It is God’s intention that a biblically shaped God concept, together with the Holy Spirit, guide the transformation of one’s God image, so that it too gradually becomes more conformed to God’s self-revelation in Scripture. This deeper knowledge through experience, however, occurs through many, many times of communion with God through the reading of Scripture experientially (and not just intellectually), Christian meditation, and deeply relational prayer (as modeled and described in the writings of saints like Samuel Rutherford, Richard Sibbes, and Jonathan Edwards).

What do we say to someone who’s going through a faith crisis?

Of course, it depends on what exactly the person is going through and what is specific about this crisis. As we get to know someone in such a crisis — let’s call her Mary Ann — we might discover that she is bothered about God’s portrayal in the Bible and has begun to feel attracted to another worldview that is “more positive” than Christianity. Or maybe we start to wonder whether her doubts about God are mostly due to an unwillingness to let go of a sexual relationship with her best friend. Or we find out she was traumatized this past year by being taken advantage of by a leader in the church.

Every faith crisis is unique, and recognizing its uniqueness is an important part of caring for people well and treating them with the respect due to anyone made in God’s image. “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame” (Proverbs 18:13). Listening carefully to Mary Ann builds trust, and our obvious concern, the kinds of questions we ask, and our body language lets her know that we believe she’s worth listening to.

Drawing Out Deep Waters

Of special importance is the listener’s responsibility to take seriously the reason(s) that a person gives for the struggle — even if we come to believe that there is more going on than what he is aware of (which is often the case). “The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out” (Proverbs 20:5). Human finitude and sinfulness being what they are, we often don’t know ourselves very well, especially early in the healing journey called Christianity, so we may not be aware of the reasons why we’re struggling with something. Such a recognition, for example, drove David to ask God to search him and open him up by helping him become aware of any “grievous way” in him that was an obstacle to the everlasting way of life in God (Psalm 139:23–24).

“Every faith crisis is unique, and recognizing its uniqueness is an important part of caring for people well.”

So, let’s suppose that after talking with Mary Ann for half an hour, we learn that she was baptized a few years ago and has been going to church regularly ever since, but she has recently come to believe that she’s so terribly unworthy of God’s love that God no longer wants anything more to do with her. However, she doesn’t seem to have any concrete sins that she has recently committed or currently is living in that might explain her overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. As a result, we begin to wonder if her problem may be due to having a distorted view of God.

Knowledge of God and Ourselves

To help us understand her, we are going to rely on a fundamental psychological insight implied by biblical passages like Psalm 139, Genesis 1:28–29, and the twofold love command (Matthew 22:37–39). This insight is developed considerably by Augustine and clearly articulated by John Calvin in the opening of his magisterial work, Institutes of the Christian Religion: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of oneself are intimately interwoven, and which one comes first is hard to discern. Our gifts and our poverties, Calvin wrote, differentially point us to God’s riches, and understanding oneself as an image of God would seem to require some knowledge of the personal Archetype we were made to be in relation with. So, it seems likely that a lack of either of these two interrelated forms of “true and sound wisdom” (to use Calvin’s words) could contribute to a crisis of faith.

In Mary Ann’s case, we can see how her knowledge of God and of herself seem thoroughly interrelated, for she insists that her sense of God’s displeasure with her is due solely to her wickedness and selfishness. She says it’s because he’s so good and so holy that he has to be displeased with her.

Knowledge of Others

In recent years, I’ve suggested that Calvin’s twofold model of wisdom could be enhanced with the inclusion of the knowledge of other humans (for example, in God and Soul Care). A vast amount of research over the past century has documented a profound correlation between the quality of one’s early social experiences and one’s adult self-understanding that probably could not be adequately appreciated in Calvin’s time.

In addition, what might be the influence of one’s experiences with an earthly father on one’s later experiences of our Father in heaven, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Ephesians 3:15)? Both fathers and mothers, after all, are images of God of some sort (Genesis 1:27; 9:6) — typological representations, as it were, of the form of God one later encounters, so that countless emotion-laden interactions with them would presumably shape one’s perceptions of the Archetype; and that is just what a much smaller, but still significant, number of studies have found (for one, Pehr Granqvist’s Attachment in Religion and Spirituality).

Among the conclusions that can be drawn from those studies are that adult believers are most likely to experience God as having a relational style that resembles that of their parents, though they are rarely aware of the resemblance; and adult children of believers are more likely to share their parents’ faith the more the parenting they experienced was characterized by both love (a generally positive emotional connection, responsiveness, and support) and structure (establishment of rules and standards and enforcement of consequences), rather than by structure alone (Doug Oman, “Spiritual Modeling and the Social Learning of Spirituality and Religion”).

As a result, I think we are warranted today in seeing that “true and sound wisdom” consists of three parts — the knowledge of God, the knowledge of self, and the knowledge of others. Furthermore, the fact that we grow up fallen ourselves, in families that vary considerably in the quality of the image-bearing of the parents, significantly affects all three aspects of our interrelational knowledge.

“The knowledge of God and the knowledge of oneself are intimately interwoven.”

So, we might ask Mary Ann some questions about her relationship with her parents, and we find out it was not so good. She made her parents angry a lot when she was little, she says, and they have been critical of her throughout her life, especially her dad. But she points out that they needed to be, because she was such a disobedient child — impossible to handle and difficult to be around.

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