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 So a lot of his criticisms were just too outdated to make any sense to me.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 