No Place for Truth

or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

David F. Wells

• Editorial: Eerdmans
• Año: 1994
• ISBN:
  9781467464772
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religion

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.

THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF FAITH

CHAPTER III

Things Fall Apart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THEOLOGY from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today but, oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world—in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift from God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational. And it would have made few of these capitulations to modernity had not its capacity for truth diminished. It is not hard to see these things; avoiding them is what is difficult.

It is also difficult to adduce conclusive proof that these deep flaws in contemporary evangelical faith are the result of its having lost its theological soul, that a faith flung out to the periphery is disintegrating because the theological center has not been able to hold. Why is it so difficult? Because the kind of proof that we would find most convincing would require that we be able to show empirically how the intersections between modernized culture, internal psychology, and the structures of belief are all playing out on one another such that theology has become their chief casualty. Social scientists who have tried to explore such questions with the laity have, unfortunately, often found themselves set to a frustrating task. They either ask questions that are so simplistic as to yield superficial answers or they ask more probing and specific questions that tend to provoke doubt and bafflement in those who try to answer.

Moreover, it is important to recognize that there remains a core of mystery within all human motivation; we seldom understand all of the reasons for any of our actions. In this particular case, we are left with our surmises and suspicions about the contemporary restructuring of evangelical faith, but we do not always have the cold, hard proof that we need. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart, we too know pornography when we see it, but we may not always be able to compile the conclusive, objective proof that will show it up for what it is.

For these reasons, I am advancing my argument cautiously in this book. I am compelled to enter this perplexing terrain, however, because the difficulty I encounter in explaining what has happened weighs far less heavily than does the need to have at least some understanding of it. The stakes are high: the anti-theological mood that now grips the evangelical world is changing its internal configuration, its effectiveness, and its relation to the past. It is severing the link to historical, Protestant orthodoxy. It is emancipating contemporary evangelicals to form casual alliances at will with a multitude of substitutes for this orthodoxy. And the reason for this is that what that orthodoxy had and what contemporary evangelicalism so often lacks is a theology at its center that defines the faith and prescribes the sorts of intellectual and practical relations it should establish in the world.

In this chapter, I want to lay the foundation for exploring these themes. I need to begin by defining the theology that is disappearing and offering some preliminary evidence to substantiate my contention that it is in fact disappearing. The bulk of the evidence will have to come later, and it will be more indirect than direct. In the three chapters that follow, I will be looking at three aspects of a faith that is in process of being shorn of its theology. By working back from the effects, I hope to be able to show that their cause is a lost theological vision at the center, and this in turn will give new cogency to my analysis of the effects. But I hope the preliminary evidence I offer here will be sufficient to provide a working hypothesis that will enable me to develop the parallels between the emergence of Protestant Liberalism earlier this century and the restructuring that is taking place in the evangelical world today.

Theology Disappears

What Is Theology?

What in an earlier age might have been self-evident is no longer so. Today, so many definitions of theology are being offered that one might well wonder how a field experiencing such internal chaos could sustain so many practitioners or that anyone outside the field would take it seriously.¹ “As everyone knows,” Ian Ramsey wrote some twenty years ago, “theology is at present in turmoil.… Theology seems often to the outsider just so much word-spinning, air-borne discourse which never touches down except disastrously.”² As he saw it, not only was the Church without theology, but theology was without God. Undoubtedly, some chastening has set in since then among professional theologians, but the chasm between their language and mentality on the one hand and the language and mentality of the Church on the other has, if anything, only widened in the intervening years.

This is, of course, the theme of this book, but I wish to look at it less from the side of the theologians and more from the side of the Church. To this end, I will begin with a definition of theology meant to cover both those with technical interest in its construction and those without such an interest, in hopes of being able to mediate between the several different ways in which we use the word. This is no small undertaking, for, as Edward Farley has noted, these different meanings have become so estranged from one another that they are no longer recognized as references to the same thing.³ When the word theology is used in the Church, it is commonly used simply of someone’s private theory about some subject. As the therapeutic culture that modernity has spawned then intrudes into this inner sphere, “theology” tends to lose its doctrinal substance. By contrast, in the academy the word theology is sometimes used to described a discipline, similar in kind to history and astronomy, in which the practitioner of learning ought ideally to have no personal involvement. Alternatively, it is also used in the academy as a synonym for Old Testament study, New Testament study, or the study of spirituality, in which case it has lost its status as an independent discipline altogether. Given the different characterizations of theology in Church and academy, it is hard to recognize that it is the same thing at bottom.

It is my contention that theology should mean the same thing regardless of whether it is used in the Church or in the academy. There was a time when there was this sort of uniformity of meaning. In the past, the doing of theology encompassed three essential aspects in both the Church and the academy: (1) a confessional element, (2) reflection on this confession, and (3) the cultivation of a set of virtues that are grounded in the first two elements. To be sure, the various theological traditions have not given equal emphasis to these three elements, nor have these elements received equal attention from century to century even within any given tradition. In ages of heresy or schism, for example, the importance of defining what it is that needs to be confessed has often received prominence; in ages of social turmoil or ideological hostility, critical reflection and apologetics have moved to the forefront of Christian attention; and in ages when confessional orthodoxy has not only dominated but, in the process, calcified the church, the cultivation of the virtues, the life of spirituality, has been made more urgent. Nevertheless, despite these shifting emphases, theologians have always seen themselves as having to live and work within the triangle that these three interests form, and what is true of them is also true of the Church as a whole.

Confession, in this understanding, is what the Church believes.⁴ It is what crystallizes into doctrine. And, to be more specific, churches with roots in the Protestant Reformation confess the truth that God has given to the Church through the inspired Word of God. There may be disagreements about what the Bible teaches on any one subject, as well as how that teaching should be assembled, but there is unanimous agreement that this authoritative truth lies at the heart of Christian life and practice, for this is what it means to live under the authority of Scripture. It is in this core of confession that the Church’s identity is preserved across the ages. This is the watchword by which it is known. Without this knowledge, it is bereft of what defines the Church as the people of God, bereft of the means of belief, worship, sustenance, proclamation, and service. Confession must be at the center of every theology that wants to be seen as theologia, the knowledge of God, a knowledge given in and for the people of God.

The second element of theology, reflection, involves the intellectual struggle to understand what it means to be the recipient of God’s Word in this present world. It has to proceed down three distinct avenues. First, it must range over the whole of God’s disclosure within Scripture, seeking to make the connections between the various parts of Scripture such that God’s intent in so revealing his character, acts, and will is made clear. It aims at a comprehensive understanding of what God has given so that his mind will begin to be replicated in the Church’s mind. Second, reflection must range over the past, seeking to gather from God’s working in the Church the ballast that will steady it in the storms of the present. It is through this kind of reflective work that the spiritual riches of the past are gathered and the present is relativized. The present always needs to be deprived of its pretensions to being the most elevated moment in the story of the human spirit (or, as some charismatics would have it, the most dramatic), for this opens wide the door to pride and folly. Third, reflection must seek to understand the connections between what is confessed and what, in any given society, is taken as normative. This is crucial, for the ideas and assumptions of any age powerfully intrude on the Church’s mind. In the West, modernity has determined what is normative. In our particular context, then, we are called to see that the Church does not adapt its thinking to the horizons that modernity prescribes for it but rather that it brings to those horizons the powerful antidote of God’s truth. It is not the Word of God but rather modernity that stands in need of being demythologized.

The third element of theology involves the cultivation of those virtues that constitute a wisdom for life, the kind of wisdom in which Christian practice is built on the pillars of confession and surrounded by the scaffolding of reflection. And yet this formulation is too simple, for what I have in mind is a kind of spirituality that is now exceedingly rare—the type of spirituality that is centrally moral in its nature because God is centrally holy in his being, that sees Christian practice not primarily as a matter of technique but as a matter of truth, and that refuses to disjoin practice from thought or thought from practice. Only when this kind of spirituality is present does the sort of wisdom arise by which a person comes to know how to be Christian in any given set of circumstances.

To ask that the Church be thus theological may seem to be asking too much; clearly it is asking too much of the academy. We have come to this pass because for most people these three interests have been disengaged from one another. In the modern period, for example, confession in the sense of a profession about the objective truth of God and his self-disclosure in the space-time world has become most awkward in academia because of its continuing attachment to Enlightenment habits. It is often equally embarrassing in the larger social context because of the way in which modernity has reshaped our sense of what is proper. As a result, confession has either lost weight or disappeared entirely in academic theology. And once confession is lost, reflection is cut loose to find new pastures. Once it has lost its discipline in the Word of God, it finds its subject matter anywhere along a line that runs from Eastern spirituality to radical politics to feminist ideology to environmental concerns. Moreover, class interests then typically intervene and drive a wedge between Church and academy, and the upshot of this is that academic theological reflection, cut loose from both the responsibility of practice and the foundation of confession, is relegated to a small world of the specially interested whose internal conversation is mostly incomprehensible to those who are outside it. Theology, in a historic sense, therefore dies, because all that is left of it is reflection of a philosophical nature.

By a different route, the same thing has happened in the Church, the evangelical wing included. As the nostrums of the therapeutic age supplant confession, and as preaching is psychologized, the meaning of Christian faith becomes privatized. At a single stroke, confession is eviscerated and reflection reduced mainly to thought about one’s self. That being the case, the responsibility of seeking to be Christian in the modern world is then transformed into a search for what Farley calls a “technology of practice,” for techniques with which to expand the Church and master the self that borrow mainly from business management and psychology. Thus it is that the pastor seeks to embody what modernity admires and to redefine what pastoral ministry now means in light of this culture’s two most admired types, the manager and the psychologist. Where this modern “wisdom” comes to supplant confession in defining and disciplining what practice should mean, where reflection has been reduced simply to reflection upon the self, and where the hard work of relating the truth of God’s Word to the processes of modern life has been abandoned, there once again theology has died and all that is left of it is an empty shell of what wisdom once used to be. It is this process of reduction—the reduction of the meaning of theology to reflection in the academy and to practice in the evangelical Church—that is the theme of this chapter. Yet before we proceed further, it is important that we understand the novelty of this situation. In eviscerating theology in this way, by substituting for its defining, confessional center a new set of principles (if they can appropriately be called that), evangelicals are moving ever closer to the point at which they will no longer meaningfully be able to speak of themselves as historic Protestants.

That the apostolic churches were confessional and that they confessed the apostolic teaching about the life, death, and resurrection of Christ may be disputed, but only on the most radical redactional reading of the New Testament. And to dispute it further requires of us the extraordinary feat of seeming to know something that is contradicted by all that we have established of the earliest patristic belief. The apostles “delivered” the facts about Christ (1 Cor. 11:23; 15:3), interpreted those facts, and then developed the consequences for Christian life from this. These facts assumed and were articulated within a framework of theism that allowed for the possibility of miracles. In the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, as well as in his ministry on earth, this possibility had become a series of actualities. These acts of God were interpreted and quickly formalized into the gospel message which in the book of Acts (e.g., 13:16-41; 14:15-17; 17:22-31) is adapted to different audiences but contains the same elements in each adapted form. These are, as William Barclay argued with respect to Paul, that history was a preparation for Christ’s coming, that God was active in that history (Acts 17:27-28; 13:16-23; 14:17), that in Christ God entered t...