Self-made drama is corollary with worshipping a self-projected god; this is more antiquely known as idolatry. I just wrote that as a Tweet, yesterday. I had something like Romans 1:18ff in mind, but also Ludwig Feuerbach’s famous critique of religion in mind as well; which is the following in nuce: “God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.”1 Thomas F. Torrance describes the inner-mechanics of this, as he details ‘the problem with modern theology,’ thusly:

The problem with modern theology, however, is that the second feature has to out of hand, for when the element of personal relation to God is not controlled by critical testing on the analogy of faith it degenerates into a gross personalism in which we obtrude ourselves into the place of God, making our relations with God the sole content of theological knowledge. That is the problem that faces us everywhere today in the so-called ‘new theology’ in which statements about God are reduced to anthropological statements. Whenever we try to transcend a subject-object relation or replace it by a ‘pure’ subject-subject relation, we are unable to distinguish God from ourselves, and lapse into irrationality, and then into the bitter futility of God-is-deadness.2

You will have to infer what TFT is referring to as the ‘second feature’ (I don’t feel like treating that now). But what should, at least, be clear is when Torrance refers to ‘subject-subject relation,’ this is the modern mode of immanentizing all reality to the absolutism of ‘self’; ie “turn-to-the-subject.” Modernity likes to think it has ‘come of age,’ that it has finally transcended the magics and mythologies of the superstitious past; its proof-of-transcendence is ostensibly revealed in our “scientific advancements,” primarily experienced concretely in technologies. Its nostra theologia (‘our theology’) is then only capable of worshipping the self as that is individualistically and collectivistically projected into the various and empirically visible achievements of the indomitable human spirit. “Our feelings” give pathos to the life and verve of the verity of tech we interact with day in and out; it has become the ‘subject-subject relation,’ the sacramental balm that modern humanity immerses itself into in self-actualistic orgasm.

The genuinely Christian response to this is to repent! Bow the knee to the risen Christ, humble yourself, through the humility of God in Christ for you, and know that He is God, and that we are not! It is only in this repentant affection that a person can truly think reality as it is, and thus operate as the type of theological realist that Christ is for us. We will come to recognize that there is an object over against us who turns out to be the subject for us; the humanizing reality that allows us to stand before the living God in His iustitia aliena (‘alien righteousness’), and come to understand what it genuinely means to be human from the ec-static life of God for us—a life constantly given to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ as that is gifted to us by the Holy Spirit.

1 Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion. 

2 Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), x-xi.