No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

David F. Wells

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Dec 20, 1994 - Religion - 330 pages

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.

Contents

• A Delicious Paradise Lost: 17
• The Delicious Paradise: 19
• A Puritan Town Revisited: 23
• The True Woman: 25
• A Quiet and Staid Revival: 30
• The True Woman about Town: 35
• A Small Town in a Big World: 46
• Reaching Out to America: 47
• World Cliche Culture: 53
• Decay and Renewal: 57
• The New Civilization: 68
• Modernization and Modernity: 72
• Secularization and Secularism: 79
• The Emperors Lost Clothes: 84
• The Boiling of the frog: 87
• Things Fall Apart: 95
• Theology Disappears: 97
• How Theology Is Disappearing: 106
• That Theology Is Disappearing: 110
• A Tale of Two Worlds: 115
• The Declining Year s of Evangelicalism: 127
• SelfPiety: 137
• Modern Individuality: 141
• The Protestant Reformation: 143
• The Heritage in America: 149
• I See Therefore I Am: 161
• The Naked Public Square: 166
• The Revised Evangelical Version The Symptoms: 171
• The Results: 177
• The Rise of Everyperson: 187
• Who Is Everyperson?: 189
• The Middling Standard: 193
• Les Liaisons Dangereuses: 198
• Postcards from the Edge: 204
• Innocent Radicals: 211
• There They Go and I Am Their Leader: 213
• The New Disablers: 218
• The New Mandarins: 222
• The New Knowledge: 227
• The Ministry and the Guild: 238
• Toward a New Order of Sacred Fools: 245
• The Minister as Impermanent: 249
• The Minister as Theologian: 250
• The Habits of God: 258
• The Pagan Mind: 264
• The Biblical Mind: 270
• The Modern Mind: 279
• The Reform of Evangelicalism: 283
• Believers and Unbelievers: 286
• The Use of God: 288
• The Recovery of God: 296
• Selected Bibliography: 302
• Index: 316

About the author

David F. Wells is distinguished senior research professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and an ordained Congregationalist minister. His many previous books include Above All Earthly Pow'rs, Losing Our Virtue, God in the Wasteland, and No Place for Truth.

Bibliographic information

• Title: No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?
• Author: David F. Wells
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994
• ISBN: 080280747X, 9780802807472
• Length: 330 pages
• Subjects: Religion / Christian Theology / General; Religion / Christianity / General; Religion / Christianity / Protestant; Religion / General; Social Science / Sociology of Religion