Return to the Concept of Truth

Basically, what Wells is calling for is a return to biblical truth-not only to its content, but to the very concept of truth. The Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles had a certainty that contrasts sharply with modernity's outlook. They were convinced that the revelation that they had received from God and proclaimed was true in an absolute sense. It was not just true for them or true in their time alone. It was true "universally, absolutely, and enduringly. "
 
Wells is aware that this conception of truth is regarded by moderns as untenable. He advances three reasons moderns cite in defense of the position that we can no longer hold to absolute truth as those ancients did.
 
(1) The first is often more implicitly assumed than argued per se. It is the idea that we have progressed to the point where we can no longer turn back to that older way of thinking. What is culturally older is considered to be of less value. While this was earlier based on Darwinism and the philosophy that stemmed from it, it has more recently been related to technology.
 
(2) Second, there is the contention that it simply is not possible to slip back into the ancient or biblical worldview, the way one would take off a garment and replace it with another. Worldviews are tied to the psychology and experiences of a given age, and ours is modern. While the argument of New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann along these lines is now considered obsolete, this belief seems to linger.
 
(3) Third, we now face religious pluralism and a bewildering array of claims to truth. It is therefore no longer possible to believe simplistically, as did the biblical writers, in an unqualified view of truth.
 
Wells responds to each of these contentions, arguing that they need not deter us from holding a biblical understanding of truth.
 
(1) First, to hold the view of the progress of the human spirit in view of the atrocities of this century requires a greater credulity than to believe the biblical writers.
 
(2) Second, from the fact of contemporary experience, it does not follow that we must simply acquiesce in this view. Experience is to be interpreted, and it certainly has not been shown that we have lost our freedom to accept or reject beliefs. If beliefs were strictly determined, what would be the point of writing books to persuade someone on any subject, including this one?
 
(3) Third, while religious pluralism in our time has reached a magnitude previously unequaled, it is quite remarkable to hear the claim that this requires giving up the uniqueness of Christianity. Wells says, "Had this been the necessary consequence of encountering a multitude of other religions, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, and Paul would have given up biblical faith long before it became fashionable in Our Time to do so. "

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Disappearance of Evangelical Theology

Actually, the world in which the apostles lived and preached was more pluralistic than any other age until the present. While their world was small and ours is not, there is another very important difference between them and us, together with an important consequence:
 
Theirs, however, was a cauldron of conflicting religious claims within which the Christian faith would have remained tiny but for one fact: the first Christians knew that their faith was absolutely true, that it could brook no rivals, and so they sought no compromises. That was the kind of integrity that God, the Holy Spirit, blessed and used in the ancient world in spreading the knowledge of Christ. We today are not so commonly persuaded or, I dare say, not so commonly blessed. Even among those who seek to guide the Church in its belief, many are of the mind that Christian faith is only relatively true, or they think, against every precept and example that we have in the New Testament, that Christ can be "encountered" in other religions-religions that they view not as rivals but as "interpretations" with which accommodation should be sought. What would have happened over the ages, one wonders, if more of the Church's leaders had been similarly persuaded?
 
Wells contends that theology is disappearing from evangelicalism. This may seem strange, since surveys indicate a strong continued belief in and commitment to the doctrines of historic Christianity. Yet, Wells contends, theology is disappearing because those beliefs have been pushed to the periphery, where their power to define what evangelical life should be has been lost. This disappearance means two things. On the one hand, the several aspects of theology have been broken apart. They are now engaged in, respectively, by biblical scholars; philosophers, historians, and sociologists; and the theoreticians of practice. Second, the articles of belief are no longer at the center of the life of evangelicals and evangelicalism. Instead, there is a vacuum, into which modernity is pouring. The result is that for the first time there is a faith that is not defining itself theologically.
 
Not only the understanding of the nature of evangelicalism but the understanding of ministry has been corrupted by modernization. Two roles that are highly admired in our society have become the models that ministers now tend to adopt: the psychologist and the manager. Thus, preaching, even in evangelical pulpits, tends to be therapeutic, and the pastor is seen as the CEO of a corporation, responsible for its efficiency and growth. This is in keeping with Wells' contrast between two types of ministry-one theologically based, the other professional in orientation. In the latter, one's occupation has become a career, in which advancing to larger, more financially rewarding, and more prestigious positions is the goal.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Human's Unfulfilled Needs

According to Augustine, our feeling of dissatisfaction is a consequence of the Christian doctrine of creation – that we are made in the image of God. There is thus an inbuilt capacity within human nature to relate to God. Yet, on account of the fallenness of human nature, this potential is frustrated. There is now a natural tendency to try to make other things fulfill this need. Created things thus come to be substituted for God. Yet they do not satisfy. Human beings are thus left with a feeling of longing – longing for something indefinable.
This phenomenon has been recognized since the dawn of human civilization.
 
In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato compares human beings to leaky jars. Somehow, human beings are always unfulfilled. Perhaps the greatest statement of this feeling, and its most famous theological interpretation, may be found in the famous words of Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
 
Throughout Augustine’s reflections, especially in his autobiographical Confessions, the same theme recurs. Humanity is destined to remain incomplete in its present existence. Its hopes and deepest longings will remain nothing but hopes and longings. The themes of creation and redemption are brought together by Augustine, to provide an interpretation of the human experience of “longing.” Because humanity is created in the image of God, it desires to relate to God, even if it cannot recognize that desire for what it is. Yet, on account of human sin, humanity cannot satisfy that desire unaided. And so a real sense of frustration, of dissatisfaction, develops. And that dissatisfaction – though not its theological interpretation– is part of common human experience. Augustine expresses this feeling when he states that he “is groaning with inexpressible groanings on my wanderer’s path, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart lifted up toward it – Jerusalem my home land, Jerusalem my mother.”
 

- Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, p132-133.

 
 

Feeling Replaced Reason

The bridge from Kant into modern theology was made easily. Kant initially argued that reason cannot establish the reality and nature of God, and then, in his Critique of Practical Reason, he went on to propose that it is only in moral experience that such knowledge can be grounded, for the knowledge we have of ourselves as moral beings is inexplicable if God does not exist.
 
Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology and the chief formulator of liberal Protestantism, agreed with Kant that the reality and nature of God are neither given by reason nor accessible to it, but he went on to propose that this knowledge is grounded in religious rather than moral experience. The general acceptance of this proposal has had profound implications for the doing of theology and has done much to give the popular culture of the modernized West the shape it now has. Our culture tends either to view experience as suffused with the divine or to confer divinity on the self.
 
The Immanence of God as Feeling
 
First in his Speeches on Religion and then in his much more complex work The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher repudiated objective knowledge of God and then, like the romantics, reached down into his own being to find the grounding for his knowledge of God. This being the case, a rehearsal of the divine attributes will tell us less about God than about ourselves, for each of them is now simply an objectification of what we first find in our religious self. We experience sin in ourselves, and we project an understanding of God
as holy; we find that we are able to resolve internal conflicts, and we attribute the resolution to God in terms of grace and love.
 
Schleiermacher dismissed entirely the vertical dimension of a God outside of experience summoning sinners through biblical revelation to pass beyond themselves into union with God through Christ. He maintained that the knowledge of God was restricted to the self, where the immanence of God was registered in feeling - specifically, awe deriving from radical dependence. Thus God became a kind of psychological deposit, a "something" deep in the self. Somewhere within, the divine signature could be read with enough clarity to secure some meaning in life. Thus it was that in the liberalism that followed Schleiermacher, in Europe as well as in America, poetry gradually edged out exposition, feeling replaced reason as the primary means of knowing God, the heart replaced the head, and intuition supplanted external, revelatory truth.
 
A Lack of Objectivity
 
Barth said, "Theology suffers from a chronic lack of objectivity" in our age; "we do not know what we are talking about when we talk about God but we still want to talk about him," so theologians have repeatedly returned to Schleiermacher to see if perhaps he might show us how to do it.
 
As David Ray Griffin has noted, post-modern theologians "registered their conviction that that noble and flawed enterprise called modern theology had run its course." They have abandoned their belief in the old Enlightenment project and its optimism, its expectation that reason would be able to pacify and comprehend the world. They have walked away from the old preoccupations with truth and meaning and the intellectual categories in which theology had been conceived, such as natural and supernatural, truth and error, transcendent and immanent.

 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 

A Generation Lost

I am a member of a lost generation. We have lost our values. We have lost our faith. And we have lost ourselves.
 
As societal standards and traditional values have declined, and the crassest elements of sexual deviancy and pornography have taken over the public square, it is the youngest Americans who have paid the price. Never in our country’s history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privileged—and yet so empty.
 
This book is not written from the perspective of a parent, a sociologist, or a teacher—but of a peer. This is my generation: the porn generation. And for good or ill, we are America’s future.
 
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the forces of moral relativism, radical feminism, and generational nihilism have gradually destroyed the foundation of our own greatness. Instead of adopting stronger moral standards, our society has embraced the lure of personal fulfillment.
 
In a world where all values are equal, where everything is simply a matter of choice, narcissism rules the day. Our culture has bred hollow young men, obsessed with self-gratification. Young women are told to act like sex objects—and enjoy it. The revisionist historians have effectively labeled obscenity as a right that the Founding Fathers sought to protect. Society told the porn generation that final moral authority rests inside each of us—and in our vanity, we listened.
 
The mainstream acceptance of pornography has become a social fact. Order a movie. Walk past your local news shop. Log on to the Internet. It’s everywhere—in your Blockbuster, your newspaper, your inbox. We’ve replaced faith and family with a warped image of sex and self-satisfaction that ridicules the concept of purity and mangles the most sacred ideals of matrimony.

Traditional authority figures—parents, community leaders, even God—have been discarded. The new authority figures of the porn generation are many, and nearly all are members of a coarsened pop culture—one fed by the destructive malaise of the relativist world. Sex ed instructors, university professors, advertisers, Hollywood actors, MTV artists and assorted celebrities (A-, B-, and C-list) act as the new elders of a church of corrupt, shallow, and materialistic humanism.
 
The porn generation now inhabits a world where “empowerment” means sex with no strings attached. The old faith and traditional morality was too bourgeois, archaic, sexist, and close-minded for this brave new world. Our new god is Tolerance of all behavior, our new credo “live and let live.”
 

- Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation:

How Social Liberalism is Corrupting Our Future, 2005.

 

Age of Jadedness

If millions of people accept the deviant as normal, that reshapes society in vastly destructive ways. Moral self-destruction may seem to have no consequences for an individual, but the destruction of societal standards always has consequences. 

When the stigma left single motherhood, society felt the sting in rising rates of single motherhood and juvenile crime. When the stigma left sexual licentiousness, society felt the sting in rising rates of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, emotional emptiness, and nihilism. Your immoral personal behavior may not affect me, but exempting your immoral behavior from societal scrutiny certainly does. A society without standards is an unhappy, unhealthy society—a society with no future. And all of us have to live in that society.

Nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism are natural results of the chaotic existential subjectivism popularized by the Left. If the hallmark of the baby boomers was rebellion, the hallmark of my generation is jadedness. Nothing really matters—we’re cosmically alone.
 
No generation has ever had the benefits of convenience that my generation does, but instead of using our extra time to live, we seek to kill it. People eight to eighteen years old now spend an average of six hours and twenty-one minutes each day watching television, listening to the radio or to CDs, using the computer for non-school purposes, and playing video games. That’s as opposed to just over two hours per day spent hanging out with parents, only an hour and a half doing physical activity, and under an hour doing homework.
 
Drug use is another form of escapism. Finally, there’s sex. Existentialism and subjectivism are lonely because narcissism is lonely. If you build the world to your own specifications, and everyone else does as well, social contact becomes nearly impossible. Love—the attempt to reach out to another person, to bring that person into your world—requires a faith to which the jaded can never aspire. It is becoming rarer and rarer to find true romantics. In an age of jadedness, the only human contact becomes solely physical, an outward expression of the nihilism that consumes the soul. As society accepts solely physical relationships as an inevitable outgrowth of the destruction of traditional morality, solely physical sex becomes more common.

- Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation: 

How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future, 2005.

Science as the new ‘Natural Law’

The philosophy of scientific government had resulted in the horrors of two World Wars and the specter of centralized, tyrannical government. But that science could free mankind was still in the offing in the postwar period. And why not? 

As John F. Kennedy put it in one of his last speeches in 1963, “Science is the most powerful means we have for the unification of knowledge, and a main obligation of its future must be to deal with problems which cut across boundaries, whether boundaries between the sciences, boundaries between nations, or boundaries between man’s scientific and his humane concerns.”
 
The focus on science had radically shifted. Science had begun, in the Francis Bacon philosophy, as an aid toward the betterment of man’s material conditions; it had morphed over time into an aid toward the betterment of man’s moral condition, though not the source of morality itself. But now, with God out of the picture and the collective implicated in the worst crimes in human history, science was handed the task of creating a new morality, a new law. The existentialists had reduced human purpose to creation of subjective truth; science provided the last remnant of objective truth in Western thought.
 
Nature, then, was the answer; investigation of nature became the purpose.
 
The legacy of Western thought had relied on natural law—the idea of universal purposes discernible in the universe through the use of reason. Nature was seen not as a justification for behavior, but as a hint toward a broader pattern in creation: things were designed with a purpose, and it was the job of free human beings to act in accordance with right reason in achieving that purpose. What we ought to do was inherent in what is: a hammer was made for hammering, a pen for writing, and a human for reasoning. Human beings could reason about the good, and then shape the world around them to achieve it.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Uprooted from the World

Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the self draws its substance from three basic sources: family, community, and craft. Connections to each of these sources are now either strained or lost to the modern self.
 
First, the family is besieged not only by the plague of divorce and the huge increase in single-parent households generally but by the stresses and strains of life that exact their toll on the marriages that do manage to survive in the modernized world. Families that function together, and that do so with a set of common moral values, are becoming an endangered species. The significance of this change in the context of our discussion is that families have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is breaking down. The new generation is inheriting a set of values and expectations that is so thin and pale as to be quite unsatisfying. Hungry for additional tutoring in the meaning of life, the young are turning first to the larger culture. Then, unsatisfied with the ambiguous and contradictory moral messages imparted by the popular media, they are turning inward in their search for signals about the meaning of life.
 
Second, modernization is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless, bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new freedom from various parochialisms is in some sense exhilarating, but it does not come without a price. Those who belong everywhere can also be said to belong nowhere; they have been emancipated from the small town only to become anonymous, unconnected in our large world. Where the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost.
 
Third, the self's connection to craft has also been seriously diminished by modernization, leaving many people perpetually dissatisfied with their work. In some case, machines have severed the link between the worker and the work. In other cases, layers of bureaucracy have severed personal links between ideas and products. In still other cases, the kind of work that is required by modernized societies is inherently undignified or boring, and the old virtue of taking pride in one's work becomes harder and harder to realize.
 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 

The Total Rejection of Tradition

Political emancipation from the oppression of the past (a key theme of the French Revolution) meant a total abandoning of the political, social, and religious ideas of the past. One of the reasons why Enlightenment thinkers placed such a high value upon human reason was that it relieved them of the need to appeal to tradition for ideas; any ideas worth knowing about were accessible to reason alone.

The Enlightenment thus represented a radical rejection of tradition. Reason required no supplementation by voices from the past. The waning of the influence of the Enlightenment in recent decades has been an important factor in encouraging the emergence of a new interest in and respect for tradition in Christian theology.

- Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, p126

The Hole After World War II

The world survived World War II. Not only did the West survive—it got freer, richer, more prosperous than ever. Human wealth expanded exponentially. Life spans increased.
 
But there remained a hole at the center of Western civilization: a meaning-shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since—a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with the will to action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides us the meaning we seek.
 
By the end of World War II, European optimism was dead and buried beneath six feet of human ash. The philosophies of the Europeans—Enlightenment ideals about the value of human beings and the need to move beyond God or Greek teleology—had ended in tragedy. Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte. The post-Locke Enlightenment project had been a Tower of Babel, with the common goal of supplanting reason for religion rather than seeking the congruence of the two. As the tower began to challenge God, its builders went to war with one another, speaking languages all their own. And then the tower fell, and the land was left barren.
 
Europe had buried millions of its sons and daughters; the West had placed its bets on mankind, and reaped the whirlwind.
 
But God did not return. Magna Carta, the first great charter of Western liberties, was signed by King John in 1215, and set limits to monarchic powers based on “regard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honour of God and the advancement of his holy Church.” Religious practice remained the norm in Europe until the advent of the middle of the twentieth century. Then, as the children born around World War II reached adolescence, religious observance plummeted.
 
Faith in human reason, too, had waned. After the catastrophic insanity of not one but two Great Wars, the Biblical warning not to place faith in princes had been proved prescient. The Enlightenment hope in mankind’s collective capacity to better itself had collapsed.
 
Without God, and without the collective, all that was left were individuals. Alone.
 
Thus, the philosophy of existentialism came to the fore.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Kierkegaard: Subjectivity is the Truth

Existentialism truly began in the nineteenth century with Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a Danish philosopher bothered by the problem of Enlightenment reason, which he saw as arrogant—the notion that a universal ethical system could be discerned by human beings was a fool’s errand, the idea that history was an unerring unfolding of Hegelian dialectics far too simplistic. The universe was cold and chaotic—man’s search for meaning could not begin with an attempt to look outward for that meaning. Kantian universalism was too hopeful, Comtian scientism far too self-assured.
 
Instead, Kierkegaard posited that human beings had to find meaning by looking within. The system by which one chooses to live is a leap of faith—but in that leap, man finds his individual meaning. “Subjectivity is the truth,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Objectively there is no infinite decision or commitment, and so it is objectively correct to annul the difference between good and evil as well as the law of noncontradiction and the difference between truth and untruth.” Truth can be found in ourselves.
 
To Kierkegaard, this meant making the leap of faith to believe in a God beyond man-made ethics—his famous “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Kierkegaard focused on passion as opposed to reason—he deemed passion the most important driving force in life, and concluded, “The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.” He hoped, of course, that the passionate leap would be toward the Christian God. But his belief system would lead not to God, in the end, but to worship of subjectivity.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

 

Kant on Subjectivity

Kant established the modern rules for discussing how it is that someone knows the external world, and in doing so he initiated the breakdown of the old distinction between subject and object. When this breakdown crossed over into theology, it resulted in an overemphasis on God's immanence and a diminished emphasis on his transcendence. This change had profound implications for the meaning of Christian faith.
 
Prior to Kant, the reigning epistemological paradigm held that the mind was simply a mirror in which the external world was reflected, that an objective world imprinted its reality on minds that were passive, inert, and uninvolved in this transaction. Kant rejected this model. Instead of beginning with the objective world, he began with the subjective conditions for knowledge, with the shape and functioning of the mind. He argued that the mind is active in and a constitutive part of what is known. It sorts into categories the stream of information contributed by the five senses and then synthesizes the data in ways that do not necessarily correspond to what is externally existent. He maintained that space and time, for example, are categories of the mind rather than realities in the world. Whatever can be said in favor of this, it should immediately be recognized that a fateful move had been made. Once the mind was seen as itself a source of knowledge, knowledge that was then superimposed on the data of the outside world, and once this knowledge was cut loose from control in the knowledge of God, a juggernaut was launched.
 
In literature this inescapable pluralism has been pursued by the post-modernists with purposeful vengeance. In their different ways, such post-modern critics as Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Fish have each made the argument that texts have no stable, unchanging meaning, that they mean only what individual readers perceive them to mean. Fish asserts that this approach does not amount to imposing meaning on the text, that it is simply a recognition of the fact that words have no independent meaning apart from specific contexts. Moreover, the contexts that are crucial for meaning reside not in the sentences and paragraphs of the texts but in the reader's internal psychology, in the ways the reader is inclined to understand life. Thus the subjective triumphs completely over the objective.
 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 
 

Subjectivism Reigns in Societal Morality

Defining deviancy up has meant stigmatizing those who obey the dictates of traditional sexual morality as fools, ascetics, or latent homosexuals. It has also meant stigmatizing moralists as fascists and hypocrites—fascists, because we wish to impose our morality on others; hypocrites, because inevitably, some of us have not been completely pure.
 
We are not fascists—in fact, fascism’s Nietzschean ideals are antithetical to traditional morality. We are Republicans and Democrats. We have the right to vote for general societal morality as expressed by our duly elected lawmakers. Social liberals seek to impose their amorality, albeit far less democratically; they push their viewpoint through pop culture, the education system, the judiciary, and the media. As for hypocrisy, that too is a weak argument—it is always better to do the wrong thing but say the right thing than to both say and do the wrong thing.
 
Yet it is impossible for all but the most extreme liberals in our society to ignore the truth: that tolerance of every social behavior is now the norm. In the absence of community-promoted traditional standards, subjectivism reigns. Nothing is expected of anyone; everyone may make his own rules about what is best.
 
The “live and let live” societal model is a recipe for societal disaster. The myopic question posed by advocates of the new, “Tolerant,” morality is: “How does my immoral behavior hurt you?” But the overwhelming truth is that these are not individual acts, but inherently social acts with social consequences. And when society sanctions and encourages your immoral behavior, that does have an impact—it doesn’t just hurt me, but it hurts my future children as well.
 

- Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation:

How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future, 2005.

 

The Religious Economy (3)

 Discernment is a spiritual capacity. It is the insight that comes with Christian wisdom. It is the ability to see "through" life, to see it for what it really is. Some people are more naturally sagacious than others, some more critically astute than others, and God may enhance this sort of gift by his grace, but it is not this natural ability that I am referring to here. The heart of the ability to discern right from wrong in the actual circumstances of life is the rich flowering that God intends from the interactions of the truth of his Word, reflection on it, and the moral character that grows out of it. It is this culture of wisdom with which the Bible, in both Testaments, is much concerned and in which the evangelical world appears to have lost interest.
 
Indeed, wherever there is worldliness in the church today, it has made its inroads because of insufficient belief in the Transcendent and a surfeit of belief in the modern world. The problem of worldliness, of modernity happily ensconcing itself in the church, is a problem of misplaced belief. It is a problem of mistaken loyalties, of misjudgment about how relevance is really to be assessed and how success is to be defined. Christian faith made relevant to the "world," in this third and final sense, will be Christian faith no longer relevant to God, to his Christ, to his truth.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

The Religious Economy (2)

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.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

The Religious Economy (1)

Finke and Stark maintain that four factors are essential to both economies: (1) organization (or church polity); (2) sales representatives (or clergy); (3) product (or religious doctrine and life); and (4) marketing techniques (or evangelism and church growth).; In other words, supply and demand explain the workings of both economies. They use this thesis to explain the changes that have occurred in the religious landscape, citing as an example the way in which American Protestantism was transformed after the Revolution.
 
It is not difficult to see how the marketeer's evangelicalism might begin to resemble the old liberalism, the gospel H. Richard Niebuhr once described as consisting in a God without wrath bringing people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross. Hawking the church as a product inevitably violates its nature as the gathering of the redeemed for service in God's kingdom and in his world. What is lost is biblical truth. It is not the truth about Christ, his work, or his presence in the church that is important in the modern selling of the church but something entirely different.
 
It is surely ironic that those who seek to promote the church have adopted strategies that deliberately obscure its essence. The church should be known as a place where God is worshiped, where the Word of God is heard and practiced, and where life is thought about and given its most searching and serious analysis. This, in fact, is what the traditional church has seen as its chief business, however badly it may have been doing this business. But none of this can be marketed, and so it is ignored. The interest turns to how well appointed and organized the church is, what programs it has to offer, how many outings the youth group has organized, how convenient it is to attend, how good the nursery is. The truly important matters are marginalized, and the marginal aspects of the life of the church are made central. Barna shows no interest in the New Testament criteria for those in leadership, such as soundness of character, knowledge of God, understanding of his Word, and an aptness to teach it; he focuses instead on traits valued in modern business, such as self-confidence and managerial skill.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Human Beings in the New Systems

In the absence of Judeo-Christian morality and Greek teleology, each of these visions offered a shining, exciting new purpose to humanity. The philosophy of the American founding represented the apex of a philosophy that could provide all four elements of meaning necessary for the building of a civilization: individual purpose and communal purpose, individual capacity and collective capacity.
 
But romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and scientific progressivism did away with the individual need for meaning. The four elements of meaning collapsed downward into two: communal purpose and communal capacity.
 
The individual virtually disappeared in each of these domains. Individuals were only valuable as members of the collective: as sources of the general will, to be embodied in the unified culture of the state; as members of economic classes, who could unite to overthrow the nature of humankind itself; as citizens to be cultivated by the state, their expertise to be placed in service of the greater good.
 
And human beings did find meaning in the new systems. But the new systems of thought, unchecked by the old morality, unconstrained by the willingness of single individuals to stand up to the collective, could only end one way: in blood. The worst sins of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sprang from various combinations of romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and supposedly scientific governance.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Religion's Response to Modernization

Secularization is almost a synonym for modernization. It is that aspect of modernization that produces the values of secularism, by which he means "the restructuring of thought and life to accommodate the absence or irrelevancy of God."
 
These developments affect all persons, Christians and unbelievers alike. They have great power to shape the consciousness of those within society. In so doing, they have created an atmosphere in which unbelief seems natural and belief seems odd. Yet the church seems blissfully unaware of this condition, like the proverbial frog in the kettle. While this is a time of great peril, Wells believes that it is also a time of great opportunity. In the providence of God, times of reformation in the church's life frequently come out of times of disorder and chaos. God often tears down before he builds up, and this may be one of these times.
 
Unfortunately, religion, evangelical Christianity in particular, is not responding very well to this challenge, in Wells' judgment. He opened No Place for Truth with an account of the first day of his systematic theology course, in which a student complained after class about having to take systematic theology, which so obviously had no bearing on his future ministry. This sets the discussion of the entire book.
 
Wells points out that theology has generally been comprised of three elements:
 

(a) The confessional element - is the body of beliefs the church has inherited and holds, which crystallizes into doctrine.

(b) The reflective element is the church's endeavor to understand the meaning of being the recipient of God's Word in the present age. This in turn must proceed down three avenues. It must be biblical theology, covering the whole of Scripture and establishing the connections among the different parts. It must be historical theology, surveying the history of God's working in the church in the past. This will give the church the ballast necessary to assimilate the spiritual benefits of the past and to relativize the present with its pretentiousness. It must also be contemporary theology (although Wells does not use these terms), relating the content of the confession to what a given period considers normative.

(c) The third element is the cultivation of a set of virtues grounded in the first two elements. It is a matter of the church obtaining the wisdom that comes from basing its practice on its beliefs.'

 
The evangelical church has, however, been strongly influenced by the forces of modernization and has done poorly at carrying out these tasks of theology. Wells says, "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." The pastor seeks to pattern the pastoral office and function in terms of the two roles that the culture most admires: the manager and the therapist. This is what theology is reduced to: reflection in the academy and practice in the church.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Spiritual Vagrants in the Modern World

The transition from a world in which God and his truth were accorded a central and often public place to one in which they have neither did not happen overnight, of course. It came in fits and starts, amid confusion and sometimes conflict. A longer view indicates that it came in two basic stages, however.
 
In the first, God began to disappear from public view, and the whole noisy human enterprise took his place. In the second, the whole human enterprise was itself displaced and the organizing center of life was assumed by the extraordinarily pervasive and impersonal forces that modernization has unleashed on the world. We have thus become the pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God's creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world. As it turns out, we too have lost our center through this transition.
 
It is now considered better to look good than to be good. The facade is more important than the substance - and, that being the case, the substance has largely disappeared. In the center there is now only an emptiness. This is what accounts for the anxious search for self that is now afoot: only the hungry think about food all the time, not the well fed, and only those in whom the self is disappearing will define all of life in terms of its recovery, its actualization.
 
We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives - including the soil in which our Christian faith grows - is constantly shifting.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Modernity is the Consequence of Modernization

By modernization, Wells means the process by which, for the sake of manufacturing and commerce, our society is organized into cities. This process results in the rise of modernity's values. He says, "In this context, the term modernity refers to the public environment created largely by urbanization, the moral etiquette, style of thought, and relationships of which are shaped by the large, impersonal structures that fill it."
 
The effect of this modernization is to create two separated spheres, the public and the private. The one world is defined by personal relations, and is made up of small, insulated islands of home, family, and personal friends. The other is defined by the functions within the capitalistic machine. In this great system of production and distribution, persons are valued not for who they are or what they believe or hold as values, but for what they do. In this realm, in fact, personal relations may actually be a hindrance, since much efficiency depends on being impersonal. This anonymity also works against accountability. The worker is disengaged from any sense of responsibility for the product manufactured, any accountability to the ultimate consumer of the product.
 
This urbanized modern workplace not only undercuts accountability, but it also has a similar effect on the cogency of religious belief and morality. Because of the wide range of worldview, cultural and ethnic difference, and personal values found in such close proximity, the values of each inhabitant have to be reduced to the lowest common denominator in order to eliminate antagonisms among the competing views. And when the public life is divested from the private world, it becomes connected instead to the machinery of the technological age. There also is a strong orientation to the future, as persons are "forced to anticipate and adapt to the oncoming change. "
 
In this modern society, the centers of culture have nothing to do with geography. Rather, they are involved with "a number of large, interlocking systems that form the structure of society." These are, for example, the economy; the political government (world, federal, and state); the universities that generate and disseminate knowledge; and the mass media, which do the same for the images by which we understand ourselves.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.