Dangers of Unitarians with Play-Doh, Stepfordizing God, and the Importance of "No"

I recall one woman who shared about growing up in a Unitarian Church. In Sunday School one week the teacher handed all the kindergartners in the class some Play-Doh and said, "Make God."

"That was the moment," she said, "that I knew something was wrong with all of this--even at the age of 4, I knew that making God out of Play-Doh just wasn't right."

With last week's thoughts still buzzing in my head about the necessity of a Jesus that ticks us off, I was listening something by Tim Keller. He suggested an even further function of bumping up against God's "no:" intimacy.

There was a book in the early 70's called "The Stepford Wives." The men in the community were slaughtering their wives and turning them into robots: yes, dear, was their basic disposition.

These men didn't want wives. They didn't want intimacy. They just wanted someone to boss around. Something to be used rather than engaged with.

Keller suggested that all of us would love to have a God who wants to share life with us intimately. But we also have this desire to "Stepford God" our God. Part of us wants us God made of Play-Do because we don't like a God that says to us: "no."

And we don't like a Bible that says to us "no." We'd prefer to do what Thomas Jefferson did: break out the white-out (or whatever he had back then) and choose for ourselves which part of Scripture is "real Scripture" and which parts we'd rather not deal with.

But apart from a "no," there is no way to get to intimacy. To have intimacy at any level, even our own self, is to engage in a relationship where "no" and "yes" are regularly exchanged. If there is no room for "no" then there is no room in our hearts for a real relationship with a real God.

We are, in the end, conflicted creatures--about all our relationships, God included. Our deepest longing is to be known and loved and yet it takes much more courage than any of us has to enter into relationships of true knowing and loving.

But God refuses to let us lobotomize him. He loves us too much to allow us to do so. He is not a God made by us out of Play-Doh. He will not simply agree with our every whim--whims which we imagine are self-generated but are more often products of our gene pool and personal history mixed with our most recent exposure to friends, enemies, and commercials .

And so he gives us Scriptures which we will push-back on. And he tells us "no" regularly. And we wrestle and engage and fight back. This is our prescription for health. There is no other way to true intimacy.