I supose this is really just another plug for a product, but it’s infinitely more important than Firefox.
I just finished reading a book for my Theology class by David Wells, a professor at Gordon-Conwell. The book is called *No Place for Truth,* Or *Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?* and I there’s a good chance that it ought to be required reading for every True Christian embarking on a path for ministry today. The basic premise of the book is that, in general, evangelical Christians, those of the heritage of the Reformers, the Puritans, the Methodists and the Charismatics, (and I suppose the Baptists too) have essentially lost their first love. Evangelical Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds recently, but they’ve accomplished this growth not by sufficiently challenging the surrounding culture, but by becoming enough like it that people find the evangelical Gospel acceptable to their social mores. For the most part, evangelicals have abandoned the knowledge of God (Theologos) and have replaced it with a kind of knowledge of man. The result has been that the Jesus we present has been dummed down enough that he’s finally acceptable to put on the shelf next to whatever other gods people have.
The first part of the book is a very difficult read, for several reasons. It consists of a scathing critique of modern evangelicalism, and a description of how and why we have abandoned our prior fascination with theology. Part of the difficulty with this part of the book was simply that it was written in 1993, just before the public started really gaining access to the internet. So a lot of his criticisms were just too outdated to make any sense to me. His discussions of how mass marketing and TV had inured our minds to thinking objectively were a bit amusing in light of RatherGate and the collapse of interupt marketing. The other thing that made it difficult is that I grew up pretty isolated from “modern culture.” I was in rural Oklahoma, and stupid wasn’t allowed in the house. You have to take that off and leave it on the porch. As a result, I haven’t ever really been aware of the broader evangelical culture, of which I seem inadvertantly to be a part. So some of his scathing criticisms seemed a bit off base. But then it occurred to me that, while *we* didn’t go to *those* sorts of churches, most nearly every other Christian we knew did. I had been fortunate, and unaware.
I do, however, have memories of people coming back to school from church and telling me that it had been prophesied: Revival was coming. Next tuesday. Be there.
But the second part of the book was well worth it. He describes the importance of Theology, why we need it, and what may likely happen to the church if we don’t get some of it out of the lofty universities and grounded in the actual church. While I wasn’t raised headlong in modern America’s “cliche culture” (to steal a line from the book), I was raised in a family with a pretty strong bias against formal education. Learning? All for it. But stay away from those schools: they’ll charge you an awful lot of money to give you a piece of paper, and you won’t really have gained much by it in the end. It’s a position I’m still inclined to agree with, much to Valerie’s chagrin. I remember when I got my English degree, the first thought that passed through my head was “now I finally know what it’s like to have a high school diploma.” *No Place for Truth* largely confirmed these inclinations. He points out that, while the church has lost it’s taste for rock solid truth, the university has lost its focus and understanding that the intended audience for theology (the persuit of the knowledge of God) is the church. If the church has no thorough concept of who God is and what he really wants from us, the church has very little reason for existence. And yet, even those people who point out the most adamantly that you have to know both the power of God **and** the scriptures, are pitifully ignorant of the scriptures in comparison to say, John Calvin. Incidentally, Wells also mentions that my current degree, the M Div, was a bachelors degree as recently as 50 years ago. It was “upgraded” officially to accord the same prestige to ministers that is given to doctors, lawyers, and MBAs, against the protest of older ministers who were stongly suspicious that there was a financial motive to adding an extra 4 years to the required education to get a theology degree. It was a gut-level sense that something like this was in place that persuaded me to drop out from school for three years, looking for the necessary theology education outside the accredited system. Honestly, it’s only because it didn’t work that I’m now back in school (still). My $30,000 in debt continues to persuade me that there was some financial motive in this “upgrade” to “professional status.”
The final chapter in *No Place for Truth* is the most impelling. Most of the book is written in academic style, with enough footnotes to choke a goat. But the last chapter is almost free of footnotes, and Wells speaks freely of his diagnosis: The evangelical church, progressing as it is, has become so much like the surrounding worldly culture that it is almost totally ineffective in making a true representation of Christ to the world. The salt has for the most part lost its saltiness. We aren’t changing the world nearly as fast as they are changing us. Even our revivals are pretty much human engineered, and so lacking the key ingredient to actually do what they’re supposed to do. We don’t need a revival: we’re lively enough as it is, and that liveliness has less to do with the actual presence of a holy God than it has to do with an engineered enthusiasm. What we need is a reformation.
I am inclined to agree. Granted, not every church in the world is soaked up by the world. Maybe your church is *the* church in your town that is preaching the true gospel, complete with a holy and awesome God who is sovereign, and wholly other and above the world. So was Martin Luther’s church, even before he nailed his 95 theses. This doesn’t negate the fact that the church at large has no clue, and it is continuing to persue the path of cluelessness.
David Wells’ prescription involves a renewal of the place of theology in the local church. That can’t be all of it, of course. God is still sovereign and has his own purposes. He also does nothing that he doesn’t first reveal to his servants, the prophets. Nevertheless, if you accept the premise that the knowledge of God is key to a functioning church, then a church that has no place for theology has surely left it’s center.
Restoring theology to its rightful place in church life could be a good start.
neumatikos 
1st when you’re finished with it, I want to read the book. 2nd….and this is under the “I think” category [not to be mistaken with the “Thus saith the Lord” category]….two things come to mind and both are borrowed. While I suspect that everything that was written is true [I have a real weakness for verifiable facts, stats & data] I have to agree with Francis Frangipane that it doesn’t take great spiritual insight to see what’s wrong with the church. All it takes is one working eye and a carnal mind. Anyone can criticize….but can you save? And to borrow from Rick Joyner, “idealism is the enemy of excellence”. I think, in truth, a closer examination might reveal that some churches are steadily growing more like the world [sort of like sleepy ents] and some, perhaps even worldly churches, are being to wake up and become who they were ment to be [more like Heurons — forgive the Tolkienesque illustrations] The difficulty with setting a standard and saying this is how the church should be is it often negates what progress is being or has been made. Whether by revolution, reformation or revival we like quick results. As Dutch Sheets has pointed out, we’re into microwaving, God is into marinating.
But having said that — I do agree with the basic premise. I recently re-watched the movie Chocolat — a movie I both love & hate. But there’s nothing I hate more than the final sermon by the young priest– who on Easter Sunday didn’t want to remember Christ’s miraculous transformation but his humanity. A theme I’ve heard repeated through the years from the “enlightened” while they forget that it was Jesus divinity that transformed his humanity. without it He would have been just as selfish, self-serving, mean-spirited, short-slighted as the rest of us. The good news is that by that death, burial & resurrection that the young priest wanted to ignore, he made possible our transformation to people who have been given the power look, act, walk, talk and more importantly love just like Him. And that is the real tragedy taking place — That we have been given the power to become children of God, co-heirs with Jesus, seated with Him in heavenly places and instead we choose something much, much less. Maybe it’s because we don’t really believe that we’ve been offered much, much more.
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Actually, that was one of my problems with the book. He spends a great deal of effort showing how we’ve dropped the ball, but little in demonstrating that God is in fact still God, that He is still sovereign, and that he probably still has a plan. Wells did mention that the book was only supposed to be covering the problem and that he was going to write a sequel on what he thought the solution would look like. The other major problem with the book was that he seemed to be constantly looking to a 17th Century Puritan town as his crystalized ideal of what God has for us. I’ll admit that the Puritan society had some distinct Christian advantages that we lack today, but it was also obviously unable to withstand the advent of modern culture. Any modern reformation has to be progressive, not regressive. To say otherwise is to say that God’s perfections are finite when it comes to his ability to make the church “without spot or wrinkle.” We have actually made some advances in our understanding of who God is and what he wants from us.
Though many have forgotten much, not all ents are sleepy.
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I’m not a historian of puritan culture — so it is possible the mental picture I carry is the product of bad press. But when I think of an “ideal” Christian society, I’m more inclined to think of the Moravians and tend to view the puritans as a group trying to achieve or maintain holiness by the written code rather than the Spirit. Which of course leads right back to phariseeism which was the primary opponent of Jesus himself. I think there is an aspect to “grace” that we haven’t laid hold of yet. If the standard that Jesus held up was higher than that of the pharisee and we’ve yet to even attain that standard….there’s something we’re missing.
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Very useful review. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
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