The God of the Gut: Examining the Role God Image Plays in Spiritual Formation

Abstract

There is a significant gap in prevailing theories of change and resulting discipleship methodologies. This gap is the result of the dominate assumption that people are primarily thinking and doing beings and that spiritual maturity is largely a function of biblical knowledge and ministry activism. This way of being does not account for a person’s interior life, specifically the aspect of an internal working model which drives how a person experiences or emotionally relates to God, something known as a ‘‘god image.’’ This article addresses the critical factors that play into how each person develops a representation of God, and how wounded god images function as a ceiling of sorts that keep so many from substantive and deep formation into Christlikeness through the Spirit. After exploring the role a person’s god image plays in the process of spiritual formation, the article will examine how the Spirit is at work in the deepest parts of human persons to open them up to experience the love of God in new, transformative ways.

Introduction

Three out of every four people have, to varying degrees, some sort of dysfunctional experiential/emotional relationship with God. ¹ In September of 2006, Baylor University published the findings from a religious survey they took in partnership with Gallup in a report titled “American Piety in the 21st Century.” ² The survey had over 1,700 respondents who answered nearly 400 questions that dealt with a variety of topics on religion in America. Of note for this article is the finding on the character and behavior of God. Participants were asked 29 questions that revealed the respondent’s belief about God along a scale of God’s engagement level (y-axis) and God’s anger level (x-axis), which fit into four different categories: (1) Benevolent God, (2) Authoritarian God, (3) Distant God, and (4) Critical God. Interestingly, 71.8% of respondents’ belief about God fit into a non-benevolent category. Over 30% believe God is highly engaged and highly angry (authoritative), 24.4% believe God’s engagement is low, as is his anger (distant), and 16% believe God is not very engaged but is highly angry (critical). Twenty-three percent of Americans believe God is highly engaged and not angry (benevolent). And, only 5.2% denied God’s existence. According to this survey, 77% of people, or three out of every four people, believe God is angry, distant, or critical, or they reject God altogether.

In the summer of 2014 I began a personal journey of grappling with the dysfunction of my own experiential/emotional relationship with God. This journey has taken me into the worlds of psychoanalysis, neurobiology, attachment theory, biblical studies, the ancient Near East, spiritual formation, and the everyday practicalities of discipleship to Jesus, all in an attempt to understand why so many (including myself) struggle to experience the love of God in our day-to-day lives. Sometimes it is easy to read statistics like the ones above as just another survey that has some interesting insight, but doesn’t really move the needle much. These are symbols and digits printed on a page. However, my personal research has borne out a very different reality. As part of my doctoral work, I developed an assessment designed to expose the unique experiential/emotional relationship each person has with God, then took a focus group from a large evangelical church in Dallas through this assessment. The statistics held: three out of four had an insecure relationship with God. But these weren’t symbols and digits on a page. They were people bearing their souls, looking for solutions and answers to questions they knew were real but did not quite know how to ask. We were on a journey of discovery together to find out what the Spirit was doing in and among us to heal serious deficiencies in our own formation. After all, if the Baylor study is touching on what Richard Lovelace calls a “sanctification gap,” ³ and if my own research is even remotely close to what is actually real, then we must admit that while many people (leaders, teachers, and lay alike) may affirm an orthodox nominal creed, the vast majority do not substantively experience the reality to which that creed attests. We may adhere to an orthopraxis that manifests in various external activities like study, prayer, and evangelism, but if we actually experience God primarily as angry, distant, or critical, we are in danger of warranting Isaiah’s (and later Jesus’) assessment: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Is 29:13, Matt 15:8, Mk 7:6).

We are at an inflection point in the life of the Church with crises at every turn: leader failure, moral ambiguity, division in almost every sphere, societal pressure, the frenetic pace of life, global instability, technological advances outpacing our ability to regulate, economic challenges, just to name a few. What the world needs more than anything right now is substance and depth . . . people who don’t merely talk about the transformational love of God, but embody it deeply, and bear witness to a broken world that Jesus is the King. The situation is serious, but I have ample reason for hope. I believe God is inviting us further up and further in, and is beginning to reveal a way forward for his people not only to affirm the love of God, but experience it in profound ways. I know this has been my story and the stories of many others I’ve had the privilege of journeying with, a story that began in a disoriented pool of tears as my subconscious, implicit belief about God was shoved in my face.

Into the World of Psychoanalysis

For me, the road to my current understanding of discipleship and spiritual formation began with an exercise in June of 2014. Betsy Barber, Associate Director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Biola University, was guest lecturing at the second summer intensive for my doctoral cohort. She gently guided us through an exercise that seemed innocuous, but blindsided me and left my soul filleted out on the table in a tangled mess of emotion. I must have scared her because immediately following the exercise I beelined it for her to figure out what she had just done to me, and how. She graciously recommended a resource that I immediately purchased and began to delve into. Of all the people on the face of the planet, I was the last one I would have expected to dive into the world of psychoanalysis. But so I did.

It took me a few years reading, interviewing, and grappling with the relevant material to come to the following three very simple and basic understandings. First, we live in a world of objects. I am not now speaking of objects in a Freudian sense of the target of desire, but of the material, corporeal, external world separate from the psychic, interior world. In this sense, everything is an object: the lectern is an object, the door is an object, your chair is an object, even you are an object, and all the parts that make up “you.” The external world is a world of objects, the cosmos itself is an object, and these external objects are real. For the purposes of this article we will call the real world of external objects, “A.”

Second, any time we have an objectively real experience with an external object, whether consciously or subconsciously, a complex process occurs that takes into account environment, psychological context, physical interaction, emotional status, motivation, desire, etc. and not only of our self-perception in the moment of experience, but also the perception of the external object related to, if it is sentient. ⁴ From this process the mind forms a mental schema, or model of that object and the self’s relationship to it. This is called an internal object, or object representation. Our entire mental perception of ourselves and the world we live in exists in representations. ⁵ This does not mean the external world is made up, like some subjective reality we create in our minds that doesn’t actually exist. It does mean the way we construct our interior world is. This representation forming is a dialectic process of internalizing external objects into a “mental map” we then use to interact with the external world. As Ana-María Rizzuto wrote: “There is no representation without object and no object without representation . . . we create the objects we find.” ⁶ For the purposes of this article we will call these created internal object representations, “B.”

Third, the only way we are ever able to interact with the external world of objects is through the internal object representations we construct as part of our mental schema, and this unique relationship between the self and internal and external objects is called object relations, or what we will call “C.” As we encounter the external objects of the real world, the experience of those encounters (either positive or negative or neutral) shape our representations which then affects the nature of our relationship with those objects. If the chair you’re sitting in (A) collapses in a room full of people, that experience will shift your internal representation (B) of the external object, which will shift the way you relate (C) to all chairs, and perhaps significantly affect your relationship with chairs depending on the severity of your embodied experience.

Before moving on, a critical point must be made that may seem overly obvious in concept but certainly is not in practice: our internal object representations are not the real, external objects themselves. In other words, B is not A. That point cannot be stressed enough, and will be given attention below. But, for now, a cursory look at the world of objects, object representations, and object relations (which took me years to process) ends up being as simple as A, B, C.

A. Objects

B. Object Representations

C. Object Relations

From Psychoanalysis to Neurobiology

Interestingly, as I was wandering around in the dimly lit world of psychoanalysis, a pressing question continued to nag at me until I finally decided it was worth addressing. If the interior world of the mind is constructed through representations based on embodied experiences with real, external objects, how does that real, embodied information get encoded so that the mind can use it? After all, we don’t have “fake” experiences. The external world is real, and we as material beings in that real world interact with the real world every day through a process that is biological. In other words, what is the raw neural data we are drawing from to form our representations, what kind of data is it, and how does it get processed? To answer this, I had to look at how the brain works.

A helpful way to think about the brain is to imagine a train with its engine, freight car, and caboose. The engine is the spinal cord, brain stem, and cerebellum, or what is sometimes called the lower reptilian complex. It is the first receptor of signals being sent all throughout the body and is responsible not only for our physiological homeostasis but also the instinctive responses such as fight, flight, or freeze. ⁷ The freight car is the limbic system, which is made of two primary parts: (1) the amygdala, which receives information from the brainstem (engine) and translates it into emotion that puts the person into a heightened state of awareness, and (2) the hippocampus, which synthesizes neural information and translates it into the memories that form our personal narratives (it puts the puzzle pieces together). ⁸ Bessel van der Kolk describes the lower reptilian complex coupled with the limbic system the “emotional brain,” given the visceral nature of its processes. It is the foundation of every decision we make in life. Finally, the caboose is the neocortex, which consists of various outer lobes that control the five senses and motor function, and most importantly, the prefrontal cortex (PFC). If information is integrated properly, the PFC takes what it is given and works to assign it meaning. It gives us the capacity for abstract thought, awareness of self, and moral judgments. It allows us to think about what we’re thinking about, make informed decisions, and even “play” with the information to discover new or deeper meaning.

During the gestational period of a healthy human, the brain develops from the bottom up, from the lower reptilian complex to the limbic system to the neocortex. Not surprisingly, this is also how it functions. Just as a train is driven by the engine, information from the nervous system all throughout the body is delivered via the spinal cord to the brainstem and cerebellum, which passes it along to the limbic system, which sends it to the neocortex to try and make sense out of it. We are a bottom-up kind of creature. ⁹

Also during the gestation period of a healthy human, the right side of the brain, the hemisphere responsible for integrating sensory data, processing and regulating emotions, non-verbal communication and image mapping, develops first. In fact, the left side of the brain, the hemisphere responsible for logic, speech, and linear thought, does not substantively “turn on” until age 2, and even then it consistently lags behind the right hemisphere process, so the experiences we have and the embodied indicators (emotions) those experiences produce are constantly dragging our logical left brain behind them. The left brain is literally constantly following behind the right brain trying to figure out what’s actually happening. ¹⁰ Just as the brain develops from bottom to top, the cortical hemispheres develop from right to left, which, not surprisingly, is how they function. ¹¹ We are right-to-left kind of thinkers. Bottom-up, right-left kind of experiential thinking creatures.

As mentioned above, one of the primary functions of our brains is to “map” the world we live in, something that results in what is known as autobiographical memory, which is the combination of both implicit and explicit memory. ¹² Implicit memory forms through repeated experience, which fires neurons that begin to wire together and form a neural pathway that subsequent firings are more likely to take, like ruts in a road. ¹³ During the first few years of life these neural pathways shaped from experiences are the initial raw data we draw from to begin constructing our internal representations of the external world. And here is a critical point: implicit memory does not require conscious awareness for it to be recalled and used. When an experience triggers our implicit memory, the representations we’ve created will activate and, without us knowing it, cause us to relive a past experience as if it is our present reality. ¹⁴ As the brain develops, so will our ability to take all of this information and make logical sense out of it, but our left-brain logical processing will always trail behind the implicit map of our holistic, affective, experiential knowledge. “No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.” ¹⁵

When the left hemisphere does finally activate, we begin to take encoded memory and place it in a linear, coherent narrative able to be consciously recalled. This is known as “explicit memory,” the type of memory most people think of when they hear the word “memory.” The part of the limbic system responsible for explicit memory is the hippocampus, which acts as a kind of puzzle piece assembler, taking the raw data of experiential implicit memory and integrating it into both semantic memory, or factual story (i.e. it is true the sky is blue), and episodic memory, or the recall of past events (i.e. I got a race car track for Christmas one year). ¹⁶ When the hippocampus is functioning unimpeded, this physiological process extends implicit neural fibers throughout the cortical region and connects them to one another, filling in the gaps where needed. ¹⁷

But the hippocampus does not always function unimpeded. If someone is formed in an environment where repeated experiences are negative or even dangerous, instead of hippocampal integration, the amygdala triggers the adrenal glands, which release the hormone cortisol into the body as a defense mechanism against the dangers of the environment. If the amygdala is consistently firing, it degrades the ability of the hippocampus to assemble information properly. Instead of completing the puzzle, the suppressed hippocampal activity ends up leaving large gaps in the information passed on to the right brain. If the body of implicit memory built over time is largely negative, the gaps in information will be filled with powerful memories driven by a fight, flight, freeze response. In this case, negative experiences can get “stuck” in the right side of the brain because there is not enough integrated information to pass along to the left side of the brain. One might have an awareness that something is off, but is largely unaware of why and will struggle to assign language to this awareness, which keeps it from integration into a coherent narrative. Until these negative experiences are brought to the level of awareness in a safe environment that allows the amygdala to relax and encourages hippocampal activity, these powerful experiences will color all subsequent data, filling gaps with unrelated negative emotion.

As a recent father for the fourth time, I am watching my youngest child use her God-given hardware to map her experiences in a holistic, affective way, and lay the foundation from which she will experience and make sense of her world. ¹⁸ She is seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling objects for the first time. In time she will assign verbal symbols (names) to those objects and experiences and naturally organize them into a lens she will view the world through. The large object who feeds and nurtures her will become “mother,” and the even larger object who supports and protects her will become “father.” Just like all humans, she is hardwired with a fundamental need and enormous capacity to attach to these two objects. ¹⁹

We Are Made to Attach

In 1978, Mary Ainsworth published a book titled Patterns of Attachment, which examined the results of a laboratory experiment called the “strange situation.” ²⁰ Using this instrument, researchers observed a child’s interaction with its mother and classified the patterns of behavior into three categories: Secure, Insecure-Ambivalent, and Insecure-Avoidant. Eight years later another study using the strange situation procedure identified a previously unclassified group of infants as Insecure-Disorganized, a group who generally lived in high-risk environments or abusive situations. ²¹

The results of this study showed that if a child’s fundamental, primal questions (“Am I safe?” “Am I secure?” “Am I seen?” “Do I have agency?” “Am I valued?”) are answered good enough (sufficient and timely), she will be free to explore and play, promoting healthy neural development and allowing hippocampal activity to integrate information from the brain stem and send clear signals to the cortical region, which passes through the relaxed right hemisphere to the left in order to translate those signals into coherent thoughts. This secure attachment allows the brain not only to put episodic memory into a cohesive narrative, it also fills the gaps with positive implicit memories, shaping an autobiographical memory that promotes well-being. The child does not simply cognitively know she is secure, she has the experience of being secure. It is not enough to reassure her she is safe and secure; she must actually experience safety and security. Secure attachment is not possible until this occurs.

On the other hand, if a child’s fundamental, primal questions either are not answered, or are not answered well enough, the stress of the insecure environment consistently activates the amygdala, which strains the function of the hippocampus and hinders healthy neural development. When explicit memory begins to function, the child’s ability to integrate subcortical information through the hippocampus in order to create a cohesive narrative is diminished. Some episodic memories are present, along with massive amounts of implicit memory, but the child cannot connect or make sense of them. ²² They remain unassembled pieces, unable to fit into a linear, organized story that has a discernible past, present, and anticipated future. ²³ Instead, these implicit and explicit memories, when triggered, flood the mind as if the experience recalled is actually happening in the present.

Attachment patterns have shown to be generally stable from infancy to adulthood if the environment remains the same with the primary caregiver, especially the mother. ²⁴ A 2014 study in the UK showed about 60% of the population experienced a secure attachment with their parent(s), while 40% did not, suggesting between a third to half of the population is in a disadvantaged position to relate well with themselves, others, and the world they occupy. ²⁵ In my experience, the percentage of insecurely attached individuals is actually higher. Their literal, biological, neurological development has been impaired. This does not mean they can’t form positive relational patterns and securely attach, but it does mean they will have more difficulty doing so to varying degrees depending on the severity of their insecure attachment. This brings us to the critical question for this article: If malformed biological hardware makes it objectively more difficult for someone to form a meaningful, substantive relationship with someone he can see, how much more difficult to relate to someone he can’t see?

The God Representation

As we move through this material, my daughter previously mentioned continues to come to mind. All of this is very present to me because I am watching her live it. She is experiencing reality, forming object representations, and is starting to assign verbal symbols (language) to her objects as the left side of her brain becomes active. In a few short years my daughter will have enough experiences and memories to form a representation of herself, representations of authority figures, siblings, friends, and her entire social context. Those representations will exist in the broader context of culture, gender, economic and education status, along with personal, familial, communal, and cultural expectations. ²⁶

In the context of these representations, her environment, and early formative experiences, she will hear of an unseen person who created the world and rules over it. She will begin to construct and then assign the English word “God” to this unseen object, and will embark on a life-long journey of interacting with her own personal god representation. For clarity’s sake I will use a lower-case “g” when discussing the god representation, primarily to distinguish the individual’s subjective inner representation from the actual objective Reality who is God, or as I like to say, “God Actual.” ²⁷ A person’s god representation (B) is not God Actual (A).

While the god representation consists of a myriad of complex processes from a multitude of sources, two categories of this unique representation must be delineated. As mentioned above, the neural processes that express themselves as memory have both an explicit and implicit quality to them. It is these that combine to form an object representation. When applied to the god representation, I will follow Rizzuto and use the terms “god concept” to refer to a person’s more explicit, conscious, intellectual belief about God, and “god image” to refer to his more implicit, often subconscious, emotional “God of the Gut.” ²⁸

We have already established the fact we are bottom-up, right-left kind of experiential thinking creatures whose explicit, conscious reasoning always follows our implicit, affective experience. Thus (and it is difficult to overstate this), in the process of belief our implicit, subconscious, emotional god image (or “God of the Gut”) is primary while our explicit, conscious, rational god concept is secondary. In other words, our god concept is always trailing behind our god image, and when there is a difference between the two (there always is to some degree), the god image wins out every time. This is not just a psychological description; it is a biological reality. Rizzuto describes this distinction and its implications well, so allow me to quote her at length:

It is important to clarify the conceptual and emotional differences between the concept of God and the images of God which, combined in multiple forms, produce the prevailing God representation in a given individual at a given time. The concept of God is fabricated mostly at the level of secondary-process thinking. This is the God of the theologians, the God whose existence or nonexistence is debated by metaphysical reasoning. But this God leaves us cold. The philosophers and mystics know this better than anybody else. This God is only the result of rigorous thinking about causality or philosophical premises. Even someone who believes intellectually that there must be a God may feel no inclination to accept him unless images of previous interpersonal experience have fleshed out the concept with multiple images that can now coalesce in a representation that he can accept emotionally (emphasis mine). ²⁹

In order to understand how one comes to accept or reject his personal god representation, we must recognize it is not a static, unchanging schema. Instead, god representations exist on a spectrum of health from malformed and even dangerous to nourishing and transformative. It moves along this spectrum in both directions depending on the individual, situation, and life stage in a journey from discovery to maturity. But each god representation is born in, built on, and continues to be shaped by the foundation already formed by interactions with the dominant objects in the formative years, and none more significant than our parents.

A child first and primarily searches for answers to its primal questions in its most powerful attachment environment. If the child’s parents answer those questions good enough, he will begin to securely attach to his primary attachment figure(s), his brain will relax, and he will begin to play, creating what is known as transitional space, or the illusory place between the interior and exterior world. This space allows the child psychologically to move toward, and then carefully into, the real world. In this transitional space the child passes out of the self-referential world of “me” into the scary world of “not me.” However, if the answer to the child’s questions is not good enough, the stress signals of the amygdala suppress the brain’s ability to relax and play, which keeps the child from moving into transitional space. Instead of using his god representation as a vehicle to an actual encounter with God, he is content to remain in the self-contained narcissism of infancy. ³⁰ As James Jones says, “What is important here is not an object but a capacity for experience and perhaps one’s [god representation] is not discarded because it is the carrier of that capacity par excellence.” ³¹

For far too many, this transitional space which is so vital to a substantive encounter with God is significantly smaller and less stable because basic human questions are not adequately answered. They are kept from this transitional space to varying degrees because the path to reality has been obstructed. Instead of learning to move toward, and then into God, their neural wiring from negative experiences or trauma in attachment environments prompts them to employ defensive maneuvers that push them merely to look at God instead of move toward him. They find themselves stuck in a world of “me,” and resolve to form a god representation either in their own image or the image of the most significant attachment relationship. ³² It is widely accepted that the pattern of relating formed in the first attachment environment lays the implicit foundation for a person’s later god image. ³³ While a person’s relationship with their god representation can and should change during the lifespan, it resists change for the most part, so if it does shift it does only through strong enough disorientation (life transition, loss of employment, death of a loved one, loss of a relationship, marriage, etc.). The attachment pattern formed in childhood is remarkably stable over time. ³⁴

Discipleship Methods and God Image

So what does all of this have to do with spiritual formation into Christlikeness? Quite a bit, actually. In order for substantive spiritual transformation to occur, the god representation must be able to change and then remain malleable . . . it must shift and change over the course of its developmental life cycle in order to move past wounds and malformation toward God Actual, the external person who exists whether you believe in him or not. ³⁵ Understanding the changing nature of a god representation is an essential aspect of discipleship and spiritual formation. It is not enough merely to teach a set of propositions about “God” or lead people through a series of focused disciplines, and we definitely cannot assume any given god representation is healthy enough not to sabotage efforts to shepherd people along the way. Two people chatting about God over a cup of coffee are almost certainly not talking about the same god, even though they use similar terminology and cognitively affirm the same doctrines. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, “we can no longer talk about God in general when dealing with the concept in psychoanalytic terms. We must specify whose God we are talking about, at what particular moment in that person’s life, in what constellation of objects, and in what experience of self as context.” ³⁶ If we are to assume anything in a discipleship relationship it is that no two god representations are the same. “There are as many shapes for this creature of ours as there are human beings.” ³⁷

Now back to our opening statistics. Considering a third to half of the population is insecurely attached, making them biologically susceptible to a malformed god image, and three of every four Americans’ primary view of God is not benevolent, there is little doubt the general health of the average churchgoer’s god image is not good. Given the results of my own research into the lives of 85 church members and leaders alike, this is hardly surprising. If the message people receive (intended or not) from religious authorities or institutions is that God is an angry deity who must be appeased, or a powerful but distant God who is largely unavailable because he is “up there” or has better things to do, or demands that we “get it right,” this only serves to reinforce the personal narrative formed out of an insecure environment with insecure attachment figures. ³⁸

As we have already seen, any given god representation is only a representation (B), unique to its individual creator. It is not God Actual (A). While some aspects of any given god representation may be accurate, much of it simply does not correspond to the actual objective Reality who is God. Some of this can be rectified by biblical and theological training, but cultivating the secondary, conscious god concept can do very little to reform a primary, pre-conscious, subconscious malformed god image, and can actually contribute to the angst many Christians experience. The more developed a person’s god concept, the greater the realization no human measures up to God, nor can we achieve in the natural self the life intended for us. The more sophisticated our theology, the greater we know what is right and the more keenly aware we are that we fail to do it. If our god image is malformed we will lack the functional trust that God is good, something that only comes through experience. For the Christian, this almost inevitably manifests itself in moral behavior as a coping strategy to avoid God. In my pastoral experience, many people will use their god concept to hide from their god image. As John Coe points out:

[Moral behavior] is the most effective human strategy to hide from God. To say the same, moralism – doing the right thing, being good or even “spiritual” in the contemporary and secular use of the term – is probably the most common human solution and seemingly effective way to avoid dealing with the problem of sin, shame, and guilt before God. From the ancient sages to Aristotle to the modern moralist, the project of morality and the claim that “I am good, I am moral” has been the most used defense as a way to hide from God and the need for a Savior. ³⁹

As Rizzuto points out, even if someone’s god concept allows him to accept intellectually a set of propositions about God, this does not necessarily mean the person can, or will emotionally accept his god image. ⁴⁰ The person may be convinced of the claims of Christianity but have such a distorted internal working model due to sin in general, the brokenness of parents and other seminal figures, harmful formative experiences, unmet expectations, woundedness, etc., that his god image keeps him from emotionally accepting the actual, personal, relational Reality who is God. ⁴¹

To varying degrees this is true of all believers. We believe in God to the extent that we are capable of accepting both intellectually and emotionally what God has revealed about himself. The malformed areas of our lives that keep us from accepting God emotionally (even if we intellectually concede) are the parts of us that do not believe. We are simultaneously believing and unbelieving. This brings us to the central point: people only progress in discipleship or mature as disciples as far as the health of their god image allows them to go. Their god image serves as a “ceiling” of sorts. The more aligned their god image is to God Actual the more open they will be to his Spirit’s work in their lives and the less they will resist him. They will not simply acknowledge the theological truth that God is love; they will actually experience the love of God. In the same way, the more distorted their god image is to God Actual the more they will fight him, believing him to be something he is not, regardless of how much doctrinal knowledge or religious activity is present in their lives. ⁴²

Unfortunately, the prevailing discipleship models in the Church today either barely consider the role of a god image in spiritual formation, or totally ignore it, or don’t even know it exists in the first place. I didn’t know anything about it and I had two theological degrees from reputable institutions. Even if an allusion is made to some sort of inner life, standard discipleship models or curriculums place such an emphasis on obedience to biblical imperatives that it drowns out any substantive attention that may otherwise be given it. The focus of discipleship is commonly looking at a two-dimensional God, dissecting and examining him, and formulating a workable doctrinal system. We love God and are devoted to him, but for us God, more often than not, is a set of propositional statements to be affirmed, sought after in the Christian Scriptures, and fought for in culture. People are instructed to adhere to biblical imperatives and basic spiritual disciplines under the assumption this will make them grow, revealing a formulaic biblical imperatives + personal discipline = spiritual transformation approach to the complex process of holistic discipleship to Jesus. It’s almost as if our theory of changes holds to an anthropology of humans as “brains on a stick.” ⁴³ This unexamined, reductionist view of discipleship sets many Christians up to fail, and does harm to others in their wake. Pete Scazzero writes:

The spirituality of most current discipleship models often only adds an additional protective layer against people growing up emotionally. Because people are having real, and helpful, spiritual experiences in certain areas of their lives—such as worship, prayer, Bible studies, and fellowship—they mistakenly believe they are doing fine, even if their relational life and interior world is not in order. This apparent “progress” then provides a spiritual reason for not doing the hard work of maturing. They are deceived. ⁴⁴

Given what we have covered, it would be laughable if it were not so tragic to think we can simply help those with distorted god images by imploring them to affirm a set of doctrinal propositions, behave in certain ways externally, remain in good standing with the community, and expect substantive transformation in their lives, when the “god” they are interacting with is a distant, unconcerned, critical, authoritative, angry, vindictive deity who constantly needs to be appeased. Expecting someone to love this “god” simply because the Scriptures say to is unrealistic. For far too many, the expectation to love and obey God creates a strong internal angst. They will think, I need to love and obey God, something commended in the context of a church or religious institution, but will simultaneously feel, I do not love God and I do not trust him, because the “god” he is relating to looks more like his abusive, authoritative dad than a loving father.

The health of any given god image is the decisive point in the process of spiritual formation, the point we are suspiciously oblivious to in most of our discipleship efforts. But the Spirit is working in spite of the unintended consequences of our best intentions. Too often we think we are on the front lines of a great cosmic battle for the world, either forgetting or not understanding to begin with that the cosmic battle is for us . . . we’re not on the battleground, we are the battleground. Misguided, we cram people’s brains and calendars full of information and activity to push them onward as Christian soldiers, only to leave them woefully ill-equipped for what is needed most. Disciples of Jesus don’t primarily need the right information . . . in fact, it is possible to give people the right information and for them never to be substantively formed in Christ. As Tozer wrote: “Compared with our actual thoughts about [God], our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is.” ⁴⁵ Or as a friend of mine likes to say, “Never underestimate the inability of information to change people.”

The primary aim of our discipleship methodologies should be to help people unearth their god images. Until the disciple’s god image is exposed and healed, any subsequent effort will ultimately not achieve the desired end “to present everyone fully mature in Christ” (Col 1:28). This is where the Spirit is primarily at work, and if we are to join him in his work then we must be about this, too. I am not criticizing discipleship curriculums or methods. They serve their purpose in the right contexts for specific needs in various stages of development. However, I am criticizing the assumption that these models of discipleship are sufficient for internal, holistic spiritual formation into Christlikeness. In order for this to occur, a disciple’s god image must be transformed. The disciple cannot merely say he loves and trusts God, the love of God must be his emotional experience. Until this occurs, secure attachment to God is simply not possible. And God is the Attachment Figure. ⁴⁶

Healing the “God of the Gut”

We have already seen how our god representations accurately portray God in some ways, but fall short in a myriad of others. This should not make us nervous, but should open up in us hopeful anticipation of what the Spirit is doing to correct our false images to show us a more accurate portrayal of the living God. Austin Farrer called this the “dialectic of images,” or “a method that keeps the uniqueness of God and the limits of human thought ever before us, so that we are reminded that we can indeed know true things about God but at the same time are deterred from identifying the images with God.” ⁴⁷ The images we, by necessity as limited creatures, must hold of God are so insufficient we must remain in a posture of humility, dependent on the Spirit to keep us from image calcification as he forges in us new images that correspond to God Actual in deeper and deeper ways:

The promise of God dealing with us through grace can be set before us in nothing but images, for we have not yet experienced the reality. When we proceed to live the promises out, the images are crucified by the reality, slowly and progressively, never completely and not always without pain – yet the reality is better than the images. Jesus Christ clothed himself in all the images of messianic promise and, in living them out, crucified them, but the crucified reality is better than the figures of prophecy. This is very God and life eternal, whereby the children of God are delivered from idols. ⁴⁸

Encountering a new god image is repeating the experiential, bottom-up neurological process that occurs simultaneously with focal-subsidiary integration and we see or experience parts of God we’ve never seen or experienced before, something that literally creates new neural pathways in the brain and allows us to experience a new way of knowing. We realize our previous image was incorrect in certain ways and accurate in others and we integrate the accurate parts into our new image while the false aspects of our previous image fall away. This iconoclasm occurs during periods of disorientation, followed by the reorientation of the new god image closer to the Reality. In the disorientation, a critical shift occurs: we stop looking to our doctrine and calling it God, and begin looking from our doctrine to God Actual. ⁴⁹ For people used to being in a position of control over their doctrinal interpretations (and thus in control over their god), this disorienting eureka moment puts us into a vulnerable position and opens us up to receive something we were previously not in a position to receive. Here we come to realize a new way of knowing, a relational knowing, “the kind of knowing that is the knowing by one person of another . . . [something] that changes everything about how we see the world.” ⁵⁰ If we respond rightly in seasons of disorientation we stop asking, “Do you believe what I believe?” and begin asking, “Do you see who I see?” To be clear, we cannot make this happen in any real sense of that word. As Todd Hall says, there is “something here that must come directly from God. We can foster it, facilitate it, encourage it, and incarnate it to some extent, but ultimately, this is where we tread on sacred ground.” ⁵¹

Our theological pedagogies can, and should, make efforts to discover the health of a person’s god image and whether or not it is malleable, then work with the individual to promote healing and further development. ⁵² If we want to cooperate with the Spirit’s work in a person’s life, we will prioritize this effort. If we desire more than superficial religious activity born out of a broken inner life, we must co-labor with the Spirit as he draws out their wounded god image and heals it, handing them counter-narratives in a world of lies that gives them a new story of a God who infinitely loves. The result of this “narrative integration is the creation of personal narratives that are both logical and emotionally meaningful, reflecting a high degree of referential activity,” ⁵³ whereby we can now tell our own coherent pasts without constantly reliving them. ⁵⁴ This allows us to examine our wounds with increased differentiation and actually change the way we remember them:

Despite the fact that you cannot turn back the clock and change the actual events of your life, you can change your experience of what you remember and so change your memory. As you pay more attention to this possibility, you will become aware of what Jesus is doing in real time and space to facilitate healing and renew your mind. ⁵⁵

Driven by the love of the Father, through the power of the Spirit, Jesus is setting us free from wounded images that tempt us not to trust God and enslave us to our pasts. Unhindered by broken god images, we are now open to new possibilities, horizons of the spiritual life we didn’t even know existed, a depth of meaning and purpose difficult to imagine, and most importantly, to experience in greater and greater ways the love of God that surpasses knowledge (Eph 3:19).

One final thought: what kind of being is God Actual, that when he indwells us the product of his presence is love? This is clearly what happens . . . the very first fruit of the Spirit is love (Gal 5:22), and the only reason we even love is because he first loved us (1 Jn 4:19). When God lives in us he produces in us love for others and his love is made complete in us (1 Jn 4:12). God “is love in such a profound and potent way that you simply cannot know him without yourself becoming loving.” ⁵⁶ God himself is the end of the spiritual life, and the love of God present in the disciple’s life is the only true metric of spiritual maturity: “Everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love . . .” (Jn 13:35). When the Spirit’s work of healing the god image is wrought deep in the disciple’s inner life, the natural outworking is a life marked by love. That is spiritual transformation. This is restoration to Eden, where we walk with Yahweh in the cool of the day, secure in the fact we are fully known and fully loved by our Creator, the Sovereign of the universe. God Actual is love, and he is taking us there. This is his Eden Project. After all, “love is at the heart of secure attachments.” ⁵⁷