Made in His Image

This inquiry did not begin with the phrase made in His image.

It arrived there.

The original question was much stranger.

If spirit does not possess a human mind, then what would it mean for spirit to judge?

Human judgment requires cognition.

Something is perceived.

Information is received.

The mind interprets it.

Competing explanations may be considered.

Intent is assessed.

Evidence is weighed.

A conclusion is reached.

A decision follows.

That sequence is so natural to human beings that we rarely recognise it as a specifically human mechanism.

We simply call it judgment.

But what if judgment in spirit does not belong to that mechanism at all?

What if the mistake begins when human beings take a word that describes something occurring in the spiritual order and assume that its mechanism must resemble the human phenomenon carrying the same name?

Perhaps the word survives translation while the mechanism does not.

Perhaps judgment is one of those words.

The human being inhabits reality through a remarkable but limited architecture.

There is a body.

There are senses.

There is perception.

There is memory.

There is emotion.

There is cognition.

There is interpretation.

There is imagination.

There is the capacity to compare what is happening now with what has happened before.

There is the ability to anticipate consequences that have not yet occurred.

There is uncertainty.

There is deliberation.

There is choice.

And therefore there is decision.

The mind processes because the human being does not possess total access to reality.

We perceive partially.

We know partially.

We remember imperfectly.

We misunderstand.

We infer.

We predict.

We revise.

We discover that what we believed yesterday was incomplete.

Cognition is therefore not merely evidence of human sophistication.

It is also evidence of human limitation.

We must process because we do not already contain the whole.

We must decide because alternatives appear before us.

We must interpret because reality reaches us through perception.

We must ask because we do not always know.

This is not a defect.

It is part of being human.

But it becomes a theological problem when the mechanism of the creature is projected backwards onto the Creator.

The Mathematics of Evil began somewhere else.

It began with perception.

Its architecture proposed:

Reality → Perception → Distortion → Misalignment → Evil Acts

and, in the opposite movement:

Reality → Perception → Clarity → Truth → Alignment → Right Action

The important feature was not merely the discussion of evil.

It was the location of the human being within the sequence.

Reality exists.

The human being encounters reality through perception.

What follows depends upon what happens within that encounter.

Clarity preserves relationship with what is.

Distortion alters that relationship.

The human being then acts from the reality they perceive, whether that perception corresponds to Truth or not.

The manuscript therefore remained primarily on the human side of the encounter.

Reality.

Then perception.

Then orientation.

Then consequence.

But another question was waiting behind it:

What is occurring on the other side?

If reality is encountered by the human through cognition and perception, does Reality itself operate cognitively?

Why would it?

If Truth simply is, what would Truth need to process?

If God is not encountering reality from within limitation, why would God need to deliberate about it?

And if spirit does not operate through the human machinery of cognition, then perhaps many of the categories we have assigned to spirit have been descriptions borrowed from ourselves.

This changes judgment.

Human beings commonly imagine divine judgment through the architecture of a courtroom.

Evidence is presented.

Conduct is examined.

Motives are considered.

Arguments are heard.

A verdict is determined.

A sentence is imposed.

God is therefore imagined as the ultimate judge because He performs perfectly what human judges perform imperfectly.

But this may already contain the inversion.

Perhaps divine judgment is not a perfected version of human adjudication.

Perhaps it is an entirely different phenomenon.

Consider another possibility:

Judgment is confrontation with Truth.

Nothing needs to be discovered by God.

Nothing needs to be explained to Him.

Nothing needs to be argued successfully.

Nothing needs to be hidden badly enough to escape detection.

Nothing needs to be weighed in order for God to arrive at knowledge.

Truth does not investigate reality.

Truth reveals it.

Judgment, then, may be the falling away of distortion.

The person becomes visible as they actually are.

Their actions.

Their intention.

Their knowledge.

Their ignorance.

Their fear.

Their love.

Their deception.

Their sincere misunderstanding.

Their chosen distortion.

Their resistance.

Their orientation.

Not because God suddenly discovers these things.

But because in the presence of Truth, nothing false can continue pretending to be true.

This would mean judgment does not reveal the human being to God.

It reveals the human being within Truth.

And perhaps, therefore, to themselves.

This is where intention becomes significant.

Two people may perform outwardly identical actions while standing in entirely different relationships to Truth.

One may act from malice.

Another from fear.

Another from misunderstanding.

Another from distorted teaching.

Another from deliberate rebellion despite recognising what is true.

Another may sincerely believe they are doing good while their perception has been profoundly distorted.

From the outside, behaviour may appear identical.

Internally, orientation may not be.

A human court struggles with this because human beings cannot see another person completely.

Evidence must therefore act as proxy.

Words.

Patterns.

Documents.

Witnesses.

Behaviour.

Circumstance.

Inference.

But if Truth requires no proxy, then divine judgment need not merely ask:

What did you do?

The deeper exposure may be:

What was your relationship to Truth when you did it?

Not as an interrogation.

As revelation.

This was where the discussion of hell changed.

Hell emerged not merely as a destination.

It appeared in three dimensions:

a state, an orientation, and a destination.

The state is present.

A person may already inhabit distortion.

Fear.

Hatred.

Self-exaltation.

Deception.

Alienation.

A refusal of Truth.

The orientation is directional.

The state is not static.

Repeated orientation creates trajectory.

And The Mathematics of Evil had already given the architecture:

Small deviation × sufficient distance = significant separation.

A one-degree distortion may appear insignificant near the origin.

Continue far enough, and the destinations no longer resemble one another.

The destination is therefore not unrelated to the orientation.

It is its culmination.

This raises a difficult possibility:

Perhaps God does not arbitrarily place a person into hell.

Perhaps the final confrontation with Truth reveals the orientation the person has already inhabited.

The destination is not manufactured by the judgment.

The judgment exposes the trajectory.

This does not make hell trivial.

It makes it more serious.

Because responsibility returns to the human being.

The question is no longer merely:

What will God decide to do with me?

It becomes:

What am I becoming oriented toward?

If hell possesses orientation, heaven must be considered through the same architecture.

Not merely as location.

Not merely as reward.

Not merely as the opposite place.

Heaven too may be understood as:

state, orientation, destination.

And here another polarity appears.

Fear and love.

Not as equal metaphysical forces.

Not as two gods.

Not as symmetrical powers battling for control of creation.

But as profoundly different orientations.

Fear curves the creature inward.

It protects.

Controls.

Hides.

Grasps.

Defends.

Distorts.

Attempts to secure itself against uncertainty.

Love opens differently.

Love gives.

Trusts.

Recognises.

Serves.

Releases possession.

Sees another as real rather than merely useful.

If God is love, then orientation toward God is necessarily orientation toward love.

Heaven therefore becomes more than where God is.

It is complete orientation toward what God is.

And hell becomes complete alienation from that orientation.

Not because fear becomes an equal opposite to God.

But because fear can govern the creature's relationship to Him.

And now the inquiry loops back to its beginning.

Made in His image.

Perhaps the image was never primarily operational.

Perhaps it does not mean that God thinks because humans think.

Or judges because humans judge.

Or deliberates because humans deliberate.

Or experiences reality as humans experience reality.

Perhaps the image concerns something else entirely.

Love.

God is love.

And human beings have been given the extraordinary capacity to express love.

Not perfectly.

Not infinitely.

Not without distortion.

But recognisably.

A human being can give without possessing.

Serve without domination.

Protect without controlling.

See another person and allow that person to remain other.

Choose another's good at personal cost.

Forgive.

Show mercy.

Remain faithful.

Tell Truth lovingly.

Lay down the self.

Perhaps image is not describing how God operates.

Perhaps it describes what may become visible through us.

The creature can express something that originates beyond the creature.

Love.

And if that is correct, then the mistake was not believing humanity bears God's image.

The mistake was expanding that statement until every recognisably human mechanism was projected back onto Him.

We took:

God → image → humanity

and quietly reversed it:

humanity → attributes → God.

We made God in our image while quoting the sentence that said the opposite.

There is another difficulty.

To say that God thinks may sound like an elevation.

But perhaps, strangely, it is a reduction.

Thinking is extraordinary within the human being.

But human thought exists because there is distance between the thinker and what is known.

There is something to apprehend.

Something to understand.

Something to work out.

Something to remember.

Something to decide.

Something to discover.

What would it mean to place that architecture onto a Being understood as the ground of reality itself?

Would God encounter Truth?

Or is God Truth?

Would God process reality?

Or does reality exist in relation to Him?

Would God weigh what is good?

Or is Goodness inseparable from His nature?

Would God deliberate about love?

Or is God Love?

Perhaps the human mind is not an analogue for divine operation at all.

Perhaps cognition is one of the mechanisms through which a finite embodied creature navigates a reality it does not fully possess.

And if so, saying God is beyond cognition is not saying God is less than intelligent.

It is saying the category itself may fail.

Not lower cognition.

Not infinitely faster cognition.

Not perfect processing.

Something for which processing may simply be the wrong word.

And here language begins to fail.

Because even the word operate may already be too mechanical.

If spirit does not possess a biological brain, nervous system, sensory organs or embodied cognitive architecture, then describing spirit through human psychological categories may produce confusion.

We say:

Spirit knows.

Spirit communicates.

Spirit recognises.

Spirit aligns.

Spirit resists.

But every one of these words arrives carrying human associations.

So care is required.

The proposition emerging here is not merely:

spirits think differently from humans.

It is more radical:

thinking may not be the relevant mechanism at all.

Spiritual relation may operate through something closer to immediate recognisability.

Alignment.

Misalignment.

Correspondence.

Presence.

Truth encountering what corresponds to Truth.

No internal monologue required.

No verbal argument.

No sensory evidence.

No sequential processing.

No weighing of alternatives.

This may also illuminate what has elsewhere been described as preverbal knowing.

Not another form of hidden sentence.

Not language occurring below language.

But recognisability before cognition translates what has been recognised into words.

The human mind eventually says:

I know.

But the knowing may have arrived before the sentence.

This also places human freedom in an interesting position.

The human being possesses a mind capable of imagining alternatives.

We can stand between possible actions.

We can desire one thing and choose another.

We can know something is harmful and still pursue it.

We can override instinct.

We can distort what we know.

We can rationalise.

We can change direction.

We can repent.

We can refuse.

We can reorient.

Choice therefore belongs intimately to human moral life.

And if orientation accumulates across repeated choices, then free will is not merely about isolated decisions.

It is directional.

Each choice participates in the construction of orientation.

The person becomes increasingly capable of recognising certain things and increasingly unable or unwilling to recognise others.

Habit becomes trajectory.

Trajectory becomes orientation.

And orientation eventually confronts Truth without disguise.

This makes redemption look different too.

Redemption is not God being persuaded to change His mind about the human being.

It is not a successful legal defence.

It is not the sinner finding the right argument.

It is not a technicality.

It is reorientation.

A return toward Truth.

A collapse of distortion.

A restoration of recognisability.

In Christian terms, Christ is therefore not merely the advocate who persuades an otherwise unwilling God not to condemn.

Christ is Truth.

The movement toward Christ is the movement toward Reality.

Redemption is therefore not primarily a negotiation around judgment.

It transforms orientation before judgment is fully encountered.

This is why repentance is much larger than apology.

To repent is to turn.

Orientation changes.

Trajectory changes.

The destination therefore changes.

And now the inquiry returns completely to where it began.

Made in His image.

Human beings were given the capacity to express love.

Then human beings looked at themselves...

their minds, their judgments, their decisions, their deliberations, their emotions, their cognitive processing...

and projected the entire structure upward.

God was given a mind resembling ours.

A judgment resembling ours.

A decision process resembling ours.

An emotional architecture resembling ours.

A celestial courtroom resembling ours.

And eventually:

We made God in our image.

The distortion is subtle because it begins with something true.

Humanity bears the image of God.

But, as The Mathematics of Evil has already argued, distortion rarely requires the destruction of Truth.

It can begin by moving something only one degree.

The Original remains.

Something is added.

Something is assumed.

Something is rearranged.

And eventually the conclusion stands miles from the origin.

Perhaps this is one of those one-degree movements.

Made in His image

became

He must be like us.

And perhaps much of what follows from that movement, our understanding of judgment, heaven, hell, cognition, intention, freedom and even divine love, requires reinspection.

Not because the answers are already known.

But because the mechanism we have been using to ask the questions may itself belong to the wrong category.

The human mind may be attempting to understand spirit by making spirit behave like mind.

Perhaps it cannot.

Perhaps the first correction is therefore not an answer.

It is a boundary.

Human is human. Spirit is spirit.

One encounters Reality through perception.

The Other cannot simply be assumed to operate through the machinery of the encounter.

And somewhere between those two lies the mystery of being...

made in His image

without making

Him in ours.