"Only another child. And not a pleasant child." (J.B. Priestley, "The Magicians")
"US President Trump posted an AI-generated photo showing himself as the Pope ahead of this week’s gathering of cardinals to choose a new leader of the 1.4-billion-strong Catholic Church. It came just days after he joked he would “like to be Pope”. The White House then reposted it on its official X account."
www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/us-news/trump-news/2025/05/04/donald-trump-popeFormer Maryland Governor and Republication National Convention chair Michael Steele said Trump was like a 10-year-old child. And there is truth in that.
The language that Donald Trump uses when he posts on Social Media does show an infantile response, especially when he suffers any discomfort and criticism. He rants away like a ten year old child. This is not adult language, it is the language of a playground bully who has been caught out, and who lashes out as a form of defence.
Just look at this:
“They are Negative Criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I WIN ELECTIONS BIG, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse. They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and there is nothing that anyone, or anything, can do about it. THEY ARE SICK, almost only write negative stories about me no matter how well I am doing (99.9% at the Border, BEST NUMBER EVER!), AND ARE TRULY THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
This is not the language of an adult. It is the rant of a child.
Peter Pan was, famously, the boy who never grew up. But while Donald Trump is a supreme example of this, he is not the only one. All of us, in one form or another, can fail to develop and grow in our personal life.
Many of those who have lost their faith, or even churchgoers themselves, often have a very naive belief. The folk-religion which puts "heaven" above somewhere, or thinks of an image of God as an old man with a white beard somewhere in the sky still retains a potency.
It is hardly surprising that Bishop John Robinson in "Honest to God" suggested that some of this imagery has lost its potency and we should try to find new images of God. Of course, his well intentioned book was rather spoiled by lurid tabloid headlines - "Bishop says our image of God must go"!
Often those who reject that image come up with something impersonal but drawn from elements of the known. C.S. Lewis commented that all God-language is metaphorical, and discarding one image does not mean we are discarding imagery:
"A girl I knew was brought up by ‘higher thinking’ parents to regard God as a perfect ‘substance’; later in life she realized that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding (to make matters worse, she disliked tapioca).”
‘I don’t believe in a personal God,’ says one, ‘but I do believe in a great spiritual force’. What he has not noticed is that the word ‘force’ has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation…says another ‘I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all’ — not noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas of fluid.”
And the same is true with images of Jesus. How many people's image of Jersey is influenced by art - white, Anglo-Saxon, perhaps looking American or British, like Jeffrey Hunter or Robert Powell?
In that respect, "The Chosen" - the TV show depicting events in the life of Jesus - is rather a breath of fresh air. The cast do not speak with an American accents but those depicting Jews (including the disciples) sound more Middle Eastern. The actor who plays Jesus is of mixed parentage - his father was born in Egypt and is of Syro-Lebanese descent; his mother is from Ireland. He does not fit the stereotype.
Of course "The Chosen" is not perfect, but by giving us a rather different Jesus, it challenges our everyday images. In order not to remain with childish images of faith, we need this challenge. We need to rethink our images when they remain those we grew up with as children. And we certainly need to break away from the images invoked by some popular hymns which we sang as children, and which, to be honest, are images which perpetuate infantile depictions of God:
"The cattle are lowing, The Baby awakes, But little Lord Jesus, No crying He makes"
"Christian children all must be. Mild, obedient, good as He"
"The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high and lowly, And ordered their estate."
C.S. Lewis, writing in "A Grief Observed", put this breaking of the images and remaking them very well.
“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”
What he writes reminds me of his depiction of Aslan, who is encapsulated for me as an image of God in the simple phrase "he is not a tame lion".
Or as, the Bible puts it: “Behold, I make all things new.”