Tuesday, January 3, 2023

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.

Monday, January 2, 2023

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.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

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.

Friday, December 30, 2022

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.

Sunday, December 25, 2022

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.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

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.

Thursday, December 15, 2022

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.