Talking about God with the Enneagram

The Enneagram is a tremendous tool at our disposal in our spiritual journey. It helps us uncover our hidden gifts, and it exposes the blind spots that sabotage us. Not only this, it can help us be better listeners of the people around us—whether our co-workers, our partners, and even our kids. But wait, there’s more: the Enneagram can also provide us language and an imagination for talking about God.

Stand in the street outside my house and you’ll get one perspective on my house. Stand in my backyard, and you’ll get a very different view. My next-door neighbor, through her kitchen window, sees still a different view. Where we stand determines our perspective.

Likewise, where we are on our spiritual journey can limit our language for God. If you can imagine the Enneagram as a giant circle, and your type is where you stand, this can represent your limited view of yourself, the world, and God. Starting here, we can start to see how much more there is to see.

Using the Enneagram as a basis for our language about God can reveal to us why we experience God the way that we do. For better and worse, we interpret our experience of God through the ways we’re wired. Sometimes, this can be helpful. If you’re dominant in Type 2, you may see God as a caring parent. Or if you’re dominant in Type 1, you may first see God as a righteous lawgiver. 

Scripture tells us were made in the image of God. Genesis 1 describes the collective, plural humanity. We all together are made in God’s image. To talk about God with the Enneagram types is to see the pure gift in each type, whole and healthy.

God as Type 1

“You are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Type 1 describes the God who establishes a good order to the universe. Genesis 1 describes a God who puts everything in its right place. The God who provides the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai illustrates the One-ness of God. Furthermore, when Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount riffs on the Torah but then goes a step further, he illustrates the standards and principles of Type 1. I was once part of a church where during Sunday worship, during the offering, the pastor would say, “God is good.” And the congregation would respond, “All the time.” This is the God who is Type 1.

God as Type 2

“Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being” (Philippians 2:7).

Type 2 shows the self-giving love, compassion, and nurture of God. When the Old Testament prophets use mother imagery to talk about God, it illustrates the Two-ness of God. But nowhere is the Two more evident than on the cross. The language “he gave up” in Philippians 2, is the word kenosis in Greek. It means “to empty.” The Incarnation is the Two-ness of God on full display.

God as Type 3

“My Father is always working, and so am I.” (John 5:17).

When the psalmist talks about the God who “never slumbers or sleeps,” this is Type 3 in God. This is the God who is always at work. This is God in action—the God who creates, who sustains, who redeems. God takes initiative, and God is the primary actor in Scripture. God is the subject of all of the verbs. This is the Jesus, who in Matthew’s gospel, preaches, teaches, and heals. This is the Three-ness of God.

God as Type 4

“For we are God’s masterpiece” (Ephesians 2:10).

Abraham Heschel writes how the prophetic books communicate the pathos of God—the joy, the sorrow, the anger. They filled to the brim with the emotions of God. While the historical books tell the story of God and Israel, the prophets show us how God feels throughout the story. Furthermore, the Old Testament repeats again and again the specialness of God. Yahweh is unique and unlike any other deity they may have heard about. In Jesus, we see God’s Four-ness in the creative ways he teaches, like with the parables. The crowds are in awe of Jesus because they’ve never heard anyone else like him.

God as Type 5

“For the Lord sees every heart and knows every plan and thought” (1 Chronicles 28:9)

When we talk about the wisdom of God, we talk about Type 5 as it relates to God. Genesis 16 tells the story of Hagar, Abraham’s servant who has his son. When she has a face-to-face encounter with God, she walks away saying, “You are the God who sees me.” This is the Five-ness of God. Again in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeatedly talks about God as “Your Father who sees everything.” That God in Jesus walks the Judean countryside as a wise rabbi perfectly captures God’s Five-ness.

God as Type 6

“God is faithful” (1 Corinthians 10:13).

For generations, Old Testament scholars have talked about how “covenant” is the over-arching theme of the Scripture. God is a God who makes promises and who then keeps promises. This is the Six-ness of God. Fidelity, or faithfulness, is indeed a major theme in the Old Testament story. God is faithful to Israel, but Israel’s greatest struggle is being faithful to God. The word “love” as it’s used in the Old Testament is hesed, which may better be understood as “covenant loyalty.” This is the rugged commitment embodied by Type 6.

God as Type 7

“The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10).

One of the first fruits of the Holy Spirit that Paul lists in Galatians 5 is joy. Jesus says, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” In fact, in John’s gospel, Jesus’ very first public miracle is turning water to wine at a wedding, so that the party doesn’t stop. This is the Seven-ness of God. God is a God of abundance. The prophet Zephaniah says about God, “He will take great delight in you, [and] will rejoice over you with singing.” And when Isaiah and Jesus and John each talk about the end of everything, they describe it as an epic feast. All this illustrates Type 7 in God.

God as Type 8

“The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold” (Psalm 18:2).

Type 8 shows us the God of the Exodus. When God promises to Moses that he is on the way to rescue his people, it should hit us with all the dramatic impact of a Liam Neeson speech from one of his action movies. God then spectacularly dismantles the entire Egyptian ideological system piece by piece in the ten plagues culminating then in the victorious moment at the Red Sea. This is God the Type 8. This is the God who brings justice. In Jesus, we see this in his most mic-dropping moments with the Pharisees, like when he calls them a “brood of vipers,” or pretty much the entire rant that makes up Matthew 23.

God as Type 9

“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two trips one and has destroyed the barrier, the divine wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14).

The culmination of all God’s creative work in Genesis is Sabbath rest. It’s the goal of God’s creation, and it shows us the Nine-ness of God. What God wants for the world is shalom—peace, rest, flourishing, enough. To read this into all the New Testament’s references to “peace,” we see how central this is to God’s identity. As Luke tells the story, this shalom/peace/Nine-ness is all over the stories of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection.

“In the beginning, God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since,” goes the popular Mark Twain-ism. And it’s true. Left to our own devices, we can’t help but squeeze the transcendent God into the image we see in the mirror. That’s one reason for the Old Testament prohibition against idols. 

Yes, we can experience something familiar about God. But there is also very much about God that is unfamiliar. And so the Enneagram is just one way of acknowledging and exploring the great diversity that is the Creator.