God of Our Fathers

Book excerpt: Protestantism today has an idolatry problem. Not merely in the sense of worshipping false gods-of pleasure, wealth, or politics-but in the sense of worshipping the Triune God of Scripture according to images and ideas of our own devising. Whether it's a God who suffers and changes alongside his creatures, or a "Trinitarian circle dance" of divine personalities, or a hierarchically-arranged Trinity that serves as a blueprint for gender relations, modern evangelical theology has strayed far from historic Christian orthodoxy. Needing a God that can be put on a greeting card or in a praise song, our idolatrous hearts shrink the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob down to size, and make him more like us. Amidst this scramble to make God more relevant, we seem to have forgotten that the only God truly capable of saving us is a God who is radically other and transcendent, far above our imaginings. This incomprehensible God is not the God of the philosophers, as modern revisionists frequently charge, but the God of the Bible. The essays in this volume, written by scholars and pastors deeply concerned for the life of the church, seek to retrieve and defend the tradition of classical theism as the historic Protestant faith, rooted in Scripture, philosophically coherent, and still relevant to the needs of the church today.