The End Of Theology?
No Place for Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?by David F. Wells (Eerdmans, 315 pp.; $24.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Roger E. Olson, professor of theology, Bethel College, (St. Paul), and coauthor of 20th-Century Theology (IVP).
With No Place for Truth, Gordon-Conwell seminary professor David Wells joins the swelling ranks of theological seismologists attempting to measure the great evangelical megashift. Or, to switch metaphors, he joins the ranks of pathologists analyzing the various illnesses of American evangelicalism.
There is a strong and noble tradition of leaders calling the evangelical church to account. While these Jeremiahs may not always get all the nuances right, they do focus the church’s light on important areas of concern. In the midseventies, Harold Lindsell diagnosed the evangelical movement as dying the death of a thousand inerrancy qualifications. Then Francis Schaeffer predicted its slide into disaster, and Sojourners’ Jim Wallis called it to conversion. Most recently, Charles Colson has declared its body almost lifeless due to subversion by cultural viruses such as individualism and consumerism. Now David Wells prepares evangelicalism’s obituary. His diagnosis? Evangelicalism has by and large succumbed to the disease of modernity.
Throughout the book, Wells develops and defends two theses. The first is about the nature of “Our Time,” which he labels “modernity,” the chief characteristic of which is the disappearance of belief in truth. What he means is that modernity rejects what Francis Schaeffer called “true Truth,” absolute, objective truth that transcends relative beliefs and values.
This disappearance of truth is the root of all modern evils, Wells argues. Out of it arise alienation, anomie (lawlessness), relativism, anti-intellectualism, and materialism. Into this vacuum left by the loss of truth has swept the incredible inflation of the self that so typifies our culture of narcissism. Since the heavens are empty of any absolute and objective meaning, the only standard and value is the self and its psychological health and well-being.
Wells declares that he does not believe in modernity at all. “Most evangelicals, however, are mild, closet believers, and to the extent that this is true, their internal life will tend to tilt away from belief in God and his truth and toward modernity.” This is the heart of his second and main thesis: that in our time, American evangelicalism has adapted to this modern denial of absolute truth and has substituted for it a psychologized, pragmatic, and subjective view of truth. We have exchanged truth for technique. The question for most evangelicals today is not “What is true?” but “What works?”
Nowhere is this accommodation to modernity more evident, according to Wells, than in the growing bias against theology (and intellectual endeavor in general) in popular evangelical faith.
So strong is this bias becoming that it is being elevated to the level of a virtue. To quote one leading popular evangelical writer and speaker, “Happy is the Christian who has never met a theologian!” The reason for this disdain for theology, Wells argues, is not because modern theology often leads to heresy, but because evangelicals have by and large accepted the modern notion that the self is the final arbiter of truth.
Therefore, the spiritual well-being of the self becomes the evangelical version of modernity’s obsession with self. In contrast, theology rejects self-absorption and points the self toward a higher standard of truth. The consequence of evangelicalism’s Faustian deal with modernity is that theology gets reduced to autobiography; preaching, to therapy; and the Christian message loses its public significance.
So who are the culprits in this evangelical disaster? According to Wells, they are (among others) CHRISTIANITY TODAY and LEADERSHIP, seminaries, pietists, charismatics, relational theology, and church-growth theorists.
Cursing the darkness
Wells’s book is designed to be controversial. Unfortunately, many readers and reviewers are likely to chalk his message up to the disillusionment and crankiness of a theologian who feels his discipline being marginalized. Many will agree with his incisive critique of modernity. Many of his pithy statements—such as, “[In Our Time] evil is boredom, and that is remedied with far greater ease than sin. It is remedied not by Christ but by a cable hookup”—will surely find their way into sermons.
But many will question Wells’s elevation of theology to the status of being central to Christian faith itself: “Without theology,” he argues, “there is no faith, no believing, no Christian hope.”
Throughout the book, Wells treats “modernity” as the archenemy of vital, historic evangelicalism. But he has named the wrong beast. Scholars of modern culture usually define modernity as European-American culture from the late Renaissance up until sometime in this century. Its hallmark was not rejection of absolute truth but the search for objective truth through human reason. Modernity prized reason, harmony, and progress.
The demon Wells is really describing is postmodernity. Sometime in this century modernity has given way to postmodernity with its dethroning of these Enlightenment ideals. Postmodernism, at least in some of its manifestations, revels in subjectivity, irrationalism, chaos, and relativism. The very idea of objective truth is the icon being smashed in this postmodern age. Could it be that Wells would find an ally, however imperfect, in the modern age’s optimistic trust in truth and reason?
Several questions also need to be raised in response to Wells’s diagnosis of evangelicalism. Is the state of theology in evangelicalism really as bad as he believes? Or is it the loss of a particular kind of theology that he fears? What about the explosion of systematic theologies and monographs on theological subjects being published by evangelicals these days? I suspect what Wells wants is not just a return to theology but a restoration of the reign of an old-style Puritan, Calvinist theology among evangelicals.
Wells repeatedly compares “modern” evangelical theology with liberal Protestant theology. He argues that both revise the doctrine of God around immanence: “Evangelicals turned from focusing on God’s transcendence to focusing on his immanence—and then they took the further step of interpreting his immanence as friendliness with modernity.” To which evangelical theologians is Wells referring? He names Harry Emerson Fosdick as the prime example of a liberal Protestant theologian but fails to name the evangelical counterparts. This is typical of the kind of sweeping accusations and critical assertions that abound in Wells’s book. His often insightful analysis is flawed by questionable generalizations and marred by overstatement.
Wells is right, however, in his claim that evangelicalism, if not evangelical theology, is flirting with abandoning objective truth through benign neglect. Many evangelicals are theologically illiterate. What can be done to restore health to evangelicalism? Who will champion the cause of restoring belief in objective truth and how? Wells fails to point a way forward.
At the very least, Wells’s book can serve as a catalyst for evangelical self-examination. If we need a gadfly like this to sting us out of complacency, then let us be stung! At the same time, we have a right to ask the curser of darkness to light a candle and lead the way out of this present darkness.
No Shortcuts To Godliness
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life,by Donald S. Whitney (NavPress, 254 pp.; $16, hardcover). Reviewed by John R. Throop, vicar of Saint Francis Episcopal Church in Chillicothe, Illinois.
There are no shortcuts to spiritual growth, says Donald Whitney, pastor of Glenfield Baptist Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. In this warm, challenging, and practical book, Whitney examines ten spiritual disciplines that all Christians can cultivate: Bible intake, prayer, worship, evangelism, serving, stewardship, fasting, silence, journaling, and learning. According to the author, spiritual disciplines “are the God-given means by which busy believers become like Christ.” They enable believers to receive God’s grace for living, and to become more and more like him.
Still, the most iron-willed self-discipline will not make one more holy, says Whitney, for holiness is a gift of God. But we need to have a receptive attitude, to make time and room for God. Whitney observes, “Christians are called to make themselves do something they would not naturally do—pursue the Spiritual Disciplines—in order to become what they’ve always wanted to be, that is, like Jesus Christ.”
All of the church-growth programs and well-planned worship services cannot substitute for a sound spiritual life. Only the daily progress of the saints in holiness will enable the church to minister effectively into the new century—and for help in that enterprise we can thank Donald Whitney.
Separate But Friendly
Positive Neutrality: Letting Religious Freedom Ring,by Stephen V. Monsma (Greenwood Press, 277 pp.; $49.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
Religious freedom was a cornerstone of the new American republic, but today many political figures seem more interested in freedom from religion. First Amendment clauses that were supposed to be mutually reinforcing are now treated as conflicting. And the mere mention of religion in the public sphere is enough to set off bitter legal and political battles.
In Positive Neutrality, Stephen Monsma takes aim at how we got into the present mess and how we can get out. A political science professor at Pepperdine University, Monsma first assesses the theory and practice of church/state relations. The courts have, for instance, always accorded a higher degree of protection to beliefs than practices, which, Monsma rightly warns, dramatically narrows the constitutional guarantees for religious believers.
Even worse is the disappointing line of cases interpreting the “no establishment” clause. Among the more bizarre results of the courts’ rulings is the secularization of religion, where religious practices are allowed because they are considered to be only of cultural importance.
Equally valuable is Monsma’s look at the cycles through which church/state relations in the U.S. have traveled. What he terms the “first disestablishment” occurred in the eighteenth century, as two very different movements, the secular Enlightenment and the revivalist Great Awakening, combined to separate the institutions of church and state. In the following century, Protestantism became a de facto national religion. The push for public schools was part of this movement, as Protestants moved to minimize the role of Catholic institutions.
However, argues Monsma, Protestants “never effectively challenged” Enlightenment theories of church/state relations, which “denied the very legitimacy of what they were doing. In the twentieth century the consequences of their neglect came home to roost,” with the second disestablishment.
Monsma’s analysis of this convoluted subject is unusually clear-headed, but of even greater value is his proposal for a philosophy of “positive neutrality” to govern church/state relations in a pluralistic society.
“The key point of pluralism,” in his view, “is that associations and communities are a natural, integral, necessary part of any society, and have positive, valuable roles to play.” What is critical, then, is for the government to recognize the important roles those communities fulfill and not to discriminate against religious organizations.
But Monsma wants such neutrality to be “positive”—that is, “to take certain positive steps if it is to be truly neutral in the sense of assuring equal freedoms and equal opportunities for all religious persons and groups.” Such a standard is hard to implement. Monsma gives the example of a military cemetery, where the authorities could either ban all religious symbols on gravestones or allow families to place any religious or secular symbol that they desired. The latter demonstrates “positive neutrality.”
Monsma goes on to deal with some of today’s most controversial issues, such as the role of religion in the public schools. He makes no pretense of having simple answers where “the issues are complex and deeply rooted in longstanding assumptions and patterns of thought and action,” but his book may help provide a new starting point for discussions of the relationship between church and state.
Testing The Spirit Of Psychotherapy
Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Other in an Age of Therapy,by Robert C. Roberts (Eerdmans, 315 pp.; $16.99, paper). Reviewed by Rodney Clapp, the author of Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options (forthcoming from IVP).
Philosopher Bob Roberts here invades the counselor’s office that has made its home in our popular culture and, indeed, in our churches. He declares that psychotherapies are alternative spiritualities. They present various “ways of conceptualizing what it is to be a person, along with sets of disciplines by which to arrive at better ‘health’—that is, to grow toward true personhood.”
Roberts devotes the first part of his book to gentle but incisive critiques of several therapies: Carl Rogers’s client-centered therapy, Albert Ellis’s rational emotive therapy (RET), assertiveness training, family therapy, Carl Jung’s variation on psychoanalysis, and Heinz Kohut’s quest for “healthy narcissism.” His critiques convincingly demonstrate that each therapy does define an ideal person and drives clients or popular adherents toward achieving that model of personhood. For instance, someone truly successful at RET would end up a “logically consistent empiricist and a pragmatic, enlightened hedonist.” Roberts’s aim, however, is not simply to tip over the psychologists’ couches and herd them out of the church. He remembers that Christianity “has always dealt in practical psychology” and strives to demonstrate that the “Christian tradition has a psychology … deeper and more adequate to our humanity than any of the modern non-Christian alternatives.” So he spends the larger part of his book on the constructive task of showing how Christian practical psychology works itself out in such everyday matters as envy, forgiveness, marriage, and friendship.
Along the way, he finds pieces of modern psychologists’ furniture that, with appropriate reupholstering, can and should remain in the church. That is particularly the case with Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy’s family therapy. Nagy’s psychology, unlike most other modern therapies, imagines the fully healthy person as one who has learned to live within community. Roberts sees this as formally compatible with the Christian understanding of salvation as membership in the kingdom of God.
A number of other Christian writers have criticized secular psychologies. Few have Roberts’s philosophical adeptness at making the crucial distinction—as in, “What is pernicious about judgmentalism is not the judgment that is being made but the contempt that alienates one human being from another.” Fewer still possess his gift for the wryly expressed insight. Though it sometimes suffers from being a too loosely bound and nonsystematic collection of formerly published essays, this book is surely one of the best in a growing and important genre.
