Wednesday, December 27, 2006

David Wells: The Weightlessness of God

"In a psychologized culture such as ours, there is deep affinity for what is relational but a dis-ease (sp) with what is moral. This carries over into the church as an infatuation with the love of God and an embarrassment at his holiness. We who are modern find it easier to believe God is like a Rogerian therapist who emphatically solicits our knowledge of ourselves and passes judgement on none of it than to think that he could have had any serious business to conduct with Moses.

This peculiarity of the modern disposition, this loss of substance and vigor, betrays our misunderstanding of God's immanence, his relatedness to creation. We imagine that the great purposes of life are psychological rather than moral. We imagine that the great purposes of life are realized in the improvement of our own private inner disposition. We imagine that for those who love God and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for their satisfaction and the inner tranquillity of their lives. Modernity has secured the triumph of the therapeutic over the moral even in the church."

-from God in The Wasteland

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