God, in relation to man, is both immanent and transcendent. That is, he is near to us and intimately involved in our lives, and he is holy, far away and high above us. David Wells employs the terms “the inside God” and “the outside God.” These different truths about God are not in opposition to each other, nor are they options between which we can choose. God is both, and, Wells writes,

We lose something essential to who God is, essential to what Christian faith is, and essential to our understanding of ourselves if we lose either side of this equation. And when we do, the side we retain always becomes perverted and dangerous because of the side we have lost.*

The God that is lost in this postmodern age, he says, is the “outside God.” Postmodern man wants relationship; he does not want accountability or to be subject to authority. And he does not want to be summoned to God; rather, he wants God to come to him.

I want to explore a few of the consequences that follow from the fact that God is outside us, that he is objective to us, that he summons us to a knowledge of himself that is not something we have or find in ourselves, and that he summons us to be like him in holiness. This summons, this calling to stand before God in his awesome moral purity, is not something we would ever hear within our fallen selves, nor from our fallen world or our postmodern experience. It is a call that, as it were, is wholly alien to us. It is other than what we are in ourselves. It comes from the outside.
   God’s holiness is part of the explanation of the biblical language of God being “above” and “high.” It is why God is Other, why he is the outside God. This translates itself, though, into very practical realities.†

And we will, Deo volente, look at those practical realities in a future post.