Looking for a gentle God

By Kurt Armstrong and ChristianWeek | October 19, 2010

Like a lot of people who grew up in evangelical circles, I've never been able to shake the feeling that God is angry with me. From as early as I can remember, I've known that I'm a sinner and therefore unacceptable to a holy, almighty God. Jesus, as God's last-ditch cosmic rescue effort, is my admission pass through the pearly gates, but deep down I still believe God is perpetually peeved at me for all the bad things I do and the even worse things I think.

My deep-rooted sin-anxiety makes Doug Frank's A Gentler God a bit hard to get my head around. In the first half of the book, he weaves together his personal experience of growing up evangelical with an abridged version of 20th century evangelicalism and its pursuit of intellectual credibility. He concentrates on fundamentalist evangelicals and authors like Carl Henry and John Stott and evangelists like Billy Graham, and the language they use to describe God's power and holiness. The result, he says, is a portrait of God as harsh and demanding, supposedly loving but in a way that makes all of us sinners feel really, really bad.

Frank's personal story struck a chord with my own experience of growing up evangelical, and it made me eager to get to the good news in the section of the book.

Part two looks at Jesus—human, fragile, weak and vulnerable—for a more true understanding of who God really is. Rather than setting the moral and spiritual bar forever out of reach, Jesus brings God right down close and makes it safe for us to be flawed, mistaken, broken, lonely and doubtful. Frank's portrait of Jesus is a rich, challenging antidote to the browbeating, conformist demands of conservative evangelicalism. He makes God real, opening up the possibility that I could be real, too, and really loved.

The idea that God truly loves me, and maybe even genuinely likes me, seems pretty basic, but the demanding, righteous God is so firmly lodged in my spiritual imagination that the good news doesn't sink in easily. I read an article by Doug Frank 15 years ago, and he was writing along these lines back then. Now, in his late 50s, Frank's still writing about the same thing. Maybe it will take me just as long to find the gentler God I'm looking for.