There is God. And there are images of God. And some people don't see any difference between the two.
A capable, good-hearted, and devout servant by the name of Felicite from Gustave Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" fell prey to this confusion between God and God's images. She was alone and unappreciated, and her parrot Loulou became "almost like a son, a lover to her", so much so that, when he died, she had him stuffed. Soon the gospel's image of the Holy Spirit as a dove began to merge with her stuffed parrot, and she fell "into the idolatrous habit of saying her prayers on her knees in front of the parrot". Finally, Flaubert wrote, as she breathed her last, "she thought she saw, as the heavens opened, a gigantic parrot hovering over her head."' Abandoned by others, she transferred her love to the parrot, transforming it into a god. An earthly image morphed into a divine reality.
Most people who fuse God's image and God's reality aren't nearly so naive. Some, like great critics of religion, argue that God is simply a projection of human ideals onto a heavenly screen; that God is, as Karl Marx thought, a reflection of the human need to be consoled in misery and to cope with weakness. For them, God doesn't exist as a reality independent of human beings. "God" is the name that the foolish, the miserable, and the weak give to what is nothing more than a useful figment of human imagination.
I will leave these critics aside here, and instead focus on what is perhaps the most troubling confusion between God's reality and God's image, which falls somewhere between the naive Felicite and the shrewd Marx. It's believers who fall prey to this confusion. We don't see them kneeling before parrots. Neither do they trumpet, "God is a human projection." They don't brazenly say, "God doesn't exist; only images of God do." To the contrary, they piously affirm, "God is a reality independent of our minds" and "God is nothing like a parrot, or any other creature."
And yet they worship idols without even knowing it. Unlike Felicite's parrot, their gods are not made of the hard matter of this world and don't sit elevated on sacred pedestals. Instead, they dwell in their worshipers' minds and are made of the soft stuff of their own cherished ideas. They simply assume that who they believe God to be and who God truly is are one and the same. God is as large (or as small) as they make the Infinite One to be, and none of the beliefs they entertain about God could possibly be wrong.
But in fact, our images of God are rather different from God's reality. We are finite beings, and God is infinitely greater than any thoughts we can contain about divine reality in our wondrous but tiny minds. We are sinful beings, and God is different from what we conceive in our selfishness and pride. Finite and self-centered as we are, we often forget God's warning through the prophet Isaiah: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (55:9). When we forget that, we unwittingly reduce God's ways to our ways and God's thoughts to our thoughts. Our hearts become factories of idols in which we fashion and refashion God to fit our needs and desires.
Yet the most powerful and seductive images of God are not the ones we craft in the privacy of our hearts. They are the ones that seep into our minds as we watch TV, read books, go shopping at the mall, or socialize with our neighbors. Slowly and imperceptibly, the one true God begins acquiring the features of the gods of this world. For instance, our God simply gratifies our desires rather than reshaping them in accordance with the beauty of God's own character. Our God then kills enemies rather than dying on their behalf as God did in Jesus Christ. To use Flaubert's metaphor, the dove of the Spirit becomes the parrot whose plumage bears a striking resemblance to our culture's values.
To worship God rather than idols of our own making, we must allow God to break apart the idols we create, through the Spirit's relentless and intimate work within our lives. First, we need to know where to look for knowledge of the true God. It would be a mistake to seek that knowledge primarily in the world around us. God is not an object in this world. There's no map that says "X marks the spot." Whatever we find in the world will be ... the world, and not God. Neither can we find God in the infinity that lies beyond the cosmos. God is not an unnamed something on the other side of the temporal and spatial edges of the universe. Rather, as Christians, we find God in Jesus Christ, God's Word incarnate as witnessed in the Scriptures, God's written word.
It's not enough, however, to know where to look for God. We also need eyes and ears that can recognize the true knowledge of God when we come across it. For it could be that even as we look at Jesus Christ and read Scripture, as the prophet Isaiah put it, we "keep listening, but do not comprehend" and "keep looking, but do not understand" (6:9). Think of people who observed Jesus teach and heal and embody the life of God - and they saw nothing but a "false prophet" or a "political rebel". Our eyes and ears need a heart ready to receive the truth of God's reality rather than one that longs for the comforts of false gods.
Finally, even when we look in the right places with a ready heart, we still might miss the one true God. We need to be willing to let our very effort to know God slide out of our hands, opening them to God's continued and unexpected self-revelation. Otherwise, like the dog from Aesop's fable, we may end up dropping the real piece of meat in order to grab its reflection in the water.
(Miroslav Volf, Free Of Charge, pp.21-23)
