I stumbled upon this book at the thrift store, and noted it was by J.B. Phillips. He was British and known for his translation of the New Testament into modern English years ago. This is an apologetic book, and I quickly perceived it is one with a “different” approach – and very glad I bought it!

Your God is too Small,
A Guide for Believers and Skeptics Alike
By J.B. Phillips, A Touchstone Book (Simon & Schuster), 1952/1998/2004

As I read it, I so appreciated it, and figured it is out-of-print. Sigh. (Too often I frustratingly find that really worthwhile books are no longer in print.) But when I saw the updated copyright and print dates in the front of my copy, I thought maybe it is still in print. It is!! Yeah! Despite its original printing in the mid-twentieth century it remains relevant – good books are timeless.

As the subtitle indicates, this book applies to both unbelievers and believers. Too many Christians have “small” views of God that can lead them astray into false beliefs. Essentially, Phillips goes through various ways we can approach God or think of God, and we have made God “too small” in one way or another. As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, I am trying to make my book reviews easier for myself (thus to hopefully write more of them) by not making them so thorough. With that, I will share some excerpts, chosen because they relate to a personal writing project.

Some can have a caricature of Jesus as meek and mild…these excerpts are from pages 28-30. Bold added by me throughout the various excerpts.

“The very word ‘Jesus’ conjures to many people a certain embarrassingly sweet tenderness (which incidentally could easily be put in its proper place by an intelligent adult reading of the Gospels)…The real beauty, love, and tenderness of Christ’s character are not, of course, being denied or minimized, but when one characteristic is caricatured at the expense of all the others we get a grotesque distortion which can only appeal to the morbidly sentimental.”

There are dangers to such a caricature or one-sided view…
“The second danger is that since it is axiomatic with Christians that God is love, this most terrible and beautiful of all virtues becomes debased and cheapened. It would seem that the ‘meek-and-mild’ conception of the Deity could readily be seen through, yet experience shows that it is operating beneath the conscious level of many Christian minds…such people find their actions, and even their thoughts, inhibited by a false consideration of what is ‘loving.’ They can neither use their critical faculties nor speak the plain truth nor meet their fellows ‘naturally’ for fear they sin against the meek-and-mild god….There is a further offshoot of the worship of this false god which must be mentioned. It is the sentimental Christian ideal of ‘saintliness.’ We hear, or read, of someone who was ‘a real saint: he never saw any harm in anyone and never spoke a word against anyone all his life.’ If this really is Christian saintliness then Jesus Christ was no saint. It is true that He taught men not to sit in judgment upon one another, but He never suggested that they should turn a blind eye too evil or pretend that other people were faultless…To speak the truth was obviously to Him [Jesus] more important than to make His hearers comfortable.”

Some can build up a mental picture of God from their knowledge and experience of man. Below is a brief excerpt from page 42. I pull this out to make my own point, while this section of the book takes it another way (which is good) but it stimulated my thinking about a related concern. Remember that Jesus is fully God and fully man. I observed this problem (a mental picture of God from our experience as a human) among liberal or progressive Methodists – who would say Jesus committed sin by how they interpreted a section in the Gospels – essentially forgetting about the full deity of Christ, conceiving Jesus as having the same sin as we do!

“…But only if we are modeling God upon what we know of man. That is why it is contended here that what at first sight appears to be a super-adequate idea of God is, in reality, inadequate – it is based on too tiny a foundation. Man may be made in the image of God; but it is not sufficient to conceive God as nothing more than an infinitely magnified man.”         

Finally, a last excerpt that relates to what I just shared, but from later in the book, page 87.

“It is by no means easy to make an accurate summary of the Character and Truth revealed by Jesus Christ, even if we do not omit those parts of the record which we personally think distasteful or discordant. In this ‘Christian’ country we nearly all have some preconceived, even though vague, idea of Christ-character and we need to be on our guard against ‘reading back’ into His deeds and words what is already in our minds about Him. Men have tamed and modified and ‘explained’ so much of His message that a great deal of its edge has been blunted. Nor does our reverence for the suburb literary quality of the familiar Authorized Version do anything but hinder. Truth that should be regarded as fact comes to be regarded as ‘a beautiful thought’: at best it is a ‘religious truth’ rather than a reliable and workable fact on which to act and build. A ‘fact’ of psychological research or of medical science for example is accepted by the mind as being more ‘true’ than a statement of Christ. Yet if Christ was God it should be the other way around.”

In other words, we can take things Jesus said or did that make us uncomfortable or even disturb or convict us – and “tame it” or “explain it away.” We put God in a box, a point the book also makes. But if Jesus was God in the flesh, it seems only “logical” that Jesus would say and do things we find…surprising, thought provoking, and challenging! Truth by its very nature will at times unsettle and expose us. Jesus was the Truth incarnate, and we shouldn’t be surprised that in His earthly ministry this made Him enemies as well as friends.

I highly recommend this thoughtful and insightful apologetic book. It is only 124 pages.

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