Ulrich Lehner is not an author I would normally read. He’s a German-born, devout Catholic. However, I was leafing through a catalog and saw a book of his that looked intriguing, Think Better: Unlocking the Power of Reason. When I checked into it, I saw a way more provocative title of another of his books: GOD IS NOT NICE: Rejecting Pop Culture Theology and Discovering the God Worth Living For.
Lately, I’ve had this burning feeling that I can be guilty of presenting a version of God that fails to reflect the Biblical record, a version that might be too “nice.” That said, I accepted Lehner’s challenge, and I’d love to tell you about it.
From the get-go, I should say this: don’t hear what he’s not saying!
When Lehner says God is not “nice,” he is NOT saying what we might presume to be the opposite: God is mean.
Instead, he wants to draw our attention to aspects of the transcendent, untameable, awe-inducing God of the universe. Our God is mysterious beyond human grasp, unpredictable by human standards, and disruptive of human plans. God is not “nice,” but is is radical, all-consuming, and Lehner’s favorite descriptor: adventurous.
Lehner laments that in our current era, God is too often presented as “nice”—one who is loving, but loving in such a way that is pleasant and asks little of us. Thus, Lehner is not surprised that people are uninterested in such a tame, worldly god. Thankfully, the real God is, as the subtitle says, “the God worth living for.”
This then leads to Lehner’s goal: to convince the reader that God is not nice—nor should we want God to be nice.
In each of the 11 chapters, he attempts to repudiate a facet of the “nice” God. Below, I present 1-2 sentence summaries of each (and yes, the exclamation points are intentional):
Chapter 1: The God of Creation — Here, he dissects a ‘sentimentalism’ that causes us to chase our favorite feelings instead of encountering the REAL God of creation!
Chapter 2: The God of No Use — While the “nice” god is useful (ensuring positive outcomes), it is dangerous to define God by His usefulness. Belief in God does not exist to keep crime rates down or support mental health; we are to live by the encounter with Christ, regardless of where that transformative encounter takes us!
Chapter 3: The God of Our Imagination — One facet of the "nice" god is that such a God is full of grace, but we often omit the "fine print" about grace: To experience it in full, we need to surrender in full, which is not comfortable at all. We have to reimagine what grace means!
Chapter 4: The God of Thunder — While the "nice" god never inconveniences us, the real God can enter our life like thunder and lightning, interrupting all our well-laid plans!
Chapter 5: The God of Terror — The "nice" god was created when the God of the Old Testament was 'flattened', 'trashed', and otherwise denigrated. But if we re-read the OT, we might just find a truly transcendent God, who is mysterious, unpredictable, and adventurous!
Chapter 6: The God of Surrender — In this chapter, he's trying to dissect what it means that God is loving. The "nice" god does not require much of us, but the real God asks for (a) a love that surrenders and (b) provides us with a love that desires and empowers transformation!
Chapter 7: The God of Intimacy — He pleads with us that God wants deep intimacy but that the "nice" god allows us to keep our masks on—i.e., the “nice” god requires minimal vulnerability!
Chapter 8: The God of Consolation — The "nice" god is insufficient for consoling us in our pain—the pain of a broken world post-Genesis 3!
Chapter 9: The God of Incarnation — In this chapter, he takes on some superficial versions of God that only serve our pursuit of health and well-being. Instead, we are called to relationship with the true God, the incarnate one who suffers with us and calls us to emulate his sacrificial life!
Chapter 10: The God of Rebirth — This chapter repudiates the idea of a "nice" god who looks at our sin and merely gives us a hug. Instead, God desires outcomes that are great, but not “nice”—transformation and full-on rebirth!
Chapter 11: The Adventurous God — As the title of this chapter suggests, this brief chapter is making the claim that God is not "nice," but adventurous.
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In the end, I loved the challenge from Lehner.
While it is true that God is more loving loving and merciful than we often imagine, we need to be wary of carrying the image of a “nice” god conveyed by ‘pop culture theology.’ That image drains the true God of his transcendent power and might, which has the potential to rob us of true consolation, transformation, and adventure. Let’s not settle for the “nice” god, when the real God is calling to us!
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If you want more detail, see my extensive notes on the book HERE.
A Connection with Amos
In “Chapter 5: The God of Terror,” Lehner makes some connections that can be helpful when we read prophets like Amos.
He observes that when we assume the “nice” God, it causes us to pursue “an understandable God who speaks as clearly as a scientist and is as amiable as a car salesman” (60). When we do that, we take an adventurous God who transcends humanity and make him a tame God, domesticated to be a “heavenly social worker.” Lehner sees the God of the Bible as unpredictable and mysterious while “the modern God of Christianity is predictable, like the outcome of a known experiment” (61).
He suggests that we need to recover what Rudolf Otto calls a sense of “The Holy.” A truly holy God is irrational—not in the sense of contradicting logic, but in the sense of being beyond the grasp of human language and imagination.
In the same vein, we would do well to recover the eymah of God—i.e., the fear of God (Ex. 23:27).
Taken together, we can read with new lenses: Although we are sometimes troubled by some of the OT narratives that convey God's anger, "ancient readers did not find these accounts contradicted the goodness and beauty of God, because they were not interested in such compatibility questions. For them, the wonder of God, the awe-inspiring experience of the divine, was the center of the story" (64).
In other words, if we could be like ancient readers and recover a sense of the holiness of God and the fear of God, we would be less troubled by some of the Old Testament passages that convey a God of tremendous power, even terror.
AND, despite the fear and trembling this induces, we're actually attracted to this transcendent, awe-inducing God, are we not? The tame, “nice” god barely seems to care. But the God who spoke through Amos is distraught about injustice and a world that fails to reflect divine desires.
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… something to chew on. For more, checkout my notes on ch. 5 within my notes on the whole book.
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What a good review. You have piqued my interest for sure.