Spiritual Hiccups - What Sort of God?

For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
    evil will not sojourn with you.
The boastful will not stand before your eyes;
    you hate all evildoers. 

You destroy those who speak lies;
    the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful.

from Psalm 5

Most of us have some sort of God image, a mental picture or conceptual framework that is our notion of what God is like.  I suspect there is no figuring out the ultimate source of such God images.  Many Protestants will point to the Bible, and that will certainly be true to some extent, but that is not the whole story.  All of us who read the Bible read it selectively to some degree.  And our God image usually guides us in this selection process.

Our God image often emerges from what one of my favorite spiritual writers, Fr. Richard Rohr, calls "dualistic thinking."  We tend to see the world as a series of either or choices, and our God images tend to reflect such choices.  Some people gravitate more toward a God of judgment who punishes the guilty. Others embrace a God of love who will redeem and embrace the guilty.  Much rarer is the person whose God image somehow holds both as true. 

And so most of us struggle with those parts of Scripture that challenge our God image.  We tend to diminish them and elevate those that confirm our image.  Those of us who cherish a God of love squirm a bit when reading today's Psalm or gospel passage where Jesus speaks of evildoers "thrown in the furnace of fire." 

But despite my own dualistic tendencies, I am convinced that a true God image requires dropping the either/or choices that help produce my God image.  A true God image requires answering the question of whether God is a God of love and forgiveness or a God of judgment with a "Yes."  To borrow a Walter Brueggemann quote I used recently in a sermon, "This tension of mercy that forgives and sovereignty that will not be mocked is an endless adjudication for the God of the Bible, who permits no final or systematic resolve.  It is a tension that we all know in our most intimate and treasured relations."  

What sort of God is your God image?   And in what way does your image reduce God to something easier to understand and incorporate into dualistic modes of thought?  Or, as a classical Calvinist might put it, what sort of idol have you created with your God image?

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