I just finished reading Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips (my cousin's husband - cousin-in-law? - loaned it to me when we were there over Thanksgiving), and I enjoyed it. It is embarrassing that it took a month to read it but you have to slowly digest a book like this (that is my story and I'm sticking to it).
The book is split into two parts, the first is a tearing down of incorrect ideas of God and the second is a building up of a more correct idea of God. In the first half of the book (the "destructive" part) there were times when I was cheering the death of someone else's sacred cow and then there were times when I was saying, "No, no, no!" and it was usually then that I realized my own sacred cow was being killed. That's usually how it is with these sorts of books.
One of the things I liked about the second half of the book is the way that Phillips uses the reality of what we know and what that must imply about the character of God to make God "big enough." This is a concept that I've tried to pass on to the class I'm teaching at church - specifically that we should apply the things we know about the world around us to God and discover if that matches what we know from the Bible, the two things interrelate. For example, the universe is immense and the world is complex beyond our wildest imagining. We have struggled for centuries to understand little bits and pieces of what surrounds us. A God who created all of this must be fantastically powerful and knowledgeable, in fact must be omnipotent and omniscient. The interesting thing is that the God of the Bible is actually big enough to meet these criteria, and the only time that we think this isn't the case is when we have made a smaller God of our own to replace him with (usually reading that God back into the Bible so that we can still feel "Christian").
I also appreciated the way that Phillips builds everything up from the basics and keeps everything grounded in the basics. Because he does this so well he keeps his eye on the ball, so the speak, when it comes to characterizing God, Christ, this life and the church. It is interesting how silly certain questions become when we keep the basics in view. Keeping the basics in view (and deriving them how he does) makes the following statement naturally follow from the previous part of the book:
Christianity is a revelation of the true way of living, the way to know God, the way to live life of eternal quality, and is not to be regarded as a handy social instrument for reducing juvenile delinquency or the divorce rate.
This conclusion follows from what he has previously written and the way that he juxtaposes Christianity in this statement with two things that are surely important and yet seem so insignificant when compared to the representation here of the eternal, omnipotent, omniscient I AM makes the point a powerful one when you come upon it at the end of the book.
In summary, Phillips seems to be making the very simple and powerful statement that once we understand who God is and place our faith in that God then that faith has to permeate into our understanding of all things (see Eccl. 12, Matt. 6:19-21, 25-33). This seems trite but it is only so because we tend to forget who it is that we worship. Starting at the beginning again is a powerful and useful thing. In this we have to remember who and what the beginning is. The beginning is God, someone we will never truly understand in an exhaustive way so building on that knowledge of God and applying that understanding to our life is, in fact, a lifelong process.
