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God Image Survey
Researchers from Baylor found that by determining more about people’s per-
ceptions of God, they could predict much more about their moral and political
beliefs than by looking at their faith background. The survey asked questions
about participants’ understanding of God, and from this they developed a
formula for determining where their God image fell along a two-dimensional
spectrum. The two dimensions include the following:
God’s level of engagement—the extent to which individuals believe that
God is directly involved in worldly and personal affairs.
God’s level of anger—the extent to which individuals believe that God
is angered by human sins and tends toward punitive, severe, and wrathful
characteristics.
From the results, they came up with four general “God Image” types:
- Type A—Authoritarian: God has both a high level of engagement and a
high level of anger. - Type B—Benevolent: God has a high level of engagement and a low level
of anger. - Type C—Critical: God has a low level of engagement and a high level of
anger. - Type D—Distant: God has a low level of engagement and a low level of
anger.
In the workshops that I facilitate around the country, I have found that
people have a hard time talking about God sometimes. Often, either the con-
versation remains superfi cial and abstract or it dissolves into ideological argu-
ment. With this God Image tool, however, I have found that people can speak
in a more narrative style about where their images of God come from and
how this informs their faith. In doing this, we become storytellers rather than
preachers or judges of one another, and we learn from one another’s imagin-
ings of the divine.
I asked each contributor to this book to take the God Image survey so that
you could catch a glimpse into how each imagines God. I also included the
survey in the book so that you and your friends or family can also take it and,
hopefully, talk about your results.
How do you match up with our contributors? Does how they imagine
God seem to affect their answers? How about you? Do you fi nd you agree
more with those who share a more common image of God? Did the survey
results surprise you?