Ancient scripture famously says humans are made in god’s image. There are two accounts of this idea, and of creation itself, in the book we know today as Genesis, which was originally just a scroll, part of a collection of texts meant to tell the Israelite nation’s origin story. That story included, in part, the Israelite, monotheistic version of a polytheistic creation myth that circulated widely in the ancient context. One of the creation accounts in Genesis says that god made humankind in his image, but in the other account—fascinatingly—god says, let us make humankind in our image.
Singular or plural, masculine or feminine or nonbinary, this notion of being made in god’s image is deeply embedded in human consciousness, especially here in the United States, where even those who are not religious are likely familiar with the idea. Yet there’s a question at the heart of this concept that we never seem to reach.
How do we understand ourselves to be made in god’s image if our knowledge of god’s image is inherently limited?
Any conception we have of divine presence in the world must be imagined, something pulled like taffy from texts that emerged within a drastically different cultural matrix, ideas humans have struggled to fathom and express since our beginning. Whatever understanding we have of a transcendent reality beyond the visual realm is confined by our very humanness, our limitations of thinking and perception, our attempts to make sense of existence on this life-giving orb spinning in space.
Historically, we have been less comfortable acknowledging limitations of understanding in theological realms than in other spheres. We are confident confessing that we do not understand everything about space, for example, or time, which we happily leave to physicists, or cancer, which we hope doctors grasp more by the day. But when it comes to god, we have waged—and continue to wage—entire wars that pit one understanding of divine truth against another.
Whatever knowledge of spirit we have or hope to have is fundamentally constrained by our perspective, which is trapped within a singular vantage point rooted in our experience. It would be impossible for me to hear the word “god,” for example, without remaining connected in some way to my position as a white cis American woman who grew up among Biblical literalists and fundamentalist Christians in the South. No matter how much I learn or evolve, or nurture my own understanding of connective life force in the world, some core of my perception will always be shaped by those first encounters with religious language.
This is just as true for communities as it is for individuals. Every faith community has its own conception of god and relationship to tradition. Each institutional branch to which those communities are beholden carry even greater interpretive weight. These conceptions of god can be meaningful for faith communities, even supportive and life-giving, helpful in navigating all manner of challenges, as long as they avoid becoming convinced of their rightness in a way that leads to dogmatism and exclusion—or worse, outright abuse—of those with differing perspectives.
Just as faith communities have their own interpretations of the divine, so do nations. The exclusion of those with differing religious perspectives becomes even more dangerous when states are formed on religious conviction. Problematic intersections between religion and nationalism, militarism, and the war economy have manifested towards death and destruction throughout history under claims of divine providence, and we are seeing the perils of religious state policy on display yet again in the Israeli state’s ongoing and remorseless mass murder of innocent Palestinian people.1
Why, I must ask, does humanity continue to condone death and destruction in the name of that great mystery which remains essentially unknowable?
For me the essential unknowability of god is not a bad thing. Rather, the mystery is part of the sacredness, intrinsic to its appeal, key to the allure of a transcendent reality beyond ourselves. The great mystery is a universal connective thread to which we can draw near. Maybe, that mystery suggests, we can become engulfed by unconditional love that has revealed itself from everlasting to everlasting.2 Perhaps drawing near to that love will help us perpetuate it meaningfully onward in our communities.
But the state of not knowing produces discomfort in Western culture, which values reason and knowledge above most things, except maybe profit, except maybe power. In other cultures, uncertainty is more readily embraced. These differences are apparent in dominant religions; in the West, Christianity wrestles with divinity to claim as much definitive understanding as it can muster and has for centuries, and in the East, to make one comparison, Buddhists model what it can look like to embrace not knowing.
Author and Buddhist practitioner Andrew Holecek wrote that “Buddhists have long observed that we don’t see things the way they are; we see things the way we are. The 8th-century tantric master Padmasambhava said, ‘Changes in one’s train of thoughts produce corresponding changes in one’s conception of the external world. As a thing is viewed, so it appears.’”
This concept feels in dialogue with psychology, which enables therapists to help us see how personal experience affects what we perceive to be true of our relationships and community. It was Carl Jung that said “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.”
If Buddhists and psychologists are right, and things appear in the way they are viewed, then we can only see god in light of the way we are. Maybe we are made in god’s image, but can only see god from our image. Our view of the divine is circular and reciprocal, shaped by what we know of ourselves.
Maybe we are made in god’s image, but can only see god from our image.
This helps me understand pictures of god from the Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament. The god of the Hebrew Bible is violent and punishing—a judgmental god who condones mercilessly killing any group that threatens Israelite sovereignty. Biblical scholars reveal the concept of “herem” in the Hebrew Bible, which involves god telling the Israelites to destroy other peoples and cultures. The instruction is explicit, and god’s command to destroy a nation means total annihilation.
This vision of god does not align with ideals of divine love, liberation, and graciousness that I, and many of you, sense and seek. Since ancient scripture is so beloved, I find myself wondering how people might make sense of this narrative of extreme violence. Is such reconciliation worthwhile, or even possible? The god of the Hebrew Bible is embraced by Judaism and Christianity, although most faith communities do not spend time interrogating what accepting these pictures of a violent god means or what implications it has for religious practice today.
If we can only see god from our image, and what we don’t know is always shaped by what we do know, then it makes sense that the narrative crafted to tell the story of the Israelite nation would be rooted in what that nation knew of themselves. History and archeology tell us that many famous events presented in the Hebrew Bible did not actually happen; rather, they are legend intentionally crafted to tell the story of the Israelite nation and their god.3
What we don’t know is always shaped by what we do know.
Myth and legend are compelling, and through the power of storytelling, they often represent or illuminate some truth. In this case, the legends at hand are said by many to describe the one true god. But what, we must consider, is the truth actually represented by the Hebrew Bible? Is it the divinely ordained truth of god, as literalist traditions claim, or is it the truth as the humans writing the story could see it?
The answer, for me, is obvious. We project our own experience of the universe onto god, and ancient scribes of the Hebrew Bible were no different. Surely the people shaping the Bible’s Israelite narrative were encumbered by their particular vantage points—their understanding of themselves, their place in the world, and the actions they had seen taken for and against others. In that sense, and as history proves of the ancient Near East more generally, violence and punishment were undeniably part of the equation.
This explains why the ancient view of god was rooted in violence as a way of operating, and why nations formed on that god—Israel and the United States, to be specific—carry that legacy forward so unflinchingly today.
Fast-forwarding to the present, it is easy to see the thread that connects this harsh vision of god to modern Zionist claims that one child’s life is more valued by that god than another. This view, though derived from religious conviction, is undeniably reprehensible. It is this connecting thread that too many people fail to interrogate. This picture of an exclusionary, judgmental god is claimed by far-right Zionists, Israeli state policy makers, and the American Christians that back them as a permission slip for mass murder and genocide.
As people of conscience, it is up to us to tend to the suffering of all people. Not just those who align with our political motivations. We must cultivate hearts and conversations expansive enough to hear the cries of dying Palestinians alongside the cries of fearful Jews. One need not cancel the other.
If we do not interrogate systems that value one life over another and deliberately ignore the death and destruction of innocent people, who will?
We must recognize that like the scribes who wrote the Hebrew Bible, our view of god, and any nation’s view of god for that matter, is tangled in our own perceptions. For better or worse. If this is true, then every person’s conception of universal life force is a little different, varied and dynamic. It’s personal to their experience.
What is spirituality to you, and you and you, I would like to ask. What love and meaning has been revealed in your life to carry you through? When have the stars aligned in a way that made you say, this is fate? Many of us have divine notions, yet we look to imperfect texts and institutions to tell us what is true.
What is spirituality to you, and you and you, I would like to ask.
In the mystical tradition, seekers throughout history have trusted their own experience of god and believed in the wisdom they discovered by getting very quiet and going within themselves. Mystics are found in every faith, but in the Christian tradition, part of their history includes an intentional resistance of relying on the institutional church to mediate and control the relationship between humans and god.
This was particularly true in the Early Modern era, when well-known mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross framed mystical practice as both a path to intimate experience of god and a means of reforming the church. They wanted to resist and transform the church’s corruption, which included practices like asking the poor to buy their salvation and robbing them of what little resources they had. The church increased their own power by placing a number of intercessory layers between people and god, making god inaccessible without their aid.4
In contrast, the mystical way invited followers to go deep within themselves to encounter the spirit directly. Their meditative style embraced visions, poetry, and ecstasy. Above all, mysticism spawns journeys that are uniquely personal to each seeker. What is spirituality to you, and you and you, it asks.
Devoutly religious people may worry that mystical practice is unrooted in some way, that it fails to be grounded in the scripture they hold dear. But remarkably, throughout history, it was.
St. John of the Cross, the most famous Spanish mystic of the Early Modern period, was deeply involved with scripture. But he was concerned with experiencing the inner wisdom of biblical texts rather than the church’s interpretation of them. To do this, he engaged a form of meditative prayer which slowly takes humans beyond words and leads the soul into direct presence of divine love.
Through this style of meditation, John of the Cross was “in constant interaction with the Bible’s teaching” and committed to the mystical ideal that through contemplative experience, one is “able to realize ever more deeply the inner meaning of [god’s] revealing word.”5 To me, this approach seems like a wise way to experience any universal truth scripture might hold while also moving beyond constraints introduced by its human creators.
The constraints of the scribes who wrote ancient scripture are much like our own. Their notions of god reflect their notions of themselves, and so do ours. This circular exchange is further complicated and made more mysterious by the intrinsic unknowability of god.
The claim that god remains, on some level, intrinsically unknowable and mysterious might feel untethered, like it is lacking the institutional history and knowledge building upon which faith communities rely. Like it is a little bold and audacious. But that’s the point. When we free ourselves from institutional legacies of pain and power-mongering, and instead embrace a reality of divine love that is in many ways undefinable yet feels exquisitely present all the same, we embolden others to do the same.
When we free ourselves from institutional legacies of pain and power-mongering, and instead embrace a reality of divine love that is in many ways undefinable yet feels exquisitely present all the same, we embolden others to do the same.
Studying Christian theology at Yale has shown me that leaning into the mysteriousness of god is not actually untethered from tradition at all. In my first year of divinity school, I was excited and even relieved to discover that many of the great theologians from whom Christian tradition is derived wrote at one point or another that despite our best attempts to define divine presence in the world, god remains, and must remain, a mystery. They confess their inability to truly express god’s essence, even as they develop pages and pages of arguments attempting to prove theological points.
Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian who was arguably the most famous god-thinker of the twentieth century, was among them.6 In The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, contemporary theologian Trevor Hart describes Barth’s view:
God does not belong to the world of objects with which human apprehension and speech ordinarily have to do and to which they are fitted to pertain. God's reality transcends this realm in such a way that human knowing could never aspire to lay hold of it and render it into an ‘object’. God is beyond human classification, understanding and description.
Exploring Barth’s perspective further, theologian Ben Quash writes that Barth presented the unknowability of god as something god reveals to humanity, not merely something “postulated by the mind as it comes up against the limits of its own ignorance.”7 In other words, god’s unknowability is part of god’s essence.
Similar ideas have been foundational to my personal theology since elementary school—though they were less developed than Barth’s. When I was eight or nine, I remember wondering, and asking some friends, why we humans are so bold as to think we can put god in a box of our own making. That question stayed with me; assuming certainty made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now. How can we claim to understand god, I wonder, when we can barely understand ourselves?
There is an age-old answer to this that invites us to have faith in what is unseen.
Yet the strongest, most dynamic faith in what is unseen relies less on certainty and more on open-mindedness to what could be. Faith requires relinquishing rigid interpretations of complicated ancient texts and bringing more flexibility to our perception. If our divine notions are indeed circular, then perhaps better understanding god requires us to better understand ourselves.
We have proven ourselves time and again to be a violent species, and this is reflected in our conceptions of god. As a result, we find ourselves in a world in which the divine is being used to justify horrific acts. But the question remains: What god would want 12,000 Palestinians, 7,000 of whom were children, murdered by bombs in a single month? Only one of our own making.
If our divine notions are indeed circular, then perhaps better understanding god requires us to better understand ourselves.
When scripture offers in the creation story that god said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” an inherent pluralism in the definition of god is revealed.
That pluralism can function like a permission slip that invites humans to move beyond the binary and embrace more expansive visions of god and ourselves. It encourages us to abandon scarcity-driven frameworks of mine versus theirs. This picture of god invites us to embrace a universal life force that looks like boundless, mysterious potential.
Resting inside that potential, a more dynamic image of god might spark enough love to transcend humanity’s cycles of violence rather than perpetuate them. From this place, may we embody that transcendence ourselves, understanding we function in its image, opening our arms to a divine wisdom that embraces every nation and desires flourishing life for every person, regardless of the borders that surround them—even, and perhaps especially, on holy land.
This essay has been taking shape in my heart thread by thread for weeks. It was challenging to develop amidst the atrocities of current events. Thank you so much for reading; thank you for being here; thank you for giving the gift of your attention to these words. I would love to hear how this lands for you. Till next time, wishing you a joyful entry to the holiday season. Take care out there!
WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE is written by Lauren Maxwell. Can you help us grow? Send this to a friend and ask them to subscribe. Share it on Instagram and tag @lauren_only. If you enjoy this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you so much!