1952
It's hard to say whether this smallish 140-page book would have made this list if it weren't for the fact that Phillips's Letters to Young Churches had come out in 1947. That able paraphrase of Paul s epistles bought Phillips an audience on both sides of the Atlantic. The paraphrase had been started in 1940 to encourage his church youth club, and Phillips continued to work on it through the dark years of World War II. After the war was over, his unique renderings of the apostle Paul's sometimes circuitous reasoning became popular, especially among young adults.
His unforgettable paraphrase of Romans 12:2, "Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold," immediately caught on and replaced the often quoted: "And be not conformed to this world" of the traditional King James Version. Surprisingly, the Revised Standard Version got considerable flak even though it is a more literal translation, but Phillips seemed to get a free ride. Phillips might be considered the first of the postwar translations of the New Testament.
On the coattails of Letters to Young Churches, Phillips published Your God Is Too Small, a book title that has been quoted far more than the book has been read. Thus, even if it can be argued that the book's contents did not do much to change the twentieth century, the title did.
In his introduction, Phillips says that he is writing to "expose the inadequate conceptions of God... which prevent our catching a glimpse of the true God; and to suggest ways in which we can find the real God." So in the first half of the book he talks about a dozen misconceptions of God: the resident policeman, the parental hangover, the grand old man, the heavenly bosom, God-in-a-box, the managing director, the pale Galilean, and so on. While that delightful first section is frequently quoted, the second part is the meat and potatoes.
"We can never have too big a conception ot God/׳ Phillips says, "and the more scientific knowledge advances, the greater becomes our idea of His vast and complicated wisdom.״ Yet if we want to know God as a Person, "we have to accept His own planned focusing of Himself in a human being, Jesus Christ." This, he says, is the Fact of history.
How big is God? Only when someone sees "God down in the arena as a Man, suffering, tempted, sweating and agonized— finally dying a criminal's death,״ only when that person sees him as Paul did when he said, "The Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me” as if the Act was for him alone, only then does a person truly see the greatness of God.
An Anglican clergyman whose main parish appointments , , were in Chichester and Salisbury, England, Phillips also wrote
Ring ofTmth: A Translator's Testimony, about his experiences in translating Scripture. Not as well-known was his battle with depression, and his book The Wounded Healer, published posthumously, is composed of letters to others who were straggling with depression (don't confuse it with Henri Nouwen's book of the same title).
But L B. Phillips's greatest gifts to the twentieth-century church were his sweet paraphrase of God's words to us and this well-titled critique of our view of God.