God Is Not Nice

God Is Not Nice: Rejecting Pop Culture Theology and Discovering the God Worth Living For by Ulrich L Lehner, 136 pages

In this short book, Ulrich Lehner observes that the polite, safe god worshiped in homes and churches across America (and around the world) is not the God of the Bible, of the creeds, or of the saints.  The true Jesus Christ is not a therapist, focused on making His devotees feel better about themselves, but the refiner's fire of Absolute Love who painfully burns away all that is impure.   This is the God of Scripture and Tradition, a God who is our happiness rather than a god who merely enables happiness, a God of sacrifice rather than sentimentality, "not someone who wants to give us a nice hug but one who expects us to become holy."

Ultimately, Lehner's God is a challenging God precisely because He is a personal God.  In a world where we have outsourced our love of neighbor to bureaucracies, it is easy to imagine that God's love is likewise impersonal and detached, omnipresent and objective.  This organized philanthropy is not the way of the love of God, the charity with which and to which he calls us - that is the passionate, frightening desire of a Bridegroom for His bride.