Anorexic God

A great statement from David Wells in his book God in the Wasteland:

It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He had lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God's existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative that their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgments no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers' sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life.

God created us in His image, but humanity has constantly engaged in a reversal of the creative act: man creating God in his image. The gods of ancient Greek and Rome are alive and well as we develop concepts of deity which reflect our own depravity and weakness. It makes us feel more comfortable about "religious" things.

We have created an anorexic God, malnourished by our starving imaginations. It is no wonder that we have lost the concept of the glory of God. He is not truly awesome. Feats accomplished during the X-Games are awesome. God is awesome in that vein. Cool. Fun to look at. But not jaw-dropping in majesty. His wrath is not terrifying. He does not drive people to their knees.

Once we rediscover that God, we will rediscover genuine faith and the God of truth.