Over the course of my spiritual explorations, I’ve come across a number of theological paradoxes. One that has continued to fascinate me for many years has its roots in the Torah, the central text of the Jewish tradition. In the very first chapter of Genesis, we are told that God created the first humans in God’s own image. Then, in the Book of Exodus, the second book of the Torah, the Israelites are expressly forbidden to make any images of God because, the Rabbis teach, God is without and beyond any image we might make of God. Combining these two texts results in the sublime paradox that we are said to be made in the image of an imageless God.
Adding to this spiritual paradox, in the Jewish tradition the imageless God is also said to have a name which is unutterable. For this reason, observant Jews refrain from writing down or saying the name of the Divine. Yet the Torah does tell us what the name of God means. In the story of the voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses asked how the voice should be described when speaking to the people of Israel. According to the King James translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the voice replied “I Am That I Am.”
This translation from the ancient Hebrew, as happened quite often, is actually a mistranslation. In the original Hebrew text, the verb used in the utterance from the bush was in a conditional tense. As a result, what the voice actually said was “I will be what I will be” or “I am becoming what I am becoming.” In other words, the voice was not claiming to be an object, but rather a process, the process of becoming, of unfolding, of evolving.
Since this Divine process of becoming is incapable of being reduced to any image we might conceive of, so are we. Like the Divine, the human person is always more than any image can encompass, endlessly, infinitely more. This is why evolved forms of religious understanding should be iconoclastic, smashing any idol, any image that claims to convey the totality of God. At the same time, we should be willing to smash any images created by the academic disciplines of human scholarship that seek to reduce human beings to our functions as social, sexual, economic, or political creatures. In the end, like the unfolding Divine process from which the human spirit draws its life, it is the “more” that makes us fully human.
In the words of Michael Bogar, a scholar of both religion and depth psychology, “Frozen or engraved images do not work well to stimulate creativity or grow human consciousness.” Indeed, Bogar warns us that “when we freeze our Gods into images, we freeze our own consciousness and stop creative expansion.”
In contrast, when our sacred myths are left open to new revelations of our potential for a deeper, more profound relationship to the holy, they stimulate our capacity for insight, curiosity, imagination, creativity, and compassion. Most importantly, like the voice from the burning bush. like the imageless God in whose image we are made, we understand that we, too, are part of a never-ending process of evolutionary unfolding.
(This post was adapted from a longer spiritual reflection)