God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy Love of God Reorients Our World
Overview
Building on years of research, writing, and cross-cultural ministry, renowned author and theologian David Wells calls our attention to that which defines God’s greatness and gives shape to the Christian life: the holy-love of God.
In God in the Whirlwind, Wells explores the depths of the paradox that God is both holy and loving, showing how his holy-love provides the foundation for our understanding of the cross, sanctification, the nature of worship, and our life of service in the world. What’s more, a renewed vision of God's character is the cure for evangelicalism’s shallow theology, with its weightless God and sentimental gospel.
Written by one of evangelicalism’s most insightful minds, this book will help you stand firm in your faith despite the changing winds and raging storms of the modern world.
- Explores the character of God by taking a journey into "the Father's heart
- Sums up the character of God as his "holy-love"
- Examines the consequences of God's "holy-love" for living in the 21st century
- God Our Vision, Culture Our Context
- The Gospel across Time
- So Much More
- The Love of God
- The Splendor of Holiness
- A Sight Too Glorious
- Walking with God
- Come, Let Us Bow Down
- And, Come, Let Us Serve
Top Highlights
“That is why we must come back to our first principles. And the most basic of these is the fact that God is there and that he is objective to us. He is not there to conform to us; we must conform to him. He summons us from outside of ourselves to know him. We do not go inside of ourselves to find him. We are summoned to know him only on his terms. He is not known on our terms. This summons is heard in and through his Word. It is not heard through our intuitions.” (Page 32)
“They are, first, that in our minds we have exited the older moral world in which God was transcendent and holy, and we have entered a new psychological world in which he is only immanent and only loving.” (Page 25)
“We assume we know what God’s love is because it connects with our experience in a way that many of his other attributes do not.” (Page 79)
“This is the direction in which our culture is pushing us: God does not interfere. He is a God of love and he is not judgmental.” (Page 20)
“These attributes of God—eternality, omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence—are entirely without parallel in our personal experience. We know nothing like these attributes in ourselves. However, God’s love is in a different category. With this we can connect, because here he seems to be much more like us.” (Page 80)
Rich, deep, and faithful—God in the Whirlwind invites us to come before the very heart of God. No theologian understands the modern world better than David Wells, yet no theologian uses the modern world more powerfully to wrench us back to truths that are foundational and never to be superseded by the latest anything. To be read slowly and with prayer.
Os Guinness, author, The Call
In this important book, David Wells begins the process of bringing his influential critique of late modern culture and the church down into practice. Here we have a ‘practical theology’ for conducting the church’s life based on the reality of a God of ‘Holy-love.’ This particular way of understanding and preaching the doctrine of God, Wells believes, protects the church from either being co-opted by the culture or becoming a ghettoized subculture. Decades of teaching theology is boiled down here into accessible, practical chapters. I’m glad to recommend this volume.
Timothy Keller, Founding Pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City; Chairman and Cofounder, Redeemer City to City
Almost fifteen years ago, I enrolled at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, in large part so I could learn from David Wells. His books opened my eyes to a host of ecclesiastical problems and to a lost world of glorious truth. As a student, I continued to learn from his deft analysis and careful theological critique. Now it’s my pleasure to commend this terrifically unique book, a fitting capstone to all that he has been building in the last two decades. Part biblical theology, part systematic theology, and part cultural reconnaissance, this is a powerful work that my generation—really any generation—cannot afford to ignore. After years of pointing out the shallowness of evangelicalism, this is Wells’s masterful summary of what should be our depth, our ballast, our center. What the world needs, and what the church needs, is a fresh encounter with the holy-love of God. This book will help you start down that path.
Kevin DeYoung, Senior Pastor, Christ Covenant Church, Matthews, North Carolina; Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte
- Title: God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World
- Author: David F. Wells
- Publisher: Crossway
- Print Publication Date: 2014
- Logos Release Date: 2014
- Pages: 272
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Christianity and culture; God (Christianity) › Love
- Resource ID: LLS:9781433531347
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2021-06-30T18:37:14Z