"Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" Job 38:1-2
Perhaps David F. Wells's excellent new book God in the Whirlwind can best be summarized by a quote from the fifth chapter of the work, "The Splendor of Holiness," which forms the pivot point of the book:
"Those who live in this psychological world [our contemporary culture] think differently from those who inhabit a moral world. In a psychological world, we want therapy; in a moral world, a world of right and wrong and good and evil, we want redemption. In a psychological world, we want to be happy. In a moral world, we want to be holy. In the one we want to feel good, in the other we want to be good." (126)
Our modern intellectual and moral morass can hardly be better encapsulated than noting the shift in worldview inherent in Wells's description of the two worlds that have prevailed in human history. Ours is a psychological world, through and through, and Wells argues that this mentality has invaded the church just as pervasively as it has the broader secular culture. Neal Postman, no religious conservative, he, in Amusing Ourselves to Death makes the observation that where we once told, say, a drunkard to despise himself and find God we now tell him to find himself. In other words his salvation lies within himself and not outside of himself, as the moral view of the world would tell us.
As part of this psychologizing of the world, we now view God not as transcendent and holy but as immanent and loving only. What's more, when we say God is "love" we do not mean what the Bible means when it says the same thing; we mean that God would surely validate everything that we can think to do. [See my older post on Gene Robinson and this bastardized love here.] God would never interfere with our happiness, because he primarily wants us to be happy on our own terms. We have discarded the notion of human nature, replacing it with the self, stripping us of reference points outside of ourselves.
The purpose of Wells's book is to pull the church back from the places where it has bought in to this psychological world, reminding us of one very large and extremely salient fact: there is a God and he is objective. This God does not exist to conform to us, but we exist to conform to him. The world of the Bible is defined by the holiness of God, because it is in his holiness, just as much as his love, that he sent Christ to be our redeemer. We want God's love without his holiness, but the two are indivisible.
In the middle chapters of the book, Wells walks through historical understandings of salvation, with chapters on salvation under the old covenant, the better covenant of Christ, the true meaning of the love of God, the true power of his holiness, the wonder and awfulness of the cross, the miracle of justification through the imputation of Christ's righteousness, the miracle of sanctification through the new life we have in Christ, with concluding chapters on the importance and object of worship and the indispensability of gospel-centered service and the manner in which service authenticates our faith.
I have no real quibbles to make with the book. Sometimes I felt as if Wells lost the forest for the trees, and I had to go back and remind myself at various times why we were covering this or that particular thing. Popular level books struggle with the fact that the author knows (and has most likely written) about ten times what he can fit into the pages allotted. Therefore culling is necessary and sometimes the gaps show. But that is neither here nor there. This was not meant to be a comprehensive book on the subjects covered and Wells has pointed us to deeper reading if we care to take the time.
The two chapters that stood out the most to me were the middle chapters on the love and holiness of God. The subtitle of the book is "How the Holy-Love of God Reorients Our World," and the beauty and care of these chapters show that they are central not only positionally in the book but also to Wells's heart for the book. About the fusion of holiness and love embodied in the character of God, Wells writes, "He is simultaneously loving and holy in such a way that we never encounter his love without his holiness or his holiness without his love. . . It is not love in general, not just good will, not simply a general benevolence, not an undiscriminating affection, not romantic love, but love whose heart is sacrificial, self-emptying, and who connections are with what is moral" (86). In other words, God's love is inextricably connected with his moral perfection. We cannot separate the two, as our culture so desperately wishes we could.
The depth of God's moral holiness and otherness from us is terrifying to behold. When the prophet Isaiah is given a vision of God he is terrified and recognized immediately his own impurity. What jumps out about God to the prophet is his moral perfection, his cleanliness to use Isaiah's language. Our best moments are never freed from the discoloration of sin in the same way. We can never approach God on our own terms. He must condescend to us if we are to ever approach his throne of grace.
The central value of this book is the oft-needed, countercultural reminder that we are to submit ourselves to God, that we are horribly fallen creatures in desperate need of redemption, that the answer to our brokenness does not find answer in introspection but at the foot of the cross. Having just celebrated Easter this is all the more palpable. The cross is not a self-esteem lesson teaching us how much we are loved by God but a condemnation of our very nature and self. We need God, not a dumbed down god who wants us to be happy, but the only God who can reorient our lives around his holy-love. Mercifully, that is precisely who the God of the Bible declares himself to be.
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