As I read all of this, I could not help but think of Jesus’ words, “anyone who has seen me has seen the father” (John 14:9). Perhaps that is the real scandal of the Christian proposition, that Jesus truly was the living image of the invisible God, the transcendent in immanent form, the unknowable in sandals.

As I personally seek healing for my distorted images of God, and they have been legion, it is with Jesus I find the possibilities of truth, not in goddess worship, convenient recasting of God in my own image, but in faith in the one who loves me and gives himself for me in the present moments of life.

This article is about how our images of God become distorted by the failures of human parents and early caregivers. The fact that we create imagery related to terms like “father” is not in question. It’s part and parcel of God’s gift of language and symbol. The fact that we must overcome deeply ingrained negative connotations attached to certain words, words that may separate us unnecessarily from the real, holy God, is indisputable.

Mankind is fallen. God is not. We need to learn to tell the difference, and articles like this one can be key to that effort. Thanks, Ms. Ryan!

I am the son of missionaries and ministers and spent much of my early life in an hyper evangelical/charismatic milieu. Starting at age 15 I spent years in Jesus People communes, engaged in street evangelism and waited for the Second Coming. I even spent time in the notorious Children of God cult. Later, in the early 1970’s, I was a core member of one of the seminal charismatic churches and went on to attend a conservative Bible School. I am no stranger to the best and worst of this tradition.

Eventually the doubts about it all – philosophical, metaphysical and moral – overwhelmed the strong conditioning and over a period of several years I made a slow but final break with this entire tradition and culture. That was 30 years ago. I went on to study philosophy, literature and comparative religions and seriously engaged in spiritual practices from diverse traditions around the world – from Buddhism to Sufism to Shamanism. I also spent years in personal growth and healing therapies and workshops. I was so so hungry for to learn and understand what was outside the bubble of Christian fundamentalism – all that had been labelled dark and demonic – and to find something authentic in myself. My subsequent life has not always been easy but I have never, ever regretted claiming freedom from dogma and external authority. I haven’t followed any particular spiritual tradition for many years preferring, I suppose, to cultivate a spirituality that arises from my own direct experience of life and truth.

I am only looking back now because I have recently reconnected with people from this early life – some who became Christians through my own witnessing. Many of them are still Christians and some have gone on to become ministers and leaders in charismatic and vineyard churches. I am also writing extensively about that time as part of a larger autobiography and so have reacquainted myself with the curious mindset that I once accepted as unquestionably right. I have also spent considerable time catching up on developments within this culture over the past 30 years.

While I see many positive developments within the church and, in some quarters, an overdue embrace of insights derived from depth psychology and sociology, that would have been unthinkable when I was in Bible School, I have to say that the whole exercise of ‘reframing’ evangelical Christianity to reflect a more nuanced, holistic and restorative spirituality strikes me as fundamentally misguided and misleading.

It is fundamentally misguided and misleading because the premise, the foundation itself is the problem. While it is certainly possible to selectively quote scripture to reinforce certain images of God – positive or negative – a commitment to seeing the Bible itself as a pure and comprehensive revelation of truth means that on has to take it all – the good the bad and the ugly. They are all there. You have selected passages that affirm the positive image of God that you wish to reinforce but there are any number of passages that support a much more horrifying vision of Yahweh. The negative images of God you are trying so hard to counteract did not spring up out of thin air; they are found in the Bible itself and no amount of creative spin can remove them. As long as the Bible is upheld as the inerrant Word of God – rather than a very human document that reflects the wide range of human experience aspiration and needs of the times – such images will endure.

My point is this. Why relate to God in terms of images at all? It is all to clear to me that all these images are mostly projections – all too human ones. God is image only where the Ground, the Source of Being and Awareness, intersects with human perception – and the needs and demands of human culture and conditioning.

It is not enough simply to free oneself of negative images of God – one needs to be free of all images of God. A focus on the positive will invariably be counter balanced with a re-energization of the negative. It is the law of balance, of the dialectic between opposites. Church history, indeed all of human history, is full of these pendulum swings.

Images of God – images of anything – are powerful and useful but need to be seen for what they are – relative, changing mirrors of the human psyche. Christianity has capitalized on a certain set of images and elevated them to Absolute status – and proceeded to enforce them on others – by persuasion, example and even violence.

In my understanding the truest, most redemptive thing to do is to stop this attempt at defining God and, instead, humbly open to the fullness, the richness, the trueness of the Presence that can be found in every moment, in everyone and everything ‘for in This we live and move and have our Being’.