J.B. Phillips - Your God Is Too Small: A Guide for Believers and Skeptics Alike

J. B. PHILLIPS died in 1983. A canon of the Anglican church, his works include The Newborn Christian and his highly acclaimed translation The New Testament in Modern English.

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T OUCHSTONE
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Copyright 1952
Copyright restored 1998 by Vera May Phillips
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

This Touchstone Edition 2004

T OUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Macmillan edition as follows:
Phillips, J. B. (John Bertram), 1906-1982.
Your God is too small.
p. cm.
1. God. I. Title.
BT101 .P48
231 52-12744

ISBN 0-7432-5509-7 (print)
ISBN 9-781-4391-4472-5 (eBook)

N O ONE is ever really at ease in facing what we call life and death without a religious faith. The trouble with many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas of God have remained largely static. It is obviously impossible for an adult to worship the conception of God that exists in the mind of a child of Sunday-school age, unless he is prepared to deny his own experience of life. If, by a great effort of will, he does do this he will always be secretly afraid lest some new truth may expose the juvenility of his faith. And it will always be by such an effort that he either worships or serves a God who is really too small to command his adult loyalty and co-operation.

It often appears to those outside the Churches that this is precisely the attitude of Christian people. If they are not strenuously defending an outgrown conception of God, then they are cherishing a hothouse God who could only exist between the pages of the Bible or inside the four walls of a Church. Therefore to join in with the worship of a Church would be to become a party to a piece of mass-hypocrisy and to buy a sense of security at the price of the sense of truth, and many men of goodwill will not consent to such a transaction.

It cannot be denied that there is a little truth in this criticism. There are undoubtedly professing Christians with childish conceptions of God which could not stand up to the winds of real life for five minutes. But Christians are by no means always unintelligent, nave, or immature. Many of them hold a faith in God that has been both purged and developed by the strains and perplexities of modern times, as well as by a small but by no means negligible direct experience of God Himself. They have seen enough to know that God is immeasurably bigger than our forefathers imagined, and modern scientific discovery only confirms their belief that man has only just begun to comprehend the incredibly complex Being who is behind what we call life.

Many men and women today are living, often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish or, as the old-fashioned would say, godless, but because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough to account for life, big enough to fit in with the new scientific age, big enough to command their highest admiration and respect, and consequently their willing co-operation.

It is the purpose of this book to attempt two things: first to expose the inadequate conceptions of God which still linger unconsciously in many minds, and which prevent our catching a glimpse of the true God; and secondly to suggest ways in which we can find the real God for ourselves. If it is true that there is Someone in charge of the whole mystery of life and death, we can hardly expect to escape a sense of futility and frustration until we begin to see what He is like and what His purposes are.

Your God Is Too Small

T O MANY people conscience is almost all that they have by way of knowledge of God. This still small voice which makes them feel guilty and unhappy before, during, or after wrong-doing, is God speaking to them. It is this which, to some extent at least, controls their conduct. It is this which impels them to shoulder the irksome duty and choose the harder path.

Now no serious advocate of a real adult religion would deny the function of conscience, or deny that its voice may at least give some inkling of the moral order that lies behind the obvious world in which we live. Yet to make conscience into God is a highly dangerous thing to do. For one thing, as we shall see in a moment, conscience is by no means an infallible guide; and for another it is extremely unlikely that we shall ever be moved to worship, love, and serve a nagging inner voice that at worst spoils our pleasure and at best keeps us rather negatively on the path of virtue.

Conscience can be so easily perverted or morbidly developed in the sensitive person, and so easily ignored and silenced by the insensitive, that it makes a very unsatisfactory god. For while it is probably true that every normal person has an embryo moral sense by which he can distinguish right from wrong, the development, non-development, or perversion of that sense is largely a question of upbringing, training, and propaganda.

As an example of the first, we may suppose a child to be brought up by extremely strict vegetarian parents. If the child, now grown adolescent, attempts to eat meat he will in all probability suffer an extremely bad attack of conscience. If he is brought up to regard certain legitimate pleasures as worldly and reprehensible he will similarly suffer pangs of conscience if he seeks the forbidden springs of recreation. The voice will no doubt sound like the voice of God; but it is only the voice of the early upbringing which has conditioned his moral sense.

As an example of the second influence on the moral sense, we may take a sportsman who has been trained from his youth that it is wrong to shoot a sitting bird. Should he do so, even accidentally, he will undoubtedly feel a sense of shame and wrong-doing; though to shoot a bird flying twenty yards in front of the muzzle of his gun will not produce any sense of guilt. His conscience has been artificially trained, and it is thus that taboos are maintained among the civilized and uncivilized alike.

Any sport, and indeed many professions, can provide abundant instances of the moral sense trained to feel that certain things are not done. The feeling of guilt and failure produced by doing the forbidden thing may be quite false, and is in many cases quite disproportionate to the actual moral wrong, if indeed there be any.