When People Are Big

Author EDWARD T. WELCH

Publisher P&R

ISBN 0-87552-600-3

This author has served with the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation and has been linked with Westminster Theological Seminary.  We could call this book an antidote to the trivializing need based psychology that has grown to be so popular in North America and increasingly in other parts of the Westernized World.  The idea that we are a bundle of ‘felt needs’ that must be filled by others and by material substances is examined and shown to be fundamentally flawed.  The long subtitled gives a clue to the thrust of the author’s argument, “and God is small, overcoming peer pressure, codependency and the fear of man.”  God must be magnified, feared and loved in our eyes and that will contextualize all other persons and things appropriately.  It is good to read some solid Biblical counsel challenging the self-oriented material so commonly available in both secular book stores and alas, in Christian ones too.  If the fear of God is brought to the fore, (and to dwell in that right fear is part of what it means to be human beings made in God’s image) then the fear of man will no longer dominate us.  The tendency to hold other people in awe, to be controlled and mastered by them is a travesty of what it means to be human.  Such dependencies are idolatrous and disastrous, they are the grounds that perpetuate sinful liaisons and they accord to others that which belong to God alone.  Welch unpacks his subject matter steadily, some might think, a little ponderously.  He examines the fear of man under the headings “people will see me, reject me and physically hurt me and the world wants me to fear people.”  He then begins to correct these mistaken views by a lengthy section on the fear of God, His majesty and the wonder of His being for whom we were made.  There is a chapter in which he helps the reader to examine their ‘felt needs.’  Are they legitimate, where and in whom should they be satisfied?  He shows that delighting in God and loving Him is a sublime corrective to putting man first.  He argues that we must recognize what our real needs are, for forgiveness for example, and to know Him in Whose image we are made.  Welch covers a lot of ground practically and in a way that many will not have considered before in such terms.  He uses the Bible liberally as he walks through his subject matter and minimizes the usual kind of examples taken from his casebook.  The reader does not need to have a great problem with co-dependency or peer pressure in order to gain benefit from this book.  Welch directs our attention back to God and His word so that we might overcome the fear of man.  The direction and argument of this book is thorough scriptural common sense.