Book review: Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips

The fifty-first book in read in 2015 was Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips.  A slim volume first published in 1952, the book purports to examine unsatisfactory conceptions of God commonly held and contrast them with the sufficient God which Phillips claims Christianity, when rightly understood, provides.  I picked up the book as a result of reading Christianity on Trial, the best parts of which were references to this older text.

In the first half of the book, Phillips tears down false images of God, often held, if unexamined, by "churchy" people.  These include God as policeman, parent, or other authority figure, "Jesus, meek and mild" or "the pale Galilean," a pie-in-the-sky God to whom his followers can retreat from the difficulties of the world, and many others.  I found this part of the book the most enjoyable, if not particularly ground-breaking.

Phillips devotes the second half of the book to constructing a representation of God able to meet the needs of modern man.  As he starts from first principles and builds rather predictably toward the Incarnation, this part of the book was less interesting to me.

What I took from this book was something that the author never intended.  In rejecting the conception of God as "Grand Old Man," an old-fashioned type who was greatly influential in His day but out of touch with modernity, Phillips writes, "So great and far-reaching have been the changes in modern life that the young man of today cannot see any but the slenderest connection between what appears to him the slow simple and secure life of a bygone generation and the highly-complex fast-moving life of the world today."

The irony!  Because one could quite readily find such a sentence in a contemporary text, with "the slow simple and secure life of a bygone generation" applying to 1952, the very era which Phillips judged "highly-complex and fast-moving!"  May it be a lesson to us today, that there is no notion so transgressive, no technology so bleeding-edge, that a future generation won't find it backward and provincial.