Making God in Our Image?

As human beings, we’re prone to assign passions and feelings to God. We imagine God “getting mad,” with clenched fists and an accelerated heartbeat. Our brains, which produce neurotransmitters and other biochemicals, are adept at manufacturing these types of emotions. But this isn’t the case for God. Since God doesn’t have a body, he’s not governed by the rules of biology and physiology.

Let’s look at this from a different vantage point. Passages in the Bible assigning God human emotions reveal His patience with our limited intellect. In other words, God needs to “drop down to our level” to get the point across. “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Is 55:9).

“God is spirit” (Jn 4:24). He is the first cause of all things and does not change. “God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God – ‘the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable’ – with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 42).

These are important truths, particularly when we consider the Old Testament. The many stories of God’s wrath and anger in the Hebrew Scriptures can lead us to view God as a tyrant. But informed by Catholic tradition, we know Scripture has different levels of meaning. Since antiquity, four specific senses have been handed down as part of the deposit of faith: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, 115 – 117).

Therefore, many Fathers of the Church understood Old Testament narratives as moral exhortations. Specifically, the stories are meant to elicit interior conversion in the reader. In The Life of Moses by St. Gregory of Nyssa, he regards many passages from Exodus and Numbers as sources of profound spiritual lessons. For example, in Exodus Chapters 7 – 12, Pharoah’s heart was hardened and all the first-born in the land of Egypt were killed. This may lead us to perceive God as quite harsh. But St. Gregory insists a just God can’t be fully understood by a simplistic reading of the text. Rather, St. Gregory challenges us to recognize the narrative as an allegory contrasting sin and virtue.

So, if we look at it from the perspective of our own hardened hearts, what must we do to cut off the first roots of vice within our souls? Let’s not blame God for our own resistance to growing in virtue. Our time is better spent cultivating an interior life of prayer, not worrying about God’s providence.