Book Critique Rodehorst

LIBERTY THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY

GOD IN THE WASTELAND--A CRITIQUE

A PAPER SUBMITTED TO DR. CHRISTOPHER MOODY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE CLASS SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY I THEO 525

BY RYAN S. RODEHORST LAKEWOOD, WA

AUGUST 12, 2009TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………1 II. BRIEF SUMMARY…………………………………………………...……………………….1 III. CRITICAL INTERACTION WITH THE AUTHOR’S WORK……………………………...3 V. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………….10 BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................................11

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INTRODUCTION David F. Wells, Distinguished Senior Research Professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, is the author of God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams. The author's scholarly interests in church and culture are at the heart of this book, which is a continuation of his previous work, No Place for Truth; or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? In that book, Wells explained some of the cultural factors that have diminished the place and importance of theology in the church. In this book, he ventures to set forth the first step that needs to be taken to reverse this situation.

BRIEF SUMMARY Wells begins by describing a revolution that has utterly changed our world. While the forces of modernization have brought radical changes in our external world with capitalism, technology, urbanization, and telecommunications, modernity has transformed our inner worlds, upending traditional values, expectations, and meanings. According to Wells this revolution is in the profoundest sense spiritual,1 a "secular transfiguration"2 from "a world in which God and his truth were accorded a central and often public place to one in which they have neither."3 Unfortunately, Wells argues, the Christian faith has not been immune to the changes wrought by this revolution.

1

David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 6. 2 Ibid., 7. 3 Ibid., 14.

23 After quickly tracing the history of 20th century American Protestantism and the shift from liberalism to evangelicalism, Wells argues that evangelicalism gained its cultural clout by compromising its theological center to cultural concerns.4 The devastating consequence of these compromises has been to render God inconsequential, weightless.5 This culture with which the Christian faith must now contend is modernity--it is the worldliness of which the Bible speaks for Our Time.6 And this issue--the relationship between Christ and culture--is the issue for Christian faith today.7 For, Wells explains, "Love of God and love of the world are in competition with each other, and we have to understand this competition in order to pinpoint how our love for God has dimmed as our love for the world has grown."8 The reason we modern Christians are losing our souls is because we have lost God. It is not that we have lost our belief in God, it is simply that he is no longer of consequence to our belief. In fact, Wells maintains, "The traditional doctrine of God remains entirely intact while its saliency vanishes."9 He has become immaterial or, as Wells styles it, weightless. While the specific reasons for this loss of significance are many and complex, in general it can be seen as coming at the hands of modernity at large, which has rearranged the categories of God's transcendence and immanence.10 Belief in the objective reality of a transcendent God has dissipated, while a preoccupation with subjective religious experience has developed.11 Wells advises that to recover the truth about God, the Church must move away from the anthropology and theology of modernity. What must be regained is an understanding of men as fundamentally moral creatures, not psychological constructions, meant to act on moral principle, 4

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 30. 6 Ibid., 29. 7 Ibid., 28. 8 Ibid., 30. 9 Ibid., 89. 10 Ibid., 90. 11 Ibid., 91. 5

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5 not in an effort to satiate our appetites, in the former; 112 and an understanding of God as transcendent in his moral purity and self-sufficiency and as objective in his relation and revelation to men in the latter.12 An understanding of God's otherness is essential. "His transcendent holiness and knowledge enable us to stand outside the charms of modernity in order to act morally within it."13

CRITICAL INTERACTION WITH AUTHOR’S WORK Theological/Biblical Perspective First and foremost, then, God in the Wasteland is a book on theology. While the larger subject is still the relation of Christ to culture, the discussion centers around the doctrine of God's transcendence and immanence. Numerous other related doctrines and issues are examined in the course of this discussion, including the nature of Scripture and revelation, the divine attributes of holiness and love, divine providence, the atonement, humanity, the Church, and the trinity. Wells approach to these subjects is as fully Biblical as can be expected. And this is only natural: the basic purpose of his book is the recovery of a Biblical perspective unsullied by the worldliness that is modernity. In this regard Wells succeeds in substantiating his position that modernity is the worldliness of Our Time. As he examines the "world" and its correlation with modernity, Wells explains that "worldliness" is "the way in which our collective life in society (and the culture that goes with it) is organized around the self in substitution for God."14 In other words, worldliness is a way of living and viewing life that is anthropocentric instead of theocentric.15 It is the "secular transfiguration" of which he spoke earlier and by which Our Time has lost its center. 16 Both 12

Ibid., 116. Ibid., 151. 14 Ibid., 40. 15 Ibid., 44. 16 Ibid., 14. 13

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6 modernity and post-modernity are "worldly" in that they have sought to replace this center with the self, offering the church "an alternative wisdom" and "a counterfeit reality" to the transcendent truth of God. The problem of worldliness is thus one of misplaced belief, "of insufficient belief in the Transcendent and a surfeit of belief in the modern world."17 Modernity encourages idolatry by "offering some substitute for God to serve some uniquely divine function."18 Indeed, even those features of modernity that are generally viewed as benign (or at least ignored because their value-neutral nature is assumed), such as capitalism, may degenerate into worldliness if the values and methods it presumes are embraced over, or without regard to, God's truth. As an example of how this very thing is occurring within evangelicalism, Wells describes the church's capitulation to the consumer mentality, a significant consequence of which has been that "church growth has increasingly been reduced to a matter of knowing how to market the church."19 Severed from God this non-Biblical, anthropocentric perspective has disastrous implications: sin becomes mere disease and efficient control an end in itself.20 Furthermore, technique takes priority over theology,21 felt needs supplant true needs,22 and the consumer wrests sovereignty from Christ.23 In effect, the church becomes worldly, trading eternal truth for temporal success. Because insufficient belief in the Transcendent so easily leads to this sort of worldliness, one of Wells's most important discussion concerns the subject of God's transcendent knowledge and holiness. He maintains that holiness is what fundamentally defines the character of God and

17

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 52. 19 Ibid., 72. 20 Ibid., 61. 21 Ibid., 71. 22 Ibid., 74. 23 Ibid., 76. 18

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that love is an expression of it.24 This is in opposition to the Christians of modernity who "seem to think that God is fundamentally if not exclusively love--and hence that talk of divine holiness is distracting or intrusive."25 In fact, divine holiness is essential to a proper valuation of God's love. "Without this holiness of God, sin has no meaning and grace has no point, for it is God's holiness that gives to the one its definition and to the other its greatness."26 Also implied by Wells is the importance of divine holiness to a proper valuation of our need of God's grace. "The Gospel of Our Time frequently is unthinking, and superficial, frequently is believed and preached without urgency, and the reason is that it has yet to dawn on many in the church that God in his holiness is deeply and irrevocably set in opposition to the world because of sin."27 For when his holiness is devalued or denied, his grace is no longer seen as necessary. Sin is not taken seriously and Christ's work on the cross is misunderstood. Meanwhile, a day of reckoning draws near. Yet the doctrine of God's transcendence encompasses and affects even more than this. His holiness is what distinguishes him as God, it is what necessitates our worship of him, it is what gives him supreme authority. And "Until we acknowledge God's holiness, we will not be able to deny the authority of modernity."28 In other words, until we acknowledge God as an objective reality "higher" than ourselves, the self will continue to occupy the position of authority it has misappropriated under modernity. And until we acknowledge God's transcendent knowledge, his objective self-disclosure as revealed in Scripture, we will not be renewed from the modern mind's "refusal to allow external reality to impose constraints on the knower."29 Until we acknowledge both God's transcendent holiness and knowledge, we will continue to conform to 24

Ibid., 136. Ibid., 135. 26 Ibid., 144. 27 Ibid., 137. 28 Ibid., 145. 29 Ibid., 111. 25

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7 the pattern of the modern world. "His transcendent holiness and knowledge enable us to stand outside the charms of modernity in order to act morally within it."30 Finally, it is important to observe the interrelation of the doctrines and issues discussed by Wells. Certainly this suggests the complexity of the subject. The line between correct and incorrect understanding is fine, and crossing this line in one doctrine can send a theology careening down a slippery slope. For instance, in providing boundaries for a correct doctrine of God's transcendence, Wells addresses the issue of the relation between the Father and Son, and their identification with holiness and love.31 The many doctrines this one boundary is supported by is tremendous: the trinity, the divine attributes of holiness and love, and the issues of transcendence and immanence. An overemphasis one way or the other creates wide gaps in theology, as evidenced by the diversity of historical developments in this area.32 As often is the case, where it seems an opposition or paradox exists (e.g., between holiness and love, Father and Son) the correct yet counter intuitive understanding is one of intersection or even unity. Indeed, even in transcendence there is an element of immanence: "Though they [God's holiness and his knowledge] are both aspects of his transcendence, they must not be construed as belonging to what is remote or distant in God but must rather be understood as part of the means why which he confronts sinners directly and inescapably from without."33 The tendency to understand in either-or categories can confuse the situation. We see so many things as being at opposite poles, when in fact the two poles intersect to form a cross. God is both holy and loving, transcendent and immanent, and no where is this more evident than in Christ on the cross. "Although God's ordering of life is as extensive as life itself, it does have a center. The center is Christ."34 30

Ibid., 151. Ibid., 126. 32 Ibid., 125. 33 Ibid., 133. 34 Ibid., 173. 31

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Recovering a divinely ordered life is in many ways what Wells's book is all about. The problem as he sees it is that modernity has "diminished the place and importance of theology in the church"35 with the effect that "God rests too inconsequentially upon the church." 36 Therefore his ultimate goal is to return God and his Word to the center of the Christian life. With this book, however, his goal with this book is more modest: "My work here amounts to far less that a complete answer [...] It is only a first step, and a very modest one, in which I have sought to develop in part the perspective within which we now need to think about the reconstitution of evangelical faith."37 Thus, Wells's goal is his theological and biblical perspective. His goal is to regain a Biblical perspective of God and man, and an understanding that gives each its proper weight. In short, it is toward a perspective centered around God rather than the self--a theocentric perspective that begins and ends with God. In this sense, Wells can only offer an analysis of the problem and the perspective from which the church can begin to think about its solution. No matter how thorough his analysis, no matter how Biblical his theology, no matter how correct his solution, Wells realizes that "restoring weight to God is going to involve much more than simply getting some doctrine straight."38 This is by no means because his analysis or arguments are defective; it is simply the nature of the problem. That's because the problem is fundamentally one of the human heart. It is God that the church needs most--God in his grace and truth. God in his awesome and holy presence, not a folder full of hot ideas for reviving the church's flagging programs. But this is what makes the reform of the church so profoundly difficult. Church facilities, landscaping, programs, and liturgies can all be changed---changed overnight and changed over and over again. The human heart cannot be so easily changed.39 35

Ibid., ix. Ibid., 30. 37 Ibid., 31. 38 Ibid., 115. 39 Ibid., 225. 36

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9 The remedy will "entail a complete reconstruction of the modern self-absorbed pastiche personality. The cost of accomplishing this may well be deep, sustained repentance."40 Of course Wells cannot change the human heart, nor can he repent for anyone but himself. Both God's working within the heart and personal repentance will be needed before the individual Christian believer and the corporate church can extricate themselves from the entanglements of the world. But this limitation does not invalidate the book's usefulness, for it provides the perspective from which the problem can be seen. Wells reveals the ways in which the church has become entangled in the world, subsuming the values and meanings of modernity in place of those of the Bible. And no reform or repentance can occur until the individual believer and the church recognize that their complicity with modernity has become worldliness if not full-fledged idolatry. Reviews Several reviews of the book have been written. The reviewers are generally positive, though a few do raise objections. One reviewer describes Wells's argument for the countercultural church as "strong, if inadequately nuanced."41 The reviewer feels that Wells treatment is too simple, his answers too definite. "Is it ipso facto wrong to seek a blend of the biblical and the cultural?" the reviewer asks. "Wells's answer in this book is clear. Scripture's answer, I fear, is more nuanced."42 But from my reading of the text, this criticism appears unwarranted. In fact, Wells makes several comments that suggest otherwise. He says, for instance, that "to participate in the productive enterprise of capitalism is not worldly per se"43 and that the ways of the Amish are not what he has in mind.44 40

Ibid., 115. Robert K. Johnston, "God In the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth In a World of Fading Dreams," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 no 4 (Winter 1995): 874. 42 Ibid., 875. 43 Wells, God in the Wasteland, 50. 44 Ibid., 15. 41

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In another review, repetition is identified as a major flaw. "More than two-thirds of the books is cultural analysis akin to its predecessor,"45 even though its express purpose is to build on the analysis already completed. And, the reviewer correctly observes, "At times, repetition and overlap overwhelm and even discourage the reader."46 Formal deficiencies in Wells's presentation are perceptible. Its organization, including the repetition and overlap already mentioned, make his argument difficult to follow. Furthermore, he seems to choose headings and categories more because they are clever than clear. Add to this an inconsistent use of terminology--at one place he may speak of the "outside God," in anotehr his "transcendence", and in yet another his "otherness," all of which are meant to refer to the same thing--and the line of thought becomes less distinct.

CONCLUSION Despite these criticisms, David F. Wells has arguably provided the best first step toward reversing the inroads of modernity into evangelicalism. At the very least, he has identified where the church must begin--with God. When the church finds itself in a culture that is predominantly secular and increasingly centered around the self, it must work continuously to keep God at its center. Certainly Wells cannot be far wrong then in prescribing a renewed appreciation for God's holiness and the authority of his Word. Only by deriving our values and meaning from the transcendent can we hope to prevail over the bondage of worldliness. Only when we renew our minds under the bright light of God's glory can we begin to not conform ourselves to the pattern of the world.

45

John Bolt, "God In the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth In a World of Fading Dreams," Theology Today 52 no 4 (January 1996): 544. 46 Ibid.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bolt, John. "God In the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth In a World of Fading Dreams." Theology Today 52 no 4 (January 1996): 872-875. Johnston, Robert K. "God In the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth In a World of Fading Dreams." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 no 4 (Winter 1995): 540-546. Wells, David F. God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.

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