Wednesday, September 17, 2008

When the Consumer Is Sovereign

"...our generation is rapidly growing deaf to the summons of the external God. He has been so internalized, so tamed by the needs of religious commerce, so submerged beneath the traffic of modern psychological need that he has almost completely disappeared.

"All too offten, he now leans weakly on the church, a passive bystander, a co-conspirator in the effort to dismantle two thousand years of Christian thought about God and what he has declared himself to be. That is to say, God has become weightless.

"The church continues its business of satisfying the needs of the self -- needs defined by the individual -- and God, who is himself viewed and marketed as product, becomes powerless to change the definition of that need or to prescribe the means by which it might be satisfied.

"When the consumer is sovereign, the product (in this case God himself) must be subservient."

-- David Wells, "God in the Wasteland" p.101 (Eerdmans 1994)

1 comment:

EH said...

Just keep these challenging thoughts coming I know they are a direct reflection of your own reading and ponderings. Thank you for your passion to see God lifted back up (in our churches) to the role that He has never left and will always be in. For He is the I AM.