Book Critique on God in the Wasteland by David F. Wells

Table of Content

I. Introduction3

II. Brief Summary3

III. Critical Interaction With The Author's Work5

IV. Conclusion12

Endnotes14

Book Critique on God in the Wasteland by David F. Wells

I. Introduction

For years the crisis of mainline Protestantism has been announced and analyzed, dissected and worried over in page's like these. Recently, evangelical Protestants have joined in the talk of crisis. Not that their numbers have dwindled or their budgets diminished. Unlike their mainline cousins, the evangelical churches still enjoy a religious bull market. Yet David F. Wells speaks for a great many commentators inside and outside the evangelical camp when he contends that American evangelicalism is sick at soul.

II. Brief Summary

Strikingly, the underlying sickness is, according to Wells, the same one that has sapped the strength of mainline Protestantism. He gives it the name "modernity" or "Our Time" or (when he is at his most biblical) "the world." Whereas Protestant liberalism accommodated itself to the modern world as a matter of theological principle, Wells argues, evangelicals have capitulated to modernity without a thought, pragmatically. While officially retaining its distinctive traditional doctrines, the American evangelical church has literally sold itself to modernity--marketed itself to the religious consumer by offering a therapeutic gospel for the narcissistic modem self. Thus, in Wells's view, liberals and evangelicals have ended up drinking at the same trough of modernity, though at different ends--the liberals at the high culture end among respectable academics and the evangelicals at the low culture end with the rest of the TV-viewing populace.

The average evangelical Christian would probably be surprised to hear this. Hence Wells's work is being hailed as a bombshell by evangelical leaders who hope it will wake up American evangelicals and alert them to their peril. Wells, a professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, has recently published two books on this crisis. In No Place for Truth, or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?, he presented a critique of evangelicalism's capitulation to modernity. In the present volume, its sequel, he covers much of the same ground but also proceeds to develop a constructive proposal about "the reconstitution of evangelical faith."

III. Critical Interaction With The Author's Work

Wells's analysis gets its initial grip by fastening on some familiar and dismal phenomena: televangelists, mega-churches, the church growth movement, the gospel of self-esteem. Behind these he sees a series of de-centerings (taking as his motto Yeats's famous line, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold"): theology is no longer central to seminary education, the truth of God's written word is no longer central to church life, and Christianity is no longer the integrating center of culture. In each case, the biblical truth that had held things together and given meaning to the whole ceases to function. Evangelical seminaries give lip service to the importance of theology but devote their pedagogical energy to training ministers to be effective managers and successful. professionals. Evangelical churches uphold scriptural inerrancy in theory but have little use for the Bible in ...