I have been reading God Is The Gospel by John Piper. He talks of a radically man-centered view of God permeating our churches and that we don’t think we are loved unless we are made much of. “If you don’t make much of me you are not loving me”. He goes on to say:
But when you apply this definition of love to God, it weakens his worth, undermines his
goodness, and steals our final satisfaction. If the enjoyment of God himself is not the
final and best gift of love, then God is not the greatest treasure, his self-giving is not
the highest mercy, the gospel is not the good news that sinners may enjoy their Maker,
Christ did not suffer to bring us God, and our souls must look beyond him for
satisfaction.
I shared this with Jonas, and he read to me something he read a day or so earlier from a devotional by Richard Rohr:
The notion of spirituality of subtraction comes from Meister Eckhart, the medieval
Dominican mystic. He said the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than
it does with addition. Yet I think Christians today are involved in great part in a
spirituality of addition.
The capitalist worldview is the only world most of us have ever known. We see reality,
experiences, events, other people, things, - in fact, everything - as objects for
consumption. The nature of the capitalist mind is that things (and often people!) are
there for me. Finally even God becomes an object for our consumption.
Remember the bumper sticker “I found it”? The Holy One becomes “it,” a pronoun, a
thing. Even the Lord becomes a consumer object that I can privately posess. Now that
is surely heresy in any religion.
Those statements really caused me to think hard how the church (and myself at times) do evangelism. We sell a relationship with Jesus as a way to “give you peace…find purpose…be forgiven of all the bad things you’ve ever done…find joy…” Not that a relationship with Jesus doesn’t give you all that, I just think we sell God short. We have commodified Him to convince people of their need for a relationship with Him. As if God in the flesh and bone of Jesus isn’t enough to be worshipped. He gets short shrift in the whole process. I mean, think about it…he’s God, the creator of the universe, the beginning and the end, the always was and always will be. Is He not enough ? Do we have to make the fringe benefits of knowing him more important than…well…knowing Him?
It has caused me a lot of struggle and thought. Is knowing Him enough for me? I am trying to make it so.
