Pensees: The Average Person and the “Inside God”

The Average Person and the “Inside God”

The Average Person

The average person today lives in an atomistic, ahistorical, individualistic, hyper-reductionistic, narcissistic bubble in which he not only manifests marked ignorance of a larger reality beyond his immediate awareness, but erupts with hostility toward the suggestion that his personal and localized narrative is only an infinitesimally small part of a grander, larger, and unavoidably all-comprehensive metanarrative to which his narrative necessarily complies. (from my private venting on paper awhile ago)

The Inside God

We put all our eggs, so to speak, in the basket of God’s nearness, his relatedness, and we lose everything related to his otherness and transcendence. This yields a God who is familiar, safe, accommodating, but also very small. This is the “god” who is accessed through the self, who showers us with therapeutic benefits, ad whom we intuitively hear “speaking” in this or that event of life. . . This spirituality has all the marks of the postmodern disposition upon it. It is deeply subjective, nonmoral in its understanding, highly individualistic, completely relativistic, and insistently therapeutic. It has seized on some truths about the nearness of God, but it has done so on its own terms and in its own way. These truths then become perverted and misused and, in the absence of the balancing truths about God’s otherness, quite damaging.~ David Wells.

There is an “inside God,” yes, says David Wells. But what postmoderns have forgotten is that He is also the “outside God.”