Confessing Evangelical

Craig draws our attention to a post by Justin Taylor entitled When People Are Big and God Is Small, which summarises a book of the same name by Ed Welch which seeks to encourage Christians to fear God rather than human beings.

Now of course, as a good Lutheran I'm all in favour of people being encouraged to "fear and love God...". Whether yet another evangelical n-step programme (with n=7 in this case) is the way to go about it is a different matter. But the point I really wanted to pick up was this question of people's God being too "small".

Asserting that God (as conceived by many Christians) is "too small" has been a common theme ever since JB Phillips published Your God Is Too Small in 1952. Many people assert that the remedy to Christianity's contemporary ills - our triviality, our lack of holiness of living, our worldliness - is a recognition that our God is "bigger" than we give him credit for.

There is something in that - which is why reading the psalms regularly is such a healthy practice - but what this brought to my mind was a post by Revd Joel Brondos on his blog a couple of years ago, where he took the contrary view and claimed that the problem is rather that Your God is too Big (the original post has now disappeared; the link is to the Internet Archive cache). Revd Brondos writes:

Our comfort is not that God is big. Our comfort (and even greater awe) is that the big God became small. He became small like us, taking on flesh and blood for our sakes. And He got even smaller than that. Humiliation can make us feel so small that we could sit on the edge of a dime and swing our legs, but His humiliation was even smaller in the eyes of the world which rejected Him.

And as it was in Bethelehem and at Calvary, so it is for us here, today:

He who became small for our sakes now comes to us in small ways (in the eyes of the world). A little water and a few words. A little bread, a little cup; His body and His blood. We are too small for Him to come to us in His bigness. It is gospel where He comes to us in the small ways of Word and Sacrament.

We should resist the temptation to make God bigger by our own efforts:

God did not become small with the intent that we should make Him bigger by our rituals. Our greatest delight is in the small things which are so small that heaven and earth cannot contain them. That is to say: a smallness that is greater than greatness, a foolishness that is wiser than wisdom, and a weakness that is stronger than strength so that where people are looking for God in greatness, wisdom and strength, they will miss Him altogether. Not in the wind. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire. These were too big for Elijah. But in the still, small whisper...

In conclusion, Revd Brondos asks us to choose whether we wish to confront the big God in all his awesome holiness, or the small God in his gracious tenderness:

If you wish to make God big, you are free to do so. If you wish to confront the Lord God in His awesome splendor and majesty, you are welcome to it. (Compare each instance in the Bible where the Lord revealed Himself in His glory and you will find people on their faces in the dirt.)

But as for me and my house, we will just congregate where two or three gather in His Name, where [we find] Christ the Lord who came in the flesh to finite creatures by becoming graciously small in a little town of Bethlehem, and who defends us by felling the old evil foe with one little word.

As Martin Luther put it, "I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ": a God small enough to fit in a manger, on a cross, in a tomb, and in bread and wine.