Book Review: Your God Is Too Small

Your God Is Too Small

J.B.Phillips

Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster /

New York 2004 Paperback

124 pp

            There’s a puzzling title—how can God be “too small”? Well, Phillips is absolutely right. The God people believe in can really be too small. For instance, to some people, God is a “resident policeman”, or the leftovers from their relationship with their parents, or a “grand old man in the sky”, or a “meek and mild” Jesus, or even “God-in-a-box”, who comes out at our beck and call. This is Part One, which Phillips labels “Destructive— Unreal Gods”.

        Part Two is “Constructive—An Adequate God”. Phillips talks about God, unfocussed, and then coming into focus in Jesus. He talks about “clues to reality”, such as the fact that matter is destructible and “reality” lies in another realm altogether; that beauty arouses a hunger and a longing which is never satisfied in this world; that there is something unavoidably attractive about the good (honesty, sincerity, faithfulness and so on).

        The latter part of the book raises some of the big questions—What sort of person is God? What is the purpose of life? What is really wrong with the world? What sort of people does God intend men to be? What are we to make of pain and disease, injustice and evil? What is the truth about sin and forgiveness?

        The very last pages touch on some things we can get excited about— “Satisfactory Reconciliation”, “The Abolition of Death”, and “Theory into Practice”. At last, the rubber meets the road, so-to-speak.

         John Bertram Phillips (1906-1982) was born in Barnes, Surrey, educated in London and Cambridge, and was ordained an Anglican clergyman in 1930. According to Wikipedia, “he found the young people in his church did not understand the Authorised Version of the Bible,” so he “used the time in the bomb shelters during the Blitz, to begin a translation of the New Testament into modern English.” After the war, he continued the work, with the support of C.S.Lewis, and published the complete New Testament in 1958. A few other of his books include, The Newborn Christian, Making Men Whole, When God was Man, and Appointment with God.