What is your God allowed to be angry about?
Ask yourself, who does he let in, and who does he leave standing outside?
What do you have to do before he will speak to you?
What is the sacrifice she requires?
When you fail, what does his face do?
Where did you first see that face?
These are not trick questions. Curiosity is not the enemy of seeking, it's the fuel. As someone who spent an enormous amount of time seeking to understand my own inherited maps, curiosity is a friend. My thesis in that pursuit is that gods are projections of our own needs, made in our image. Not in the American Jesus aesthetic type of image, but an impression of our own moral psychology. What a god forbids, forgives, excludes, and needs from you. Those four things vary enormously across traditions and across centuries inside the same tradition, and they vary in a direction. They track the people doing the worshipping. Punitive people get a punitive god. A shame-bound culture gets a god who keeps score. A people at war get a god who fights. A slave-owning culture gets a god who supports slavery. An abolitionist movement gets a god who abhors slavery. A culture that believes wealth is earned gets a god who rewards the deserving, and therefore a god who has already ruled on the poor.
When the moral psychology of a community shifts, the character of its god shifts with it, and the shift arrives with a scriptural midrash to support it.
As I researched this, I found that it is not a new observation. Xenophanes of Colophon, a Greek philosopher writing around 500 BCE, noticed that the Thracians described gods with red hair and blue eyes while the Ethiopians described gods who looked Ethiopian, and he made the joke that if horses and oxen could draw, they would draw gods shaped like horses and oxen. Ludwig Feuerbach turned the joke into a system in 1841, in a book called The Essence of Christianity, arguing that theology is really anthropology, that human beings take their own best qualities, project them outward at infinite scale, and then kneel to the result as though it came from somewhere else. Émile Durkheim, the French sociologist, shifted the object in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912, arguing that what a society worships is finally the society itself. Sigmund Freud shifted it again in The Future of an Illusion in 1927, and made it the father, enlarged.
Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist, argued in Faces in the Clouds in 1993 that anthropomorphism is not a mistake we make about gods but the default bet the perceptual system places on everything, attributing agency before phenomena. Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained in 2001, and Justin Barrett, in Why Would Anyone Believe in God? in 2004, showed why some god-concepts survive transmission and others die: the ones that stick are human enough to reason about and strange enough to remember.
That last point answers the objection I get first, usually from someone who knows more than I do about traditions outside my own. Krishna is blue. Ganesha has an elephant's head. Kali wears a garland of severed heads. None of that is a painter reproducing his neighbors. And there are whole traditions organized around refusing the projection outright. Islam and much of Judaism forbid the image. Apophatic theology in the Christian East insists that anything you say about God is more false than true, so you proceed by negation. The Hindu concept of nirguna Brahman is the divine stripped of every attribute a human might grab. These are the hard cases, and they are not fatal, because a tradition that works that hard to prevent the projection is a tradition that knows exactly what people do when left alone with a god.
I personally read Jeremy Campbell's 2006 book, The Many Faces of God: Science's 400-Year Quest for Images of the Divine. Campbell gives a detailed exposition of how, before the seventeenth century, the divine reached people through intermediaries, saints, angels, relics, visions. After Newton, God becomes the sovereign intelligence behind a lawful machine, all-knowing and remote, because that is the God a culture needs once it has decided the universe runs on mathematics. Campbell traces the same move forward into the twentieth century and argues that religion carries a quiet dread that science will eventually explain God away.
Nicholas Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, ran a study published in 2009 in which believers were asked what God thinks about contested moral questions. Their answers tracked their own positions more closely than their estimates of anyone else's. When the same task was run in a scanner, reasoning about God's views recruited the regions used for reasoning about the self, not the regions used for reasoning about another mind. Your God does not merely agree with you more often than your neighbor does. You appear to consult him the way you consult yourself.
In my early days of deconstruction, I saw this myself in the text of Deuteronomy 32, verses 8 and 9, which describes the Most High dividing the nations and assigning each one a portion, with Jacob given to Yahweh as his allotted share. The Masoretic Hebrew reads sons of Israel, but the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek Septuagint read sons of God, and the older reading is almost certainly the divine one, since a later scribe has an obvious motive to soften a divine council into a census and no motive at all to invent one. Psalm 82 opens with God standing in the assembly of the gods, delivering a verdict against them. Mark S. Smith, a biblical scholar, traces the whole development in The Early History of God. There are of course conservative scholars who grant the council but interpret its members as created beings rather than rival deities. They are sincere, I imagine, though they seem to be dismissing the polytheism of the period in which those passages were written. Maybe they can get away with that. The harder thing to ignore is the pattern I am about to describe.
Notice how Yahweh himself shifts in scope when the circumstances of his people change. A tribe fighting for land has a god who fights for land, who hates the same enemies, who wants the same territory. When the nation is broken and hauled into exile, the tribal god arrives at a fork, because a god who belongs to a defeated tribe is a defeated god. The prophet we call Second Isaiah is that fork being resolved. There is no other, there was never any other, the gods of the empire that conquered us are pieces of wood. Monotheism becomes fully explicit at the precise historical moment a devastated people needs its god to be larger than its devastation. Theology arrived when the need emerged.
Lee Kirkpatrick, a psychologist who spent his career on this, laid out two pathways in Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion. Correspondence, where a person's God resembles the caregiver he actually had. And compensation, where a person's God supplies precisely what the caregiver withheld. Both pathways show up in the data, which means the same wound can produce opposite gods. Wherever the wound is, that is where the God has the most detail. The doctrine gets specific exactly where the person got hurt.
Place all the classical attributes of God next to the injuries and see whether you can unsee it. Omnipresence answers abandonment. Omnipotence answers helplessness. Omniscience answers not being seen, or answers being watched, depending on which of those you carry. Immutability answers a parent whose mood you had to read through the door before you decided whether to come in. A systematic theology's list of divine perfections reads like an inventory of childhood harms, each one answered in the negative.
I watched three men do this in public while I was losing my own faith, and I did not notice at the time that they were performing the same operation.
Gregory Boyd, a pastor in St. Paul, published God of the Possible in 2000 and gave up God's foreknowledge, because a woman in his congregation had prayed her way into a marriage that destroyed her and needed a God who had not seen it coming. Rob Bell, who had built one of the largest churches in the country, published Love Wins in 2011 and gave up hell, or at least the version of it that runs forever, and lost his standing in evangelicalism inside of a year. Mark Driscoll, in Seattle, went the other direction entirely and preached a God with muscle, a warrior king he could respect, saying openly that he could not worship a man he was capable of beating up. He resigned in 2014 after his own elders documented a pattern of domineering leadership. Each of those men's gods looks exactly like the man who described him.
Three revisions in fourteen years. One man removed God's knowledge, one removed God's wrath, one enlarged God's strength. Each was accused of remaking God in his own image, usually by people whose own image had simply been installed earlier and more slowly, which made it invisible.
I was paying close attention to all three, and I thought I was watching a debate about scripture. Instead, I was watching men rebuild a God around the thing each of them could not carry.
Which brings me to the argument I was most often offered when I started asking these questions in the rooms I was traveling through. C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, made what is usually called the argument from desire. Innate desires correspond to real objects. Hunger exists because there is such a thing as food. Thirst exists because there is such a thing as water. And if a person finds in himself a longing that nothing in this world satisfies, the likeliest explanation is that he was made for a world other than this one. Lewis was building on a long history. Augustine wrote in the Confessions, around 400, that the human heart is restless until it rests in God. Thomas Aquinas argued in the thirteenth century that there is a natural desire to see God, and that nature does not plant desires in vain. Blaise Pascal, in the notes published after his death as the Pensées, described an infinite emptiness in a person that nothing finite fills, which later got compressed into the phrase about a God-shaped hole, a phrase he never wrote.
They are not describing something imaginary. The longing is real. We have all felt that existential wonder, dread, curiosity.
But, nobody knows. And it doesn’t take much thinking to see it’s an argument that the conclusion can be fitted to anyone’s bias. Just ask all the people who seem convinced we are in a simulation.
My authentic suspicion, the longing tracks something that was already there. It tracks a face. Somebody who was supposed to be steady, whose attention settled you, whose absence took the floor out. My study of the human brain and the psychology of human projections, says the ache is more likely evidence of a world within us. The hunger may certainly point to something real, just in reverse.
And that is what maps are. They are inherited beliefs, examined or unexamined, that operate your life, from the existential down to the petty. And why nobody's map should be exported as knowledge.
My grandson is seven, innocent and wise. I once asked him, with completely open-ended questions, what he thought the difference was between believing something and knowing it. Without hesitation he started thinking out loud. He inherently senses that beliefs are subjective and significantly different from how we know things. I wish I had recorded it. Like, the world is round because many scientists have seen it and measured it, he said. Then he thought of his friend Caleb, who had told him he was always going to be taller. He considered that for a second. That's just a belief, Caleb, he quipped.
Beliefs are vital. What we can actually know, while growing, is not what fuels daily life. Beliefs hold up a marriage, a family, a name, a job, a whole community of people who will still be there Sunday. But once a claim of I believe begins to be spoken in the grammar of I know, we mistake our maps for territories. And the people saying that have lost their ability to hear the difference. My grandson has not been trained out of it yet. I hope he never learns.
Here is where I keep landing. If no one is there, the map is not worthless. It is the best readout you will ever get. Every feature of the God you were handed and every feature of the one you cannot quite put down is a record of what you needed, what you feared, and what you were taught you deserved. His anger tells you what you were punished for. His conditions tell you what you had to do to be safe. His silence tells you where nobody came.
Mine went quiet somewhere between the Friday night football games where he supposedly chose the winners and the children he seemed unwilling to save from malaria in a country he never visited. When it stayed quiet, there was nobody left to hand it to. My new map gave me back everything I had been assigning to him. It is why one of my favorite lines has become William Ernest Henley's: I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.
I spent a year of my thirties arguing this badly on a blog called Chasing Black Swans, mostly by borrowing other men's certainty and mistaking it for my own. The tagline was the only part I would keep. The map is not the territory.
Which is why the last question is the only one I actually want answered.
Where did you first see that face?
