by Jason Lusk

Created on: March 26, 2008

When we interpret God's image, we're interpreting a fantasy. In other words, we interpret our imagination because, according to Scripture, God has no image.

Of the three main monotheistic traditions, only Christianity possesses paintings of God. There are representations of God overlooking the Garden of Eden, God in the heavens above a portrait of Christ, and many others.

Yet Scripture strictly forbids any attempt to show God's image. Jews and Muslims adhere to this out of the core belief that no image can contain God; that God can't be contained in the human imagination. From their point of view, this is an attempt to create God.

In Christian imagery, though, God is sometimes a benevolent and loving father. At other times, particularly in representations of the Exodus, God is a wrathful war-god who fights the Egyptians on behalf of the Hebrew.

There is a passage in the Old Testament that describes how Elijah hears thunder, but God isn't in the thunder; there is an earthquake and a fire, but God is in neither of those. He senses God in a quiet, harmless breeze. Therefore, Elijah ultimately finds God within, as a small still presence of comfort.

That summarizes the traditional Hebrew view of God; the Muslim viewpoint can be similarly summarized. According to the traditional teaching, God is a presence within us and simultaneously around us; before and after us.

Christianity, unlike Judaism, was marketed to the pagan nations of the world. Pagans often created physical representations of their deities, whether in paintings, statues, sculptures, drawings, what have you. And since Christianity adopted many pagan traditions as its own, such artwork that conveys God became part of the movement.

How we interpret God's image in modern society seems an uncertain question. (I can hear many people in my head saying, "I don't know really," in response to it.)

In America, we have many who claim a belief in the almighty, omniscient, omnipresent God. Yet it's obvious that we worship the dollar; and materialism in general. We worship human beings who are always in front of the camera but are just as human, and just as faulty, as the rest of us. (That's my definition of a celebrity.)

Ultimately, though, God is not supposed to have an image. According to Scripture, God is a presence, an invisible intelligence that we cannot fully comprehend.

However, our interpretation of that invisible presence has changed over time. Is it an all-knowing presence? Or a symbol of the potential we have within us?

It seems we're in another Axial Age, where there is no standard, and everyone's arguing that this is right or that is right. It'll be more interesting, I think, to see how we view the concept of God in another fifty or one hundred years.

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