Stale images of God aren't working for today's seekers, says feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J. New ones are emerging from the experiences of all God's people-male and female.

When you whispered a prayer this morning while sipping your coffee and eating your toast, to whom exactly did you pray? An old man with a beard somewhere beyond the clouds? Sophia, otherwise known as Holy Wisdom? The Holy Spirit? Jesus?

Elizabeth Johnson wants to know. In her new book, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God (Continuum, 2007), she examines how Christians the world over have experienced the presence of God in new ways since the last half of the 20th century. Theologians agree, she says, that we're in a "golden age of discovery."

Even before her groundbreaking 1992 book, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (Crossroad), Johnson has been fascinated by how believers view God. "This might sound a little archaic," she told Fordham Online, "but I take my cue from Thomas Aquinas-the study of God and all things in the light of God. That articulates for me what theology is about."

A sister in the Congregation of St. Joseph who hails from Brooklyn, Johnson has been president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the American Theological Society. Winner of the U.S. Catholic Award in 1994, she served as a member of the national Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue, a consultant to the Catholic bishops' Committee on Women in Church and Society, a theologian on the Vatican-sponsored dialogue between science and religion, and on the Vatican-sponsored study of Christ and the world religions.

We're hearing a lot from atheists today who want to persuade us that God doesn't exist. What do you as a theologian think about that?
Atheists are rejecting the old images of God that don't really work that well even for Christians anymore. Just who is the God in whom Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), doesn't believe? I found a great quote from a review of his book, in which the reviewer said that Dawkins envisions God "if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized." This is not the Christian God.

Also a lot of the atheists writing today are scientists who just want to clear the deck of God so they can do their science. They're primarily opposed to the fundamentalist approach.

You've said that Christians today have many "stale, worn-out images of God that no longer satisfy." What are they?
We might be a bit beyond Michelangelo's image from the Sistine Chapel of the old man with the beard, but nevertheless, God is too often still a "chap." It's just assumed that God is this single individual with more power than anyone else, who intervenes now and then to get certain things done, and whom you need to satisfy on a number of levels. Again, this isn't the God of Christian revelation. When you hear talk radio or people in the press talking about God, this is the God they're talking about. This image is so unworthy of us.

My daily bread is teaching college students and graduate students, and I find among them that this image just doesn't work. Especially as they rebel against their parents, which one tends to do at that stage, it's even less attractive to have the super-parent idea of God. Both in this and other countries, I see a terrific hunger for a mature faith, but that's not being fed by much of the preaching that people hear, most of which also uses this stale idea of God.

Where did this image come from?
In the Middle Ages, or even at the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, ideas about God were drawn mainly from scripture and sacramental practice and from people's spirituality. Once the Enlightenment started in the 17th century, as Western philosophers began to throw off authority and to sort out ideas on their own, theologians adapted that method as well. They began to reason toward the fact of God's existence on the basis of natural phenomena, and they came up with the idea of a superior being at the apex of the pyramid of being. We call it the God of theism.

What is forgotten in this image is that this God became incarnate, that God is everywhere present in the Spirit, that God is filled with compassion. It became a much more distant God, while at the same time ironically not distant enough because God became just a more powerful player than we are.

This theistic God is also in competition with the world. It's a zero-sum game: more of God, less of me; more of God, less of the natural world; more of God, less of my own freedom. That is an aberration from the Christian understanding of God, which is that God set the world up in its own integrity and gives us our freedom. The more we have of God, the freer we are. All of this got lost after the Enlightenment.

Before the Enlightenment, were biblical images more alive in the church?
I don't want to paint any age as the golden era, including our own, although I think we're in a renaissance right now. If you look at the Middle Ages, you see God spoken of as "the fountain fullness overflowing." Richard of St. Victor speaks of the deep relationality that is at the heart of God.

Theologians in the Middle Ages wrote tomes on these ideas. We didn't have anyone doing that during the Enlightenment, with the exception of Cardinal John Henry Newman in England, but he went back and read the Fathers of the church, which caused the whole God question to open up for him again.

The Enlightenment didn't touch the East in the same way. Even today if you read Christian Orthodox theologians, you get a much different sense of the fullness of God's trinitarian life, inviting the world into communion. It's so different from this monarchical, solitary ruler God that we have, the God about whom we ask questions like, "Why is God letting this illness happen to me? What did I do that's wrong?"

What is attractive about this idea of God?
This all-powerful God can bless you or curse you; therefore you better please him to get the blessing and not the curse. That's a pattern of relationship that people have with their parents. It's familiar. It brings a certain measure of security. Also many people don't know any other God. They haven't been exposed to any other understandings.

There are some exceptions: You see some wonderful renewed parishes, for example, where people are living a more biblical approach to God. And this image of God is not widespread in the Hispanic community, where people have the sense of God walking with them. Their home altars and other expressions of their popular religion all indicate the closeness of God, a whole different sort of relationship.

Hispanic theologians today say that their community did not go through the Enlightenment. Conquistadors brought with them to the Americas late medieval Catholicism, which blended with indigenous religion. While Europe went through the Enlightenment, the believers in the Americas did not.

But in general I think the image of the theistic God is very widespread in our country. You hear it in sermons. And it's not just me saying this: The U.S. bishops have said that preaching in our country is in a very bad way in terms of the Catholic tradition. The late German theologian Karl Rahner, S.J. was saying the same thing back in the 1950s and '60s. He said that the words of the preacher fall powerlessly from the pulpit "like birds frozen to death and falling from a winter sky." I sit and listen to some sermons and I think, "Come on, think of all the wonderful things you could say with this text."

How does one's theology of God affect one's everyday life and faith?
If you're a believing person, you draw your deepest values from that. How you make moral decisions and vocational decisions, how you treat other people-it all flows from how you see God working.

None of the newer theologies of God are innocent in terms of politics. Every one of the ideas I explore in my book has political implications. They are concerned with power and who uses it and the powerless and how they are affected. So if you let any one of those theologies get into your understanding, you're going to vote differently, you're going to volunteer differently, you're going to use your money differently. Theology, I think, can be very powerful as a tool. It's my conviction that we all have a theology, so how it shapes your life depends on what it is.

What are some of the theologies of God that you've been investigating?
They include images from feminist theology, from Latin America and from Latinos in the United States, as well as the God who emerges from encounters with religious pluralism. Also God as envisioned in Europe after the Holocaust, God as seen through the African American experience, and several others.

Each of the new images of God I studied has biblical grounding, each refers in some way to the Trinity, each of them is oriented in some way to religious practice. All of them support the idea that God is deeply involved, deeply concerned with what happens in the world. If you love God, then your heart needs to be conformed and configured to God's heart. You have to feel that way toward the world as well. There will certainly be differences of opinion about how to do that.

You mentioned the Trinity. This solo God of the Enlightenment doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Trinity.

The Trinity has been just about lost forever in the West. Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in the Vatican, says the Holy Spirit is the Cinderella of theology in the West, in the kitchen doing all the work while the other two get to go to the ball.

The view of God in classical theism also does not see God through the lens of Jesus Christ, which is basic to the Christian understanding of God. Therefore it leaves out everything that is beautiful and attractive and that makes people want to be Christian. Jesus and his life, death, and Resurrection just don't factor in.

The new theologies from Africa and Latin America, on the other hand, are examples of a new kind of trinitarian theology. They don't let Christ and the Spirit drop away. They're rooted in an understanding of God related to the world. These understandings are so basic to Christian faith and tradition, I call them a gift to all the rest of us.