Imago Dei and Faith Formation: Exploring the Relationship between God Representations and Personal Aspirations towards Flourishing - Lynne Taylor

Summary:

This project seeks to better understand the relationship between people’s perceptions of God and their aspirations towards living well. As well as contributing to theological and psychological theory, the research will help churches and Christians to understand how they can best support people towards flourishing. My PhD on contemporary faith formation found that recent converts to Christianity appreciated things about God’s character and actions that they aspired to be more like themselves: seeing God as loving, patient, accepting and forgiving; and desiring to display these attributes. This project extends that research, further exploring how people’s god concepts and god images relate to their desires to live well. It also builds towards my forthcoming research on pastoral care, considering how people’s god images and god concepts impact on their wellbeing. An overall goal is to help churches and Christians to support people to form healthy and integrated god concepts, god images, and personal aspirations assisting them towards flourishing.

The research explores whether the God representations of recently baptised adults correlate with attributes that they aspire to live out. It considers: What are the attributes of God that they appreciated, particularly as they decided to be baptised? Did they witness in other Christians’ lives those or other positive attributes? Did they and/or do they want to reflect those same or similar attributes? If so, did this contribute to their decision to be baptised?

This research is important because the Christian faith can be perceived and described (both internally and externally) in negative terms: overemphasising human sinfulness and deficiency. This is at odds with the psychological and theological insights and frameworks that helpfully emphasise human flourishing. I expect the research findings will highlight the importance in faith formation of a desire towards living better lives (and what I call relational authenticity) rather than merely a seeking to be saved from an inherent deficiency.

The research relates directly to the theme of the Fellowship, exploring how people conceive of and think about divine realities. It considers the relationship between people’s emotional and intellectual understandings of the divine, and their personal aspirations towards flourishing.