Greg and Amy explain that the idea of “God within” can lead to justifying sinful behavior and following personal desires in place of an external authority. Instead of relying on a “divine spark” that makes no moral demands, we must recognize our need for salvation, offered only by a perfect God.
Transcript
Question: What would be a tactical way of responding to someone who says, “God is not out/up there. God is within,” pointing to himself?
Greg: Well, of course, they want clarification at first. What do you mean? So, if you didn’t exist, would God disappear? If God is in all human beings, and he’s not out there in any sense, then before there were any human beings, was there a God? These are fair questions to ask.
Now, they’re probably making a separate kind of point—not that God’s existence is dependent on our existence, but rather that God isn’t far off, that we have to come to him and discover him and receive him and be reunited with him, but we all have, kind of, a spark of the divine in us and are one with God, in a certain sense. That’s a New Thought kind of idea—the spark of the divine that’s in all of us—but I need to get clarification. That’s a very popular view now with a lot of people, and it’s been around for a long time. This has kinship with ancient Gnosticism in the second century. You’re going to run into this, but this is where the first two Columbo questions are just golden: “Well, what do you mean by that?” Try to get clarification. “Why would you think that’s the case? What are the reasons why you think that?”
What we’re searching for—and many people are searching, a large portion of the population is trying to figure things out—is the truth of the matter. If they already have what they’re searching for inside of them, that seems to go against common sense, too. So, why would they think that everybody’s got this spark of the divine—or however they characterize it—God within them?
Amy: I wonder, also, if he’s saying something about looking inside yourself for guidance and looking to your ideas and your feelings and what you love. I’m trying to think if there’s a good example of why that’s a bad idea.
Greg: People who are not guided by externals are all guided by internals, and this is the consequence—I should say, the consequence of that view, oftentimes—not all the time, but oftentimes—is following your emotions, your passions, your desires to do what you want, and a lot of times, those are sinful things. People end up justifying sinful behavior by saying, “I’m being true to myself. I did it my way.” “You be you” kind of thing. “I’m going to be me, and that’s cool.” So, there you go, until you have Jeffrey Dahmer, who’s doing his own thing—he’s a murderer. You’ve got people like that. That’s the outworking of this concept.
Amy: What strikes me when I hear this is the idea of, don’t you know that you do bad things? Don’t we all know that we need someone outside of ourselves to rescue us from our own sin and our weakness and our failures? Do I want to be my own god? It strikes me as someone who has very little self-awareness. Maybe the younger you are, the easier it is to say things like, “God’s inside of me.”
I think maybe where I would take this is, you know, “I just think I’m aware of my need to be saved. I’m aware of my own sin. And if God is in me, that means God is sinful, and I don’t want that. I mean, I’m just really grateful to know that there is a God who’s outside of me, who’s actually perfect, and who sent his Son to die for me so that I could be forgiven and be with him and ultimately be completely redeemed because I need someone outside of me. I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps—my own moral bootstraps.”
Greg: I think this is an example of trying to have your cake and eat it too. You acknowledge spirituality, but then you adopt a spirituality that acknowledges that the human being is a spiritual creature—good—but then makes no demands on them. “God’s in me. He’s not out there. He’s not somebody I’ve got to please or obey. He’s already in me, and that makes me good just the way I am.” Is that true about everybody? Yes? Well, then, it’s easy to think of individuals in the world today—probably reflecting on your friends’ political convictions—that they would think are really bad people, who are contrary to that person’s political convictions. Those people are going to have to be considered good based on this criteria that God is in everybody. And so, none of these people doing all these things that you object to are doing bad things at all. God’s in them. So, help me understand how this works, then.
Amy: It just seems so obviously insufficient to explain what’s going on with the world. You just have to look around to see the evil, and you have to look in your own heart to see the evil. It kind of blows my mind.