Our Changing Images of God: A Jungian Perspective

The ways in which human beings imagine God are never static. They shift over centuries, reflecting not only theological debates but also profound transformations in human consciousness, culture, and as I have shown in previous articles, our psychology - each shift revealing something about the inner landscape of the human soul.

Carl Jung invites us to read this unfolding not as doctrinal confusion but as psychological evolution. The God-image changes because we change, it evolves as our psychological and cultural frameworks change. As we slowly shift from a patriarchal world that has so dominated our theology, so does our God image.

Yet running alongside this evolution, often marginalized, is another thread: the mystical Christian tradition that quietly always held a more relational, inclusive, and intimate God-image long before it could enter the broader cultural psyche.

The God-Image as Psychological Mirror

For Jung, the God-image arises from the archetype of the Self—the organizing center of the psyche that seeks wholeness. The divine we imagine inevitably contains our light and our shadow, our aspirations and wounds, our deepest longings for unity.

Jung observes that even Scripture reveals a developing God-image. The moral tension in the story of Job exposes a divine figure who is not yet whole. The God who blesses and the God who destroys appear side by side, revealing contradictions that humanity must wrestle with in order to grow.

For Jung, the suffering of Job opens a psychological doorway: the recognition that the divine image, as it appears in human consciousness, is evolutionary, not fixed.

The Eclipse of the Great Mother and the Rise of the Unmoved Mover

Anne Baring, a religious scholar and Jungian Analyst, describes an earlier shift: the gradual suppression of the Great Mother—the ancient feminine presence that held life, earth, and cosmos in a web of relationship. In this worldview the universe was alive, ensouled, and sacred. And we can hear echoes of this Great Mother image in some of the transliterations of the ancient Hebrew words describing God in the Old Testament, the nuances of which are often lost in our English translations. For example, מְקוֹר מַיִם חַיִּים in Jeremiah 2:13 and Jeremiah 17:13 where God is described as the womb-like 'water-source of life.' Others include images of God as a birthing mother חוֹלֵל / יְלָדְתִּיךָ in Deuteronomy 32:18, and a nursing mother in Isaiah 49:15. And, of course, the Old Testament feminine 'Spirit of God' - Ruach (רוּחַ) - literally meaning 'breath', that animates and sustains the whole of creation.

Over time, patriarchal cultures replaced this immanent, relational presence with a distant, omnipotent Sky Father which I have spoken about in my previous article 'Letting Go of Toxic God-Images'. In Christianity, this evolved into the scholastic image of God as the “Unmoved Mover”—perfect, impassive, hierarchical, distant, and primarily masculine. This was the God of the power structures shaped by male theologians embedded in patriarchal institutions.

For Jung, this one-sided masculine God-image inevitably created psychic imbalance. The feminine, the relational, and the immanent dimensions of the divine were pushed into the unconscious, where they continued to live and act.

The Mystic Counter-Tradition: A Relational God Long Before Modernity

Even as official theology gravitated toward abstraction, hierarchy, and the “unmoved mover,” a different God-image persisted—nurtured not by scholastic reason but by contemplative experience. The Christian mystics offered a living counterpoint: a God encountered as intimate, relational, overflowing with immediacy and love.

Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, Gertrude of Helfta, Hildegard of Bingen and many others experienced God not as an unmoved cosmic monarch but as an intimate Presence: dynamic, relational, tender, and surprisingly feminine.

Julian could proclaim that “as truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.”Mechthild wrote of God as the one who “floods the soul with love until she overflows.” Eckhart spoke of the ground of the soul as one with the ground of God, emphasizing birth, becoming, and creative dynamism.

And from Gertrude of Helfta, whose visions glowed with warmth and reciprocity, we hear one of the most deeply relational expressions of divine intimacy in the medieval tradition:

“Place me like a seal upon Your heart… for Your love is strong as death.”(Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love)

For Gertrude, the heart of God is not remote or impassive but open, vulnerable, and desirous of communion. In her visions Christ bends toward the soul with tenderness, saying: “In my heart, find a place of rest.”

This is a God who relates. A God who feels. A God who longs.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) famously characterizes viriditas, 'the greening power of God,' as moist, nurturing, and womb-like—symbolizing the feminine, fertile, and creative energy of God that enlivens all of creation, viewed as a direct outflow of God's life force. She also frequently employs the metaphor of God as breastfeeding, providing spiritual grace to nourish the soul.

In psychological terms, these mystics intuitively held a more integrated God-image—one that included both masculine and feminine, transcendence and immanence, form and flow. They preserved the relational essence that the patriarchal image had eclipsed.

The Modern Crisis of the Old God-Image

By the 20th century, the patriarchal and authoritarian God-image had reached a breaking point. In a world marked by mass suffering - genocide, technology outpacing morality, the planetary ecological crisis - the image of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent ruler felt hollow.

Anne Baring argues that modern humanity has become spiritually homeless, severed from the living cosmos and from any sense of divine immanence. Jung argued that the God-image symbolized in the patriarchal deity was no longer sufficient; its moral contradictions, exposed in stories like Job, demand evolution.

The crisis of the God-image is also the crisis of human consciousness.

Re-Emergence of the Feminine and the Return of Wholeness

Jung and Baring both see the next step not as the abandonment of the sacred but its transformation.

For Carl Jung:

The divine must become conscious of its own opposites—its capacity for both order and chaos, good and evil, masculine and feminine. He saw this process reflected symbolically in:

• the incarnation,

• the descent of the Holy Spirit,

• the growing prominence of Mary and Sophia,

• and the psychological need for integration.

  
  

For Anne Baring:

We are living through a reawakening of the feminine principle—an ecological, relational, intuitive, and cosmically connected sense of the sacred. This is not a return to the ancient goddess religions but a rebalancing: the healing of a split that has lasted for millennia.

Crucially, this new emerging God-image resonates strongly with the mystics’ experiential knowledge. What was once suppressed at the margins of Christian tradition now returns as a vital key for the future.

The God Ahead of Us: Relational, Inclusive, and Alive

The evolving God-image that Jung foresaw—and the cosmic vision Anne Baring articulates—aligns with the mystical heart of Christianity:

• a God who is within as much as beyond,

• a God who births, becomes, and transforms,

• a God who holds both masculine and feminine energy,

• a God who is relational rather than authoritarian,

• a God who invites participation rather than passive obedience.

  
  

This is not a break from the tradition but a retrieval of its deepest current. It is the God-image of the mystics, rising into collective consciousness just as the old forms dissolve.

Toward a Re-Enchanted and Integrated Spiritual Imagination

Both Jung and Baring warn that without an evolving God-image, humanity risks fragmentation—psychologically, socially, and ecologically. But the emerging image offers hope:

A God who is closer to Julian’s Motherly Love

than to the unmoved mover;

closer to the dynamic birthings of Eckhart

than to the static categories of scholasticism;

closer to the cosmos-dreaming vision Baring describes

than to a distant, ruling deity.

To imagine God anew is not an intellectual exercise—it is a work of healing. It is the restoration of relationship:

with ourselves,

with one another,

with the Earth,

and with the mystery we call God.