Binding: Paperback
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Eerdmans
ISBN#: 9780802807472
Availability: Usually Ships the Same Business Day
Description: Has something indeed happened to evangelical theology and to evangelical churches? According to David Wells, the evidence indicates that evangelical pastors have abandoned their traditional role as ministers of the Word to become therapists and “managers of the small enterprises we call churches.” Along with their parishioners, they have abandoned genuine Christianity and biblical truth in favor of the sort of inner-directed experiential religion that now pervades Western society.Specifically, Wells explores the wholesale disappearance of theology in the church, the academy, and modern culture. Western culture as a whole, argues Wells, has been transformed by modernity, and the church has simply gone with the flow. The new environment in which we live, with its huge cities, triumphant capitalism, invasive technology, and pervasive amusements, has vanquished and homogenized the entire world. While the modern world has produced astonishing abundance, it has also taken a toll on the human spirit, emptying it of enduring meaning and morality.Seeking respite from the acids of modernity, people today have increasingly turned to religions and therapies centered on the self. And, whether consciously or not, evangelicals have taken the same path, refashioning their faith into a religion of the self. They have been coopted by modernity, have sold their soul for a mess of pottage. According to Wells, they have lost the truth that God stands outside all human experience, that he still summons sinners to repentance and belief regardless of their self-image, and that he calls his church to stand fast in his truth against the blandishments of a godless world.
The first of three volumes meant to encourage renewal in evangelical theology (the other two to be written by Cornelius Plantinga Jr. and Mark Noll),
No Place for Truth is a contemporary jeremiad, a clarion call to all evangelicals to note well what a pass they have come to in capitulating to modernity, what a risk they are running by abandoning historic orthodoxy. It is provocative reading for scholars, ministers, seminary students, and all theologically concerned individuals.
Monergism Review:
David F. Wells’
No Place for Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology
is a compelling, poetic and brilliant analysis of today’s ever-widening evangelical landscape. It would be difficult to find a book better suited or more convincingly argued than this, the first in Wells’ four volume series. In it, Wells, Gordon-Conwell’s eminent sociological-theologian, tracks the rise and progress of modernity within Western culture detailing its destabilizing and secularizing effects upon the often hapless souls of men. Wells’ thesis is simple: ours is a day that prizes pragmatisms and profitability. Where character and virtue were once touted and cultivated, now we are left with personality and image. Self-searching and self-fulfillment have triumphed, while self-sacrifice has been eschewed. “Spiritual, but not religious” is the mantra, or perhaps better, the bumper-sticker of our age. And sadly the church is hardly immune. On the contrary, as Wells records, “It may be the case that Christian faith, which has made easy alliances with modern culture in the past few decades, is also living in a fool’s paradise, comforting itself about all the things that God is doing in society (which is the most commonly heard religious version of this idea of progress) while it is losing its character, if not is soul” (68). more...
