God and "The old guy with the beard"

Full disclosure: whenever I hear someone complain about a mental image of God as "the old guy with the beard", I tend to stop listening. There is nobody I have ever heard who thought it was meant literally; the objection as if that were a common understanding seems to me like argument-bait for an argument that I could scarcely believe was meant seriously, and certainly couldn't take seriously in any form I've heard.

For those who are familiar with idea of archetypes, I could say that the "old guy" image reminds me of the archetypal ancient sage -- much like Merlin in the Arthur legends, Tolkien's Gandalf, or more recently J.K. Rowling's Dumbledore. Archetypes are something like the shared images of the cultural mind -- and in this image we can see the thought of the powerful ancient man whose age has increased his wisdom without diminishing his strength.

In visual art Michelangelo -- one of the world's greatest painters -- in one of his most famous images, portrayed God as an old guy with a beard (below, image from Sistine Chapel). If we're going to use imagery at all, then meaningful imagery for God will convey one who is ancient yet vital. If we use images at all, we'd be hard-pressed to find a better image than that.

My experience is that those who complain about such an image of God tend to be either atheists who would protest anything that communicated God regardless of its merit, or Christians who find such images to be low-brow, unsophisticated, and embarrassing. It reminds me of times in the church's history when there were controversies over whether it was permissible to portray God in art, and times when Christian religious art was destroyed by other Christians. For the most part, the arts have won the argument for legitimacy in Christianity. Still the aspiring intellectuals may be its harshest critics. They may accept a great master like Michelangelo who makes a great painting of God as an old man, but if they imagine an uneducated person who finds that image helpful to make the idea of God more present, sometimes the aspiring intellectual may find himself embarrassed -- not of God but of his less fortunate brother.


I've recently been re-reading C.S. Lewis' Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. He had a useful insight that may be helpful when thinking of such images:

This talk of "meeting" is, no doubt, anthropomorphic ... That is why it must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological abstractions. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. (from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Chapter IV).

As Christians, we remember the Word of God in human flesh as Jesus. This teaches us that while we may have any amount of pious and lofty talk about God, it is at least as close to the truth to think of God as taking on flesh to reach out to us, and that God is not too high minded to make concessions to our weaknesses.