What We Think About When We Think About God…

What We Think About When We Think About God… May 4, 2018

Written By Jonah Venegas

“Understanding these ways in which we use metaphors and descriptors to think about God is necessary, because our own inner constructs of who God is affects everything else about the way we do faith, the way we live our lives, and the way we relate to other people, other people who are all also made in the image of God, the imago Dei.”


There are quite a few different metaphors we use to conceptualize God these days. Some of them come directly from the Bible. Some we learn growing up in school or in church. And some we learn to create ourselves based on our own experiences of God. These metaphors are important, because if you believe the Christian God is as big and expansive and infinite as many would claim that God is, then it would seem impossible to be able to identify God with a single descriptor in human language and expect that to fully encapsulate who God is. It would be like trying to look at a 360-degree panoramic landscape, choosing the one fraction of it you can see in that moment, and saying that piece of the picture defines its entirety. But so often, this is how we relate to God.

We choose one facet of God’s character to emphasize and erase the rest of God’s infinity in the process…


Browse Our Archives