The Outside God

In his book God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Eerdmans, 1994), David F. Wells asks a question “Can the church survive the modern world and the worldliness that it brings?” His argument is that in order for the church to survive, the church must recover the reality and character of God. What we need to recover is not God the Immanent, but God the transcendent. Wells is very against the inside god whom Christians tend to manipulate and turn him into their personal/privatized god. This god is no longer the biblical God. The reality and character of God, as Wells proposes, is the outside God and his holiness.

The God whom we believe and follow is the biblical God “who was there before the first foundations of the modern world were laid and who will be there long after it has self-destructed or been overwhelmed” (p. 120). He is “the stranger in our world” (p. 137). He is the outside God who challenges and confronts us. His challenge and confrontation, however, are out of his divine love towards us. We understand his love in light of his holiness in relation to human sinfulness. Unless the church places the biblical emphasis of the holy God in its rightful place, she loses its distinctive identity and function in the life of Christians and in the wider society. Without the holiness of God, the church is flat. Without the holiness of God, sin is not confronted, and it is freely subjected to one’s moral preference. Sin loses its seriousness. When the outside God is marginalized and privatized as our insider god, grace becomes cheap grace. We only receive his grace, but fail to respond to it with sacrificial thankfulness, for the inside god is our idol, which, only satisfies us, never demands from us. 

“You must be holy because I am holy” (1 Pet. 1:16; Lev. 11:44).

An excerpt:

“Without the holiness of God, sin has no meaning and grace has no point, for it is God’s holiness that gives to the one its definition and to the other its greatness. Without the holiness of God, sin is merely human failure but not failure before God, in relation to God. it is failure without the standard by which we know it to have fallen short. It is failure without the presumption of guilt, failure without retribution, failure without any serious moral meaning. And without the holiness of God, grace is no longer grace because it does not arise from the dark clouds of judgment that obscured the cross and exacted the damnation of the Son in our place. Furthermore, without holiness, grace loses its meaning as grace, a free gift of the God who, despite his holiness and because of his holiness, has reconciled sinners to himself in the death of his Son. And without holiness, faith is but a confidence in the benevolence of life, or perhaps merely confidence in ourselves. Sin, grace, and faith are emptied of any but a passing meaning if they are served from their roots in the holiness of God” (pp. 144-145).