasp. But my beliefs about God and God’s providence had been shattered into a million pieces and laid at my feet.
I had obeyed God, believing that God rewarded such obedience. But now events in my life were continuing to unravel as I scrambled helplessly to keep them from complete disintegration.
In desperation I expressed my fear to someone: “God has abandoned me!”
I saw the person smile as I heard a sing-songy voice say, “God has not abandoned you.” The person’s words rang trite and hollow. Unable to penetrate the blackness, they bounced off darkness’s outer rim and fell to the ground. Instead of shining a dim light of hope (as perhaps intended), the darkness closed in, becoming more suffocating. My feelings of loneliness intensified as my sense of abandonment deepened. My needs to be seen and heard had remained unsatisfied.
Later, I was to learn that I had adhered to a belief in a just world—God rewards those who are good and punishes those who are bad. It is a common, unconscious belief among many in the West. In writing about victims of trauma, Alexander McFarlane and Bessel van der Kolk discuss that many societies believe that persons are able to “control their own destinies.”[1] For such societies, the world is seen as basically “just” in “that ‘good’ people are in charge of their lives, and . . . bad things only happen to ‘bad’ people.” Such societies dearly hold to the conviction that “human beings are essentially the masters of their fate.”[2]
If I had been informed that such aspects were part of my beliefs in God, I would have probably denied it. But years later, I understand that this unconscious belief as well as my would-be denial were normal.
My belief that God punishes the bad and rewards the good exemplifies what psychologists refer to as a God image, a false image of God.
As humans, we mold and shape false images of God based on our experiences, cultural worldviews, and our relationships with attachment figures (caregivers). We are not fully aware of our God images until something confronts them head on. Sometimes the confrontation comes in the form of our own natural development. In my case, it was a crisis in which my habitual expectations of God went unmet before my false images of God were exposed and challenged.
Along with our God images, we also have God concepts, which are conscious cognitive beliefs that are based on what we have been taught, such as from sermons, catechism, or Bible studies.
God concepts are most noticeable when someone asks us to use three words to describe God. I possibly would have said, “Omnipotent, omnipresent, and loving,” not realizing how these conflicted with my unconscious God images. It was when my life unraveled that one of my God images came to the fore as I clung to the belief that I was being punished for some unknown action, causing God to depart from me. It took extended dialogue with a trusted individual in addition to much study and reflection to move away from and replace this particular false image of God.
I have repeatedly heard people spout their God images when life goes awry as they exclaim, “What have I done wrong?”
- A survivor of sexual violence may wonder where was God when she was being sexually assaulted while simultaneously believing that God is present everywhere.
- A woman, who experienced a father and mother who abandoned her at a young age may believe God is like a clockmaker, who created the earth and all that is within it but has since left it alone.
- Middle- to upper-class Americans may be convinced that their comfortable lifestyle is because God has rewarded them for their hard work while thinking that people in poverty are not blessed of God due to their laziness.
- Politicians may be convinced that God supports their political agendas and directly opposes that of their opponents.
- Some pentecostals may believe God will physically cure all their ailments until God does not.
- In a patriarchal society, persons may perceive that God is male.
- Some individuals may be raised in a rule-driven church in which God is portrayed as vengeful. As such, the congregants are being taught that they, themselves, had put Jesus on the cross because of their sin, leading to a belief that God wants nothing to do with them.
Not all false images of God are abusive; some may be too domesticated, as implied in this frequently used quote of Annie Dillard:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.[3]
As shown above, many false images of God are not only the result of relationships with attachment figures but also may be entwined with church teachings and experiences and/or subtle cultural beliefs.
Forming God images is not a new development with the emergence of modern societies as it has been a part of humanity since the beginning. Consider the story of Adam and Eve, who ate of the prohibited fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3).
Like a good prosecutor, the serpent sows doubt about God’s goodness:
Surely you will not die, for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Adam and Eve embrace this seed of doubt through their actions:
When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.
The serpent sows the false seed that engender Adam and Eve to doubt God’s goodness. Through the serpent’s words, the prohibition becomes a path to question God’s character, a path down which Adam and Eve trod. For them, God as God is no longer to be trusted, having good in store for them. As such, a false image of God emerges.
Doubting God’s goodness looms even more largely when God confronts Adam, and Adam quickly blames God by saying, “The woman whom you gave me.” Here, Adam has twisted that which God has created and called “good” (Gen 1:31) and turned it into the problem—that is, no longer good. God’s character, God’s goodness, is no longer trusted by the first couple, and a false image of God is formed.
As in the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, faux images of God serve us.
They may turn God into being more manageable. More controllable. More in the image of humankind. They may turn God into a God we are more capable of understanding. Theologian N. T. Wright implicitly refers to one such false image of God as paganized soteriology, which speaks of our drawing upon pagan belief systems to develop a theology of salvation. Wright is specifically describing the popular Christian notion that “God kill[s] Jesus to satisfy [God’s] wrath” (sort of a bad cop-good cop routine).[4] Such a God image is more comprehensible for our finite minds since it has been a repeatedly told story and practice for hundreds of years about the gods of other societies: a human sacrifice is required to appease the wrath of an angry God. It is hard to push against such a prevalent story.
But this is precisely the reason for Genesis: to combat such false images by revealing God.
Genesis was written to contrast with the other stories and views about creation and how other gods operated in the ancient near east. That is, Genesis was written to reveal the God of the Hebrews. For instance, in the ancient near east, other civilizations taught that the gods were unpredictable and inconsistent. But the scriptures of Israel inform us that God is holy, and that God is consistent in character. In the ancient near east, other civilizations taught that humans were created by the gods as an afterthought because the gods needed slave labor. However, Israel believed that humanity was God’s crowning touch in creation. People were not an afterthought but were to have dominion over creation.
Thus, in reading through the book of Genesis, one sees God as the one who inserts Godself into human impossibilities:
- Adam and Eve feel shame and realize they are naked (Gen 3:7), so God enters into their human impossibility and gives them clothes (Gen 3:21). They are also given a promise of a Deliverer, who Christians believe to be Jesus Christ.
- Hagar, a servant, becomes pregnant and is treated badly by Sarai, so she flees; however, God enters into her darkness, of nowhere to turn, and gives her a promise (Gen 16; see also Gen 21). [also see When God Ministers through Listening]
- Abram and Sarai are childless, but God enters their impossibility, their void, and they have son, Isaac (Gen 21).
- Joseph is thrown into a prison for something he didn’t do, but God removes him from that prison, and he becomes second in command of all of Egypt (Gen 39-41).
God is a God who joins us in our impossible darkness. It may be through a friend being present to us, the reading of scripture, or a supernatural experience.
I recently heard a story from a woman who had experienced God joining her in her unconscious God image. She had a father who was emotionally and physically abusive; thus, she trusted Jesus and the Holy Spirit but not the Heavenly Father. She did not want anything to do with God the Father if God the Father was anything like her earthly father. However, while she was reading the scriptures, she came across John 14:9, in which Jesus says, “The person who has seen me has seen the Father.” In this moment, this woman had a revelation that transformed her deeply held God image. For the first time she comprehended that it was her relationship with her earthly father, an attachment figure, that had caused her to be fearful of God the Father. She confessed that she had thought that she had known God the Father but realized that she really didn’t until the Holy Spirit used the scriptures to speak to her.
As I write this blog, I am aware that I have not rid myself of all my false images of God. Yet, I am praying that God will help me to trust God and not the images that I have established. It is my prayer that my trust in God will increase as I see more clearly the love of God, which the writer of Ephesians says is beyond our comprehension:
I pray that according to the wealth of his glory he will grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person, that Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith, so that, because you have been rooted and grounded in love, you will be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you will be filled up to all the fullness of God (Eph 3:16-19).
This is an invitation for you to join me in this prayer.
[1] Alexander McFarlane and Bessel van der Kolk, “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society,” Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, edited by Bessel A. van der Kolk, et al. (New York: Guilford, 1996), 26.
[2] McFarlane and van der Kolk, “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society,” 28.
[3] Annie, Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (NY: HarperCollins, 2007), 49, Kindle Edition.
[4] N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (NY: Harper One, 2016), 147.
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