The New Testament offers a wealth of images of God. God is not only like a forgiving father, but also like a mother hen longing for her straying offspring and a woman searching until she finds one lost coin. God in Christ is Lady Wisdom, divine Word, the Light of the...
The Bible does not limit God to masculine images. God as Father is not the only image in Scripture. Faithfulness to the complete biblical revelation leads us to include other images. Opening our minds to new ideas can be scary at first. Growing up I learned that God...
…images of God in language must not become idols. However hallowed by tradition, however enriching and suggestive, however profoundly they move us, our metaphors and names for God are not themselves God.
The real tragedy is that we see people as entities or merely as things. Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness. A spiritual myopia limits our vision to external accidents. We see men as Jews or Gentiles, Catholics or Protestants, Chinese or American,...
We image God in the music we make and perform. When the program is hit-or-miss, we show forth a God who lacks purpose and direction;…when our performance of music lacks vitality or artistic grace, we portray God as inert; when our musical choices revolve around taste...
There is even a growing tendency in the church to turn Jesus into a consumer item; from bumper stickers to Christian entertainment, we are finding ways to market our Lord. Our entire culture is oriented to hype, and unfortunately the church is becoming increasingly...
Although taking the risk of openness to new experiences with God can be scary, we will find the resulting growth in faith rewarding and exhilarating. The commandment against worshiping idols includes more than physical statues. We create an idol when we become set in...
I do not feel the need to see all of God at once, to comprehend God, as if I even could. It is enough for me to have a few clear images of how God is. So long as they resonate with Scripture and with my experience and so long as they produce in me the fruits of the...
The process of being conformed to the image of Christ takes place primarily at the points of our unlikeness to Christ’s image. God meets us there, in grace, offering us the forgiveness, the cleansing, the liberation, the healing we need to begin the journey toward our...
Imago dei, the image of God… We resemble God in our capacity to love, to reason, to feel, to relate to other creatures, to imagine, to plan, to create, to contemplate, and in many other ways. We are an image of God. A scratched-up one, badly damaged by sin, but the...