God Representations and Ideal Selves: Christians’ Aspirations Towards Imaging God

Psychological research on the self-concept shows people seek to acquire skills, traits, and behaviours that reflect their ideal selves. In Christian theology, humans are understood to be made in God’s image ( imago Dei ), suggesting a prototypical ideal self (albeit individually unique and marred by sin). Psychology distinguishes “God concepts” (intellectual understandings and beliefs about God) from “God images” (emotional experiences of God): “God representations” combine both. Recent converts to Christianity reported aspiring to reflect particular attributes of God, motivating their faith adoption. Similarly, recently baptised adults had ideal selves that matched the attributes of God that they appreciated. This consonance between Christian participants’ ideal selves and their God representations warrants further investigation, and this study similarly found matches between appreciated attributes of God and personal aspirations, reported qualitatively, as well as statistically significant positive correlations between ideal selves and God representations, suggesting congruence. Paired-samples t -tests and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests confirmed these similarities on a number of positive attributes. Implications and future research suggestions are discussed.