There was a time when American evangelicals prized and cultivated biblically chaste Christian thought and an incisive analysis of the culture from a perspective apart from it. But the past few decades have seen an erosion of the old distinctions, a gradual descent into the "self" movement, a psychologizing of faith, and an adaptation of Christian belief to a therapeutic culture.
Distracted by the blandishments of modern culture, we have lost our focus on transcendent biblical truth. We have been beguiled by the efficiency of our culture's technique, the sheer effectiveness of its strategies, and we have begun to play by these rules. We now blithely speak of marketing the gospel like any other commodity, oblivious to the fact that such rhetoric betrays a vast intrusion of worldliness into the church.
It was once one of the hallmarks of evangelicalism. that it offered a pronounced cultural critique, but now it is as attentive as any other aspect of that culture to the pronouncements of the pollster. Today any evangelical who demurs from the cultural consensus will almost certainly be viewed as a rebel, perhaps even a subversive, and almost certainly as irrelevant and out of it. All of this may be deeply alarming, but it is not more alarming than the prospect of falling in with the world, of capitulating to a system of values and set of assumptions that kills the love for God required by the first and great commandment upon which all Christian faith must be based.
Distracted by the blandishments of modern culture, we have lost our focus on transcendent biblical truth. We have been beguiled by the efficiency of our culture's technique, the sheer effectiveness of its strategies, and we have begun to play by these rules. We now blithely speak of marketing the gospel like any other commodity, oblivious to the fact that such rhetoric betrays a vast intrusion of worldliness into the church.
It was once one of the hallmarks of evangelicalism. that it offered a pronounced cultural critique, but now it is as attentive as any other aspect of that culture to the pronouncements of the pollster. Today any evangelical who demurs from the cultural consensus will almost certainly be viewed as a rebel, perhaps even a subversive, and almost certainly as irrelevant and out of it. All of this may be deeply alarming, but it is not more alarming than the prospect of falling in with the world, of capitulating to a system of values and set of assumptions that kills the love for God required by the first and great commandment upon which all Christian faith must be based.
- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland:
The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.
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