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Many have been raised with God-images, faces of the Divine, that have encouraged fear and guilt, not the safety of gracious, all-inclusive, and nonjudgmental love. Many persons will respect God, but they refuse to get close to God - No wonder!
My faith community and family gave me Jesus as a face of the Sacred loving, kind, and safe to get close to. Other faiths and devotees have different representations of the Absolute, which invite to intimacy with the Holy. These representations are masks of Infinity, even as the whole world is a sacrament of God.
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While we grow spiritually, this means openness to adopt new images of Spirit, drop previous ones, or have our images transformed - as has been true of my image of Jesus. We learn the image, being a mental picture, is that - an image, a representation. The image of Jesus given me is not Jesus, even as the image of God given me is not God. The image of Krishna is not Krishna. The image of Buddha is not Buddha. The image transforms due to our transformation.
That the God-image modifies does not mean its validity or usefulness is lost. For example, I sensed more intimacy with Jesus after my initial perception of Jesus was challenged in interaction with other faiths and engaging a contemplative life.
And while persons speak of the historical Jesus, in contrast to the Jesus of faith, the Jesus we know has been shaped by his followers. We cannot recover a historical Jesus. We only have the Jesus of faith. The same is true of the Buddha, Krishna, and other images of Grace through whom devotees worship the Absolute. This does not mean these images are a lie, only that they function as metaphors. Yet, also, in our lives, everyone is metaphorical, everything is metaphorical.
If Gautama Buddha, for example, were found to be a fiction, this would not at all affect the potential of the Buddha in inspiring Buddhists to walk the Buddha Way and connect with the Dharmakaya, or Absolute. The living Buddha within the heart of a Buddhist is far more important than any of the potential many Buddhas spoken of within the Buddhist path.
Once I asked a person who had taken my classes in contemplative prayer and contemplative living, "Who is the Buddha and Christ to you?" She said, "They are the same?" She had seen, within the silence, the wisdom that transcends the historical differentiation of Buddha and Jesus.
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The God-images are like stained-glass through which we look into the realm of the great, brilliant Void. The Void is the Absolute, God-beyond-"God" and is to the mind the ultimate Enigma. Hence, the image is a created form to relate with uncreate Spirit, what Joseph Campbell spoke of as a metaphor. As we love other humans by associating presence with a face, which speaks to us of their enigmatic being, God-images are faces of Life that live within us, to remind us of the Ineffable.
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