Book Review: David Wells – No Place for Truth
(Reviewed by Monergism.com's Aaron Orendorff)
“Perhaps no modern author has written more powerfully on this subject.”
Iain Murray
“No Place for Truth was the bomb that exploded on the evangelical playground.”
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
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).
Wells’ assessments of modernity and its younger, more boisterous sibling – post (or ultra) modernity – are pointed, clear and exhaustively researched. Following in the steps of cultural critics like Robert Bellah, Peter Berger and Neil Postman, Wells skillfully navigates the lonesome streets of Western society’s sprawling, consumerist cities. In particular, he charts well the impact of enlightenment thinking and post-Kantian ideology upon the religious centers of academia both with its whole-sale abandonment of confessional orthodoxy and its unyielding embrace of empirical and experiential epistemology. What this shift in thinking produced within academia was a stalwart bias towards “the sort of classical liberalism that Schleiermacher argued for (which seeks the disclosure of God within human experience).” Outside of the academy, however, and within evangelicalism at large, the “disappearance of a confessional element” was the result, not of autonomous intellectual rigor, but of autonomous and democratic sentimentality. Having lost its doctrinal heart the word evangelical has itself become “descriptively anemic.” “It is not hard to see,” Wells explains, “that the disappearance of a center of values in culture is now paralleled by a disappearance of a theological center in evangelicalism.” This disappearance is evidenced in the pulpit and the pew alike, creating in the first a gospel of romanticized self-help and in the second vacuous and entertainment driven lives full of moral indecision.
Far from being a mere experiment in doomsday-ism, however, at point after point Wells returns to the redemptive message of apostolic Christianity to find his footing and point a way out. As the following excerpt explains, it is again to the gospel we must turn – to the foolish and scandalous word of cross – to die to ourselves, our way of thinking, believing and living, that we might truly live a life worthy of the name (pg. 279):
It is the biblical world of meaning, its way of interpreting life, into which we are invited to enter, to make its world our own. We stand at its door, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim before the Cross, the bundle of our self-understanding and of our self-interpreted world upon our back. This bundle, as with that of our sin, must be abandoned. If we are to enter this new world of meaning, we will have to do so hermeneutically naked, our modern horizons and taste, our modern fascination with ourselves wrenched from us and abandoned on entry. For we come to take from this new world, not to give. We come to take meaning; we come to give up the narrative of our own life with its parables of self-constructed meaning in order to find the truth that God has given in his own narrative.
And here, strangely enough, lies the watershed both of the ancient and the modern worlds. Where is the locus of God’s truth to be found? To the pagan who heard the voice of the gods within, who listened to the whisperings of intuition, and to the modern who similarly listens within for the voice of self, the answer is the same. For the Israelite it was different. The Bible is not a remarkable illustration of what we have already heard within ourselves; it is a remarkable discovery of what we have not and cannot hear within ourselves. Thus, our inward sense of God and our intuitions about meaning are irrelevant in any effort to differentiate biblical truth from pagan belief. It is how we apply ourselves to learn what God has disclosed of himself in a realm outside ourselves that is important. And unless we steadfastly maintain this distinction in the face of the modern pressures to destroy it, we will soon find that we are using the Bible merely to corroborate the validity of what we have already found within our own religious consciousness – which is another way of saying that we are putting ourselves in place of the Bible. It is another way of reasserting the old paganism. When that happens, theology is irredeemably reduced to autobiography, and preaching degenerates into mere storytelling
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