Let God be God over the Church. It seems a rather silly thing to say. After all, who can prevent it? The point is that many Christians and churches live as practical deists, as though God is not really interested in how we operate, and as though he does not sovereignty direct all things that come to pass. Letting God be God means trusting him to work through the means he has ordained, without feeling the need for innovation, and simply doing as he has directed.

Letting God be God also means being who God wants us to be, recognizing that being is fundamental, and doing is only consequential. If we are who God wants us to be, we will inevitably do what God wants us to do.

Letting God be God over the church, seeing him as its center and glory, its source and its life, is a truly liberating experience. It liberates us from thinking that we have to do, in ourselves, what we are entirely incapable of doing. That is, growing the church. We cannot do the work that only God can do. We can work in the church, preach and teach, spread the gospel, encourage and urge each other on, but we cannot impart new life. Nor can we ever sanctify the church. Indeed we cannot even feed the church. It is God who supplies the food; we are simply called upon to serve it (1 Cor. 3:5). This, however, is precisely why Paul says, a little later, that “we do not lose heart” (2 Cor. 4:1, 16) but are “confident” (3:4; cf. 5:6).
   While all of this is conventional enough, it is not common enough in evangelical churches. Lip service is paid to these ideas, but when we get really serious about “doing church” we turn to what we know best. We turn to structures and programs, appearances and management, advertising and marketing. Our preoccupation is with what we do and therefore with what we control. This is what animates the conversation among evangelical leaders, what fills the pages of magazines like Leadership, and what attracts pastors to the really big important conferences. This is what they are willing to pay serious money to hear.
   Alas! It is missing the point, if I may say so. What is of primary interest in a technological world is technique, for that, after all, it how we manage everything else. In the kingdom of God things are different. It is not that we do not do things, but that our doing is rooted in our being. Who we are is more fundamental than what we do. Character is more basic than action. Being mastered by God is infinitely more important than having the know-how to manage the church.
   Letting God be God over the church means that he becomes foundational to its being, thinking, and doing. In a highly pragmatic culture, such as we have in America, doing cuts itself off from thinking. The only thinking that gets done, at least with respect to the church, is about the how-to questions. The kind of critical thinking, the serious evaluation that should go along with all of this, is impatiently brushed aside as irrelevant. If something works, if it is successful, that means what was done has validated itself. What more needs to be thought about it?
   I believe that today there is a deep yearning for churches in which God is God. Those are the churches that most easily become the communities we have all lost, where relations are developed, even in this fallen world, in the sight of God. They are where people strive to be truthful in those relations, which really is the key to integrity, and the integrity ties together our public and private lives. Churches, in fact, need to be communities that love the truth God has revealed and, in so doing, become serous and joyous about the God of that truth and intent upon serving him in his world. The church is not a business, not an experiment, not a product to be sold. It is an outpost of the kingdom, a sign of things to come in Christ’s sovereign rule, which is now hidden but will be make open and public. Then all the world will bow before him in recognition of who he is.
   And this, I dare say, is the only answer we have for the church’s existence and service. It is the anticipation of that great day. It is pointing beyond itself to that great day. It lives in this world, but it lives because it has seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. This is the knowledge that changes everything. Business savvy, organizational wizardry, cultural relevance are simply no substitute for this. Unless the Lord rebuilds the evangelical church today, as we humble ourselves before him and hear afresh his word, it will not be rebuilt.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 247–248.

The fads that exist in the church (using the term in its broadest possible sense) today — the seeker-sensitive and emergent movements — are largely motivated by fear. It is a fear of being unattractive to postmodern man, and so becoming irrelevant. The prevailing notion is that we must become postmodern if we are to gain an audience with the postmodern culture.

But this has never been the way God has worked. He has never called his people to blend in with the culture. On the contrary, we are a people called out of the culture to display the character of God to the culture. And we need not fear that our peculiarity will hinder God in his work of redemption.

[W]hen Paul says it is God who grows the church, he clearly is assuming that God is sovereign. God rules over all of life, bringing about his providential will, from the mighty events like the falling of empires to the most insignificant, like the falling of a sparrow. This means that within this world, kingdoms and cultures rise and fall according to his sovereign will. Paul says he has even established the nations’ boundaries (Acts 17:26).. Nothing, therefore, is more absurd than the panic that now grips the evangelical church. It is terrorized by the specter of postmodernity. Reading today’s “how-to” literature, one has to draw the conclusion that the church’s days are numbered unless we rush in to prop it up with our own know-how. God, you see, has more on his hands than he can possibly handle. Unless the church capitulates and kisses its (post)modern enemies, it is done for!
   The desperate measures being proposed for these desperate times are often little more than a case of weak knees and unbelief. We believe altogether too little in God’s sovereign control, otherwise we would not be in full retreat before the pressures and demands of the (post)modern world. We look like the soldiers of some sorry nation that are very brave when they are safe in their protected barracks but, at the first sight of an enemy, lay down their arms and run.
   The truth is that there is nothing in our postmodern world that is a serious threat, or an insurmountable obstacle, to the will of God, this is true of this saving will as well. He is as sovereign in the way he begets faith today as he is over the sparrow that flies or falls, he will grow the church. Today, we no longer seem to believe this, and want to aid his cause by our week and foolish capitulations.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 244.

During the last few decades, it has been decided that we have been “doing church” all wrong. That is the reason for the cultural decline in religiosity, and the consequential rise in numbers of the “unchurched.” If we could only find the right way to “do church,” surely people would want to be a part of it. And so a number of “experts” have been “rethinking the church.” According to David Wells, this is energy misdirected. “It is not the church we need to rethink,” he writes. “Rather, it is our thoughts about the church that need to be rethought.”

   In my view, so much of this rethinking confuses rethinking the nature of the church with rethinking its performance. For the multitude of pragmatists who are leading churches in America today, these are one and the same thing. The church is nothing but its performance. There is nothing to be said about the church that cannot be reduced to how it is doing, and that is a matter for constant inventories, poll taking, daily calculations, and strategizing.
   I beg to differ. These are two entirely different matters. We intrude into what is not our business when, in our earnest pursuit of success in the church, which we think we can manufacture, we confuse its performance with its nature. Let me explain.
   The church is not our creation. It is not our business. We are not called upon to manage it. It is not there for us to advance our careers in it. It is not there for our own success. It is not a business. The church, in fact, was never our idea in the first place. No, it is not the church we need to rethink.
   Rather it is our thoughts about the church that need to be rethought. It is the church’s faithfulness that needs to be reexamined. It is its faithfulness to who it is in Christ, its faithfulness in living out its life in the world, that should be occupying us,. The church, after all, is not under our management but under God’s sovereign care, and what he sees as health is very often rather different from what we imagine its health to be.
   The church, let us remember, is called the “church of God” (Gal. 1:13; 1 Cor. 15:9). Churches are “the churches of Christ” (Rom. 16.16) because they are his, bought by his precious blood. Christ not only constituted the church (Math. 16:18), but God has given us the blueprint of its life in Scripture. What we need to do, then, first and foremost, is to replicates his thoughts about it. We need to ask ourselves how well, or how badly, we are realizing our life in Christ in the church, how far and how well churches stand out as the outposts of the kingdom of God in our particular culture.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 222–223.

Postmodern man is an independent sort. He does not want to be told what to do or be confronted with audacious claims of objective truth. He wants to choose his own truth and form his own religion, and be free to alter them as he goes, according to whatever suits him at the moment. He values spirituality, but hates religion.

[I]in America, 78 percent of people say they are spiritual. When solving life's dilemmas, 56 percent say they are more likely to rely on themselves than on an outside power like the God of the Bible. And 40 percent claim specifically to be spiritual but not religious. The same change has occurred in Britain. A study looking at the decade from 1990 to 2000 found that during this time weekly church attendance dropped from 28 percent to 8 percent but those who said they had spiritual experiences rose from 48 percent to 76 percent. There clearly has been a surge in spiritual appetite that is either hostile to religion or, at least, has lost confidence in institutionalized religion.
   Religion as we typically understand it is a publicly practiced matter. It is about attendance in a church, synagogue, or mosque; about public praying and teaching; about accepting the disciplines of the believing community; and about respecting the boundaries of its belief. This new spirituality is about the private search for meaning, a search for connection to something larger than the self. It is in fact a self-constructed spirituality.
   Why is that? The answer, quite simply, is that postmoderns trust direct experience but distrust what is mediated. What comes through others is subject to all the suspicions that are activated the moment they start to speak to us. What are their motives for speaking to me? What's in it for them? Are they using words to manipulate me? These are the thoughts that arise in the cloud of doubt and distrust when postmoderns engage religious matters. By contrast, spirituality that is inward, rising within the self, arising from the perceptions of our own selves, is not something coming to us secondhand from others. It is innocent, untouched, unscathed, unpolluted. It is real. We can trust ourselves but we cannot trust others! We are unsuspicious about ourselves but highly suspicious of others!
   In the United States, 80 percent believe that a person should arrive at his or her own beliefs independent of any external authority such as a church. Indeed, 60 percent say that since we all have God within us, churches are unnecessary. And in a generational slice that was made, 53 percent of boomers think it is more important to be alone and meditate than to worship with others.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 179–180.

How different this is from biblical, Christian faith! At the foundation of Christian faith is the knowledge that we cannot trust ourselves, that in us “dwelleth no good thing” (Romans 7:18). This is no self-discovered religion. We can only put our trust in a mediated relationship with a God who is outside and above us. God has revealed himself through the Scriptures, has given us a mediator in Christ, and ordained that we be shepherded within the fellowship of the Church. Until postmodern man sees his true nature and learns to distrust himself, he is without hope.

David Wells discusses the fundamental difference between biblical Christianity and pagan spirituality, and shows that many who call themselves “Christian” and “evangelical” actually have more in common with pagan religion than with Christianity.

Christian and Pagan Paths

There are two families of spirituality in life. Within each are many differences, much as there are within human family members. But what distinguishes them most importantly is that one begins above and moves down whereas the other begins below and tries to move up (or perhaps in). One starts with God and reaches into sinful life whereas the other starts in human consciousness and tries to reach above to make connections in the divine. One is Christian and the other pagan. These are the two fundamental spiritualities in the West today.
   Throughout the Old Testament this earthy, pagan spirituality was constantly being engaged both outside and inside Israel. Readers today associate this paganism mostly with its more vivid, reprehensible episodes such as sacrificing children to Molech, or Jezebel’s flock of priests who tried to keep Baal content and whom Elijah faced off against. But beneath it all were assumptions of a spiritual kind that are often missed. These spiritual assumptions have persisted across the ages, coming down into our present moment, even though today the barbaric practices that went hand in glove with this ancient paganism in the Old Testament period have passed away.
   These spiritual assumptions were present in the New Testament period, too. The apostles confronted them. Yet the church did not really enter into a life-and-death struggle until the centuries that followed immediately on the patristic period. At stake was its very existence. Would it think of its faith as the grace of God coming from “above,” being incarnate in the Son, and conquering sin and death on the cross? And would it insist, against great cultural pressure, that there is absolutely nothing sinners can do to reach upward to God, to connect with him or to influence him, that he has had to reach down to us through his Son? Or would it allow for the possibility that sinners can reach down into themselves and find solace there in the sacred? Can they make this connection by their own religious effort? The apostles had made their argument that the real and saving spirituality was from above and not, in these ways, from below. The early church, for the most part, followed.
   This life-and-death struggle was therefore won, for the moment, by upholding the New Testament’s doctrines of incarnation, grace, atonement, and resurrection. However, this message was soon lost in the Middle Ages. Luther in the sixteenth century, followed by Calvin and the other Reformers, once again returned to Scripture and once again resounded the notes of God’s undeserved grace, coming from above, which alone enables sinners to know him. Christianity is not about sinners lifting themselves up to God but about God coming down in condescension and grace to them.
   Biblical spirituality and our contemporary spirituality are not two variations on the same theme. They are stark alternatives to each other. In the one, God reaches down in grace; in the other, the sinner reaches up (or in) in self-sufficiency. These spiritualities belong in different worlds, one moral in its fabric and the other psychological. One thinks in terms of salvation, the other of healing. One results in holiness, the other looks for wholeness. In the one, God’s sovereignty is seen in the establishment of what is spiritual; in the other, a human-seized sovereignty is at work to create its own spirituality. Between these two kinds of spirituality there can be no accord, no peace, no cooperation. The one excludes the other. This is the message we have heard from the apostles. This is the message that was recovered at the time of the Reformation. And this is the message that should be resounding in the church today.
   The church, however, is courted in every age by the alternative counterfeit spirituality, first in one form and then in another. Today the evangelical church is in a life-and-death struggle with this spiritual alternative, even as the apostles were in the New Testament period and the prophets were in the Old Testament. Today this pagan spirituality comes, not in barbaric forms of child sacrifice — assuming that abortion is more about convenience than spirituality — but in the innocent tones of popular culture. We meet it everywhere.
   Sometimes it is dressed up in sophisticated psychological language. More commonly we hear it in the everyday self-talk of our therapeutic culture. It is there in the television chatter, in the magzines near the checkout counter at the supermarket, and it is mentioned between neighbors. This understanding of being spiritual sounds plausible, compelling, innocent, and even commendable, but, let us make no mistake about it, it is lethal to biblical Christianity. That is why the biggest enigma we face today is the fact that its chief enablers are evangelical churches, especially those who are seeker-sensitive and emergent who, for different reasons, are selling spirituality disconnected from biblical truth.
   The seeker-sensitive are adapting their product to a spiritual market that believes it can have spiritual comfort with very little truth. The emergents are adapting their product to a spiritual market that is younger, postmodern, and leery about truth. But in both cases we see this strange anomaly. Here are those who think of themselves as being biblical, as being the children of the New Testament, the followers of Jesus and the apostles, embracing an alternative spirituality in order either to be successful or to be culturally cutting-edge.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 176–178.

We have been hearing from David Wells on some shifts in popular thinking that have taken place in the latter half of the twentieth century. Today we’ll consider the change in our perspective of guilt and shame.

It is true that we often use the words "guilt" and "shame" interchangeably. We tend to mean the same thing by them. However, in recent years, especially in psychiatric literature, a clear difference has emerged between them. I am going to be following this distinction.

Shame

Shame is the sense of awkwardness a person feels when seen doing something, or heard saying something, he or she does not want others to know about. Shame is not necessarily “moral” in nature. A person may be ashamed about parents who come off sounding ignorant, or do not speak English, or are poor. A person may be ashamed of where he or she lives because it is in the wrong part of town. These are not moral matters, but they are still capable of making a person feel ashamed.
   This same sense, though, carries through into more clearly moral matters. A person, for example, may feel quite awkward about being caught shoplifting by a video camera, or that news somehow got out that the IRS was pursuing him or her for evading payment of taxes. The dynamic in each case, however, is the same. A person feels awkward when others know something personal he or she wished to keep hidden.

Guilt

Guilt, by contrast, happens when an external standard has been violated. In our courts each day juries pronounce defendants either innocent of the charges brought against them or guilty. In the latter case, the defendants are judged to have broken the law even though virtually all defendants deny that and plead innocent. The person who hears this verdict may not feel guilty, though many do and hide their faces. The court, however, has no interest at all in how the defendant feels. It takes no account of how ashamed the defendant may or may not be before others. The sole point in dispute is whether that person did or did not break the law as charged.
   It is the same in Christian faith. The guilt the gospel addresses is also objective in nature. It is our guilt before God's law. It is the result of our violating the standards of his character. It is all about our blameworthiness before God, not about how we feel or do not feel or whether, in the contemporary sense, we feel shame. Indeed, in America so many people think of themselves as essentially good that, from that angle, there is very little to be ashamed about.
   Shame today is what lines up our actions horizontally. Guilt is what lines them up vertically. Shame is what we feel subjectively and guilty is what we are objectively. Shame is what we feel before others. Guilty is what we are before God. Shame belongs in a psychological world and guilt belongs in a moral world.
   If shame is simply about how we see ourselves and how we feel, it is not hard to see why many psychiatrists and psychologists think of shame as a crippling, unhealthy emotion that needs to be healed. This in undoubtedly true of false shame . . . but this new approach to shame forgets that lying in the midst of many of our feelings of awkwardness are real moral perceptions. This is not false shame. This is shame for real moral reasons. To feel embarrassed because we were caught embezzling, or deceiving, or (shamelessly) self-promoting is an entirely good and healthy emotion! To argue, then, that we need to be liberated from these uncomfortable feelings, that the ultimate liberation is to become entirely shameless, is to sever our connections to the moral world entirely.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 162–163.

But that is exactly what has happened. Rather than being guilty of sins, we are now afflicted with diseases, disorders, and syndromes. And disorders, of course, cannot be disciplined or punished; they must be treated. So we coddle naughty children because it‘s not their fault, who grow to be adults who have seldom or never been held responsible for their actions, and so are unlikely to begin now.

What is worse, as sin has become syndrome, the gospel has become obsolete. We do not need forgiveness, we think; no, what we need is healing and recovery. And we are taught that healing must come from within, through positive thinking, self-forgiveness, or some such psychological mumbo-jumbo, rather than from without, as scripture plainly teaches. Oprah and Dr Phil, and yes, Dr Dobson, have replaced the Great Physician himself.

We read previously of a shift in Western thinking from virtues to values. Today we’re going to observe a similar shift, this one from character to personality. We know that man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). However, there are still traces of the image of God that can be seen in man (I think the term “common grace” applies here), and so I think I am safe in saying that to some degree, man also has looked at the heart, although not exclusively or even primarily. Character, too some degree, has mattered. Integrity has been a marketable characteristic. This is no longer true as it once was, and it is becoming less true as time passes.

What we think of today as the self, a kind of internal center into which all our experiences flow and get sorted out, has been thought about as something separate from character only quite recently. Actually, the self came into prominence only in the twentieth century. Before that time people would have been quite baffled by all of this talk about finding the self, cultivating, esteeming it, realizing, and all the other things we think we are doing to it.
   For centuries we in the West have thought about our consciousness — the self, in contemporary parlance, — only in conjunction with nature and, indeed, with character. This center was thought about in terms of virtues to be learned and desires to denied. These virtues were all sustained by a belief in moral law, be it natural, or revealed in Scripture, of perhaps just generally assumed.

. . .
As the twentieth century dawned, Warren Susman observed in his work Culture as History, the great change was under way. The words that had peppered the advice manuals of an earlier generation, words that came out of a moral world, were disappearing. These were words like “duty,” “golden deeds,” “morals,” “manners,” “honor,” “citizenship,” and “reputation.” But as the new century began, a different set of interests came into view. These were signaled by the prominence in the advice manuals of words like “fascinating,” “stunning,” “attractive,” “glowing,” “masterful,” “creative,” “dominant,” “forceful.” The words most common earlier had been the words or character; these new words were those of personality. Character is not fascinating, glowing, of masterful. By the same token, personality is not dutiful, honorable, of full of golden deeds. Character is good or bad; personality is attractive, forceful, or magnetic.
   Here was a move out of the older moral world, where our internal moral intentions were important, to a different world. This is a psychological world. It is a shift from what is important in itself to how it appears to others. God may judge the heart, but our preoccupation is with the outward appearance that, after all, is what others see. In a society where affluence is important and ethical norms are disappearing, success is paramount and character in not. Our preoccupation, therefore, is how we “come off” before others.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 147–148.

So now we live in a day when attractiveness is more important than honesty, and charisma trumps integrity. The value of a person is only skin deep. Yet, while society changes, God does not. He still looks on the heart, and so must we.

I’m feeling quite validated today. Earlier this year I posted a bit of a rant entitled Down with Values. Now I have discovered that David Wells has virtually plagiarized me in the following passage from The Courage to Be Protestant (mysteriously published in April, three months before my article). Wells writes of a shift that has taken place in Western thought that has replaced virtues with values.

Virtues, as I am thinking of them here, are aspects of the Good, or of Virtue. They are the moral norms that are enduringly right for all people, in all places, and in all times. It is true, of course, that there has been debate about what these virtues are.
   In the Middle Ages they were classified into two sets. The natural virtues were wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice while the supernatural virtues were faith, hope, and love. That makes seven virtues, which paralleled the seven deadly sins.
   The Protestant Reformation rejected this classification because it offered of basis of natural merit in four of the virtues that was simply upgraded by an infusion of grace. In fact, Scripture is more or less silent about virtue (cf. Phil. 4:8; 1 Pet. 2:9; 2 Pet. 1:3), but it clearly speaks of moral excellence and goodness in connection with the character of God. And not only in God’s character but also as reflected in the creation (Rom. 1:8-20) and in conscience (Rom. 2:14-15).
   However we understand this matter, it is inescapable that ours is a moral universe. It is one in which God sustains what is right, still abhors what is wrong, and still demands that we be accountable for knowing the difference.
   We can therefore say with confidence that there are moral excellencies that are always right because they make up who God is in his character. What Scripture speaks about in its narratives, psalms, and didactic sections is God’s holiness, justice, mercy, love, and truthfulness. And each of these has multiple variations in its application to human life. That these are the norms by which we should live is rather clear; how we might actually do so is a different matter.
   Across the ages people have tried to emulate these virtues. This has been true in Roman Catholicism, as it was in the liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century. In their slightly different ways, they made the argument, one which has always appealed to the most morally earnest, that people should aim to be virtuous and that by practice they can become virtuous. Luther attacked this notion that, he said, came from Aristotle. It was the thought that just as a natural talent can be improved by practice, so can our own inherent virtue. This, needless to say, takes too little account of the way sin has intruded into all our virtue, perverting it. It is not practice that we need, but radical, supernatural transformation. That has always been the Protestant understanding of Scripture, and we will have occasion to return to it in due course.
   This brings us to the heart of a conundrum: Does “I ought” mean “I can”? does God still require of us obedience to what is morally normative even though in sin we cannot give that full obedience? Does he modify his demands to fit our abilities?
   The answer, of course, is that God cannot modify his demands because he cannot modify his character. His moral demands, therefore, were the same before the fall a they as they have been after it. What changed was our moral ability to obey what God demanded. Yet, being unable to live as God demands in no way changes how we should live. God does not tailor his moral demands to our ability to fulfill them, otherwise the most degrading and scurrilous miscreants would have the smallest expectation to reach! No, his moral norms are the same for all people, in all places, and in all times. It is these norms that I have in mind as virtues, and when we put them all together they make up Virtue. His grace that we encounter in Christ so takes us into itself that God is able to see us just as if we had never violated a single norm and have always given him his full due.
   To speak of Virtue, then, is to speak of the moral structure of the world of God made. Rebellious though we are, we have not broken down this structure, nor dislodged God from maintaining it. It stands there, over against us, whether we recognize it or not. We bump up against it in the course of life and we encounter its reflection in our own moral makeup. And from all sides a message is conveyed to our consciousness: “Beware! This is a moral world you inhabit!”
   . . .

Values, as we speak of them today, are a relatively new idea. In 1928 the multivolume Oxford English Dictionary, which had been under construction since 1882 and had accumulated the meanings of close to half a million words, had no entry for “values.” “Values” is a word in later twentieth-century talk in the West.
   Indeed, values represent the moral talk of a relative world and one that is clearly quite novel in some ways. It is true that in the past, free thinkers, novelists, artists, and other avant-gardists have dispensed with any kind of moral world. But never before have we seen an experiment on so large a scale as we are seeing in the West today. Everyone is now avant-garde, not just the cultural elite. Everyone is experimenting with how it feels to live in a world without moral form, one that is devoid of objective ethical norms.
   Once we left behind a moral world, we had no option but to treat values in a value-free way because what is right for one is not necessarily right for another. As the older moral world has faded, then, its virtues have faded with it. In the twilight of its dissolution, we are left with values.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 143–147.

During the 1960s there came a shift in American thinking. While individualism that had always been a part of the American mindset, morals and ethics had previously been subject to a higher authority than the individual himself. Now, self became the authority and source of all values. Self realization became the ultimate purpose in life.

That a new cultural direction was in the making was becoming evident in many ways. By the 1980s, for example, a large majority had begun to think that what was worthwhile in life had nothing to do with its normal routines such as getting up each day and going to work. Nor with the tradition responsibilities of marriage and the raising of children. Rather, life is about its more exotic moments. It is not about what happens on Monday through Friday, but what happens on the weekends. Its real meaning, and its real rewards, are found when the self, unencumbered by routine and responsibility, can be found, nurtured, and satisfied. Two-thirds of Americans began to think a lot about their selves. A great majority, 80 percent, forsook the older traditional ways of looking at life, certainly the older ethical norms, and began to search for new rules by which to live. About half wanted new experiences. They also wanted new freedoms, even trivial ones, like being able to dress the way they wished, unrestrained by convention. They also were looking for more excitement and new sensations.
   Thus it was that the individualism in which you should think for yourself, decide for yourself, provide for yourself, and work to serve others in personal of civic ways had ended up as something rather different. This older individualism has turned inward. Now it is about finding the self for yourself, discovering you inner potential for you own benefit, esteeming your self, and developing now ethical rules that serve the discovery of the self.
   It is not unreasonable to think that this turn in our culture would have found resistance among the religious. And it did at the more liberal end of Protestantism, ironically enough, but evangelicals fell head long into this new way of seeing life.
   It could be heard, in the 1980s and 1990s, every time Robert Schuller’s cherubic countenance appeared on television. He was moving in a new direction, even though he also claimed to be traditionally Protestant. He announced that his new self-focused preoccupation was no less than a new Reformation. He went on to construct the whole of Christian faith around the self and its discovery.
   . . .
   And so it came into our pulpits. In sermon after sermon over the last two or three decades, preachers of an evangelical kind have latched onto this cultural way of thinking. Self-talk, it seemed, would be a natural springboard into salvation talk. Even if it never actually got to salvation, there was enormous benefit to be had along the way. So, why not venture along this path? Imagining themselves to be speaking the language of their congregations, and being quite au courant, these preachers actually ended up buying into a worldview that is deeply hostile to Christian faith. They seemed not to notice that feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as actually being good. In fact, people often feel good about themselves in moments when they should not. Some feel good about themselves in moments of great self indulgence, of revenge, and certainly in moments of inebriation. Is this not the warning that we should have heeded? Should we not have notices this?
   When evangelical churches entered this new universe of the self, they left the moral world behind. The evangelical church, which takes seriously its responsibility to steward the gospel, should have been the first to seen this because the gospel makes sense only in a morale world. Sin, after all, is not simply feeling bad about ourselves. It is violating what is right in God’s law and character. Those who inhabit this self-word look only for therapy, not for forgiveness and regeneration. Recovery, in fact, is their was of speaking about regeneration. It is all about human technique and not about miraculous intervention. All of this was apparently lost on evangelicals who stumbled after one another in their earnest pursuit to recast their faith in this new language from the culture.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 136–138.

We now live in a world in which self is the purpose and goal of all endeavors, and the arbiter of morals and ethics. The church at large has bought into this same mindset, albeit with spiritualized language. The great problem of mankind is not sin, but low self-esteem, or some other self-deficiency; so the “gospel” that is preached has no power to save anyone.

David Wells writes of five realities that are lost when we lose sight of the holiness of God, or as Wells puts it, the “outside God”: There Is a Law, There Is Sin, There Is a Cross, There Is Conquest, and finally, There Is Obligation. God’s holiness calls us to a life of holiness. Yet, Wells writes, according to Barna, “. . . even among [those who claim to be] born-again, fewer than half have any idea what holiness means.”

When asked to describe what holiness is, only 7 percent of Americans rooted this in the character of God. Although 72 percent said they had made a commitment to Christ, and 71 percent said their faith was “very important” to them, and 60 percent said they were “deeply spiritual,” only 16 percent said their faith was the highest priority in their lives. Barna’s conclusion was that most American like the security of being able to call themselves “Christian,” but most also resist the biblical responsibilities that go along with that claim. For the great majority, he says, being identified as a Christian is more about image than substance. It is a cultural thing. It is all about creating a pleasing self-image.
. . . where this state of affairs is most scandalous is in the churches that imagine themselves on the cutting edge of advancing Christian faith. What many of them are producing are so-called followers of Christ who are in it for their own spiritual comfort but are at sea when it comes to understanding the significance of God’s holiness for their Christian lives. And the reason for that, quite simply, is that many churches, obsessed with their own success, have made Chritianity light and easy so that they can market it successfully. what are the consequences, then, of losing sight of the holiness of God, this aspect of the outside God? And, just as important, what are the consequences of seeing the holiness of God?
   Our situation is not that different from what pertained in much of Israel’s history. The Old Testament people of God were religious, but often their religion made little difference. This, apparently, is what we have in the [professing] born-again sector in America today. The ancient Israelites’ religion was not an impediment to idol worship or to a whole assortment of pagan practices. They had the written law and temple worship. They had the prophets. They had all they needed to please God, but so often they would not listen. They would not reckon with his holy will. They became careless, living as if he were not there . . . The problem was that, again and again, with monotonous repetition, they lost sight of the holiness of God. And they paid the painful consequences for this, again and again.
   Is this really so different from what we have now in the West? We have Bibles enough for every household in America a couple of times over. We have churches galore . . . All too often we don’t have what the Old Testament people didn’t have. A due and weighty sense of the greatness and holiness of God, a sense that will reach into our lives, wrench them around, lift our vision, fill our hearts, make us courageous for what is right, and over time leave its beautiful residue of Christlike character. . . .

   So what do we need to do? Quite simply, we need to find the outside God.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 131–133.

Among the truths that are lost when we fail to recognize God as the “outside God” is his power over evil.

[W]ithout his holiness God is reduced to being kind, amiable, approachable, and harmless, but for all his likeability he is incapable of dealing with evil in the world. The perspective of the Bible, by contrast, is that God’s patience and forbearance will one day run out. The time will come when he acts in judgment because of his holiness. And when he does, he will place truth forever on the throne and evil forever on the scaffold. All that has broken and defiled life will be finally, and irrevocably, overthrown.
   This doctrine of God’s judgment should not be an embarrassment to the church. It is not simply a negative doctrine. It is profoundly positive.
   It is this doctrine that carries the church’s hope. For in this world evil often triumphs, goes unpunished, and what is good and righteous is often dismissed or even penalized. However, this applies only to the interim period. In the end, evil is judged, the world is cleansed, and the church is finally redeemed. This is why Christians have hope. All the injustices, the upside-down nature of things morally will be set right. God’s holiness will descend upon the rebel creation. And then, as John saw, the “night will be no more.” And God’s people “will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Rev. 22:5). This vision of the end of time now throws back its clarifying light into the muddled present.
   Sin, grace, love, and faith . . . Have nothing but a superficial meaning until we see them in relation to the Holy, arising from it, and setting it forth. God’s love is his holiness reaching out to sinners; grace is but the price that his love pays to his holiness; the cross is but its victory over sin and death; and faith is but the way in which we bring our worship to him who is holy.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 130.

Third on David Wells’ list of realities rising from the holiness of God, is that There Is a Cross. When we lose sight of God as the “outside God,” we lose the cross.

Third, without the holiness of God the cross would be emptied of all meaning. Christ was not a social reformer, of a do-gooder for whom things got out of hand. These are the old liberal ideas, but they are not biblical thoughts. The cross was not an accident. It was planned in eternity, and it was for this, Jesus said, that he had come. He had come to die. And in his moment of death the holiness of God and our sin collided. This in what called forth his cry of dereliction. It is an impertinence, at the very least, to say, as Steve Chalke and Alan Mann do in The Lost Message of Jesus, that this view makes God guilty of “cosmic child abuse,” that the cross needsto be purified of its violent images. This may appeal to a postmodern constituency, and to its Arminian counterpart, but it is remote from the way the Bible thinks about Christ’s death and distant from the way the church, down through the ages, has thought about it. The truth is that Christ’s death is simply incomprehensible if we do not start with the demands of God’s holiness, which cannot tolerate sin’s violations.
   Without the holiness of God, then, there is no cross. Without the cross there is no gospel. Without the gospel there is no Christianity. Without Christianity there is no church. And without echoes of the holiness of God in those who are Christ’s, there is no recognizable church. What is it about this chain of connections that the evangelical church today is not understanding that is leading it to soft-pedal, overlook, or ignore the holiness of God?

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 129.

The second of five realities rising from the holiness of God, according to David Wells, is that There Is Sin. This is a reality we lose when we fail to see God as the “outside God.”

The second consequence is that without the holiness of God, sin loses all its meaning. Sin, as I have argued, is not simply the breaking of some church rule but is every act that is an affront to the character and will of God. It is true that only 17 percent of Americans define sin in relation to God, but their mistake in no way diminishes the nature of what their sin is.
   What has been lost is not the sin itself but its culpability. Sin in all its forms is still present in life. It is still trailed by all the pain and confusion that always attends it, but it is not being understood in relation to God. It thus loses its depth, character, and culpability because we have lost our internal compass. That compass lines up our sinning, not merely horizontally, but also vertically. Sin brings not only shame, but also guilt when we understand it in relation to God’s holiness. “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps. 5:14), after the calamity he brought upon himself by his sexual affair. Only then do we understand its nature. When we lose the holiness of God we have sins pains and calamities, but we do not understand it anymore.
   But if we begin to see the nature of sin, we are on the road back to reality. We are on our way back into the presence of God through Christ. It is not that the knowledge of sin alone suffices, but rather that it pushes us to seek our deliverance from it. Knowing about sin is therefore vital knowledge. There is none quite so lost as those who know little or nothing of their sin. Knowing about our sin, therefore, is something for which we should be deeply grateful. This is why it is so important for us to be able to understand that God is not simply the inside God but he is the outside God as well.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 128.

David Wells lists five realities resulting from the fact that God is holy, or, in Wells’ words, the “outside God.” The first is that There Is a Law.

It means, first, that there is a moral law. Indeed, without the holiness of God, his character as morally pure, there would be no moral law in the world. Our consience reflects the moral nature of things (Rom. 2:14–15), however imperfectly, and in God’s self-revelation in Scripture we have our full, objectively given instructions on how to live. The “law,” Paul says, “is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Rom 7:12). These are the moral norms for life that reflect the holy character of God. What would we lose if we had neither this law nor human conscience?
   We would lose all knowledge of the difference between good and evil, and in fact, we would do evil in complete innocence. We could not appeal to conscience . . . Indeed, there would be no morality at all. . . .
   Now let us think of the reverse side of this coin. God has not abdicated his rule. His character of holiness has not been eliminated from this world. He still sustains the difference between right and wrong. And knowing that difference, being helped to work it out in practice, is what gives our first moments of recovery a sense of what it is to live in God’s world on his terms. It steers us away from what is destructive and into what is right and healthful. Satisfaction, protection, and joy result from following God’s law. All of this is a consequence of God being the “outside God.”

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 127–128.

God, in relation to man, is both immanent and transcendent. That is, he is near to us and intimately involved in our lives, and he is holy, far away and high above us. David Wells employs the terms “the inside God” and “the outside God.” These different truths about God are not in opposition to each other, nor are they options between which we can choose. God is both, and, Wells writes,

We lose something essential to who God is, essential to what Christian faith is, and essential to our understanding of ourselves if we lose either side of this equation. And when we do, the side we retain always becomes perverted and dangerous because of the side we have lost.*

The God that is lost in this postmodern age, he says, is the “outside God.” Postmodern man wants relationship; he does not want accountability or to be subject to authority. And he does not want to be summoned to God; rather, he wants God to come to him.

I want to explore a few of the consequences that follow from the fact that God is outside us, that he is objective to us, that he summons us to a knowledge of himself that is not something we have or find in ourselves, and that he summons us to be like him in holiness. This summons, this calling to stand before God in his awesome moral purity, is not something we would ever hear within our fallen selves, nor from our fallen world or our postmodern experience. It is a call that, as it were, is wholly alien to us. It is other than what we are in ourselves. It comes from the outside.
   God’s holiness is part of the explanation of the biblical language of God being “above” and “high.” It is why God is Other, why he is the outside God. This translates itself, though, into very practical realities.†

And we will, Deo volente, look at those practical realities in a future post.

David Wells writes of the loss of God and his truth as our center:

Perhaps the most startling consequence of all this is that our self begins to disintegrate. When the universe loses its center or, to be more precise, when the center is lost to us as something outside us that has the authority to reach into our lives, we ourselves begin to disintegrate. The self that has been made to bear the weight of being the center of all reality, the source of all our meaning, mystery, and morality, finds that it has become empty and fragile. When God dies to us, we die in ourselves. That is the connection we need to see, and it has become especially aggravated in the context of our (post)modern world.
   Many modern writers have pondered the emptying out of the (post)modern self, this was certainly evident in the 1960s, and it has continued down to this present time. Their language is sometimes different, but what they have in mind is much the same. [Various writers have written] of the “minimal self,” . . . “decentered self,” . . . “an enfeebled self,” . . . “the empty self, . . . “the depleted self.” Their analyses came at it from different angles, but all saw a constant erosion of out internal substance in the modern world. And whatever else we wish to say about it, it does seem clear that this is related to our experience of being uprooted, of not belonging, of drifting, of being homeless. It is also related to our being constantly bombarded with images, ideas, demands, products, and options that wear down our inward substance. But, most importantly I believe, it is related to the fact that there is no one before whom we are summoned, no one outside our experience before whom we are accountable, none on whose light we measure who we are and where we are heading. It is this last point that many (post)modern writers do not understand.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 111–112.

The rejection of objective truth in postmodern thought has its roots in something much deeper than the professed desire for “conversation” and the focus on the “journey” rather than the destination. David Wells writes,

   At the heart of [the] sin that holds us captive is pride. The essence of sin is finding in the self what in fact can be found only in God. So pride, as Cornelius Plantinga writes in Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, leads us to think much about the self and much of the self. We imagine that within ourselves we have power enough, wisdom enough, and strength enough to live in security, in the fullness of happiness, as we want to live, amidst all the conflicts and opportunities of life. Very finite preoccupations are therefore substituted for those that are eternal, and we then confidently take the place God once had. We therefore redefine reality. Is this not the ultimate explanation as to why life in the postmodern world has lost its center? What I am describing here, within a biblical framework, is what others in the postmodern world are seeing without this framework. This is the “autonomous self.”

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 103.

This is the root of the rejection of absolute, objective truth. Postmodern man, indeed, modern man, and all who have come before and, no doubt, all who will follow, rebel against the claim that they cannot determine for themselves what is true and right, that there is an authority outside themselves that is eternal, unchanging, and absolute. Most unacceptable of all, this authority is not subject to their judgments, and couldn’t be less interested in their opinions. This authority, of course, is God; and this exaltation of self is no less than a rejection of God.

Postmoderns revel in uncertainty. The more they learn, the less they know; and the less they know, the more certain they are that no one else knows anything, either. David Wells comments,

   What we hear from many of the emergent church leaders who are most aware of the (post)modern ethos, therefore, is a studied uncertainty: “We do not know.” “We cannot know for sure.” “No one can know certainly.” “We should not make judgments.” “Knowing beyond doubt is not what Christianity is about.” “We need to be more modest.” “We need to be more honest.” “Christianity is about the search, not about the discovery.” “Christianity is about the spiritual journey, not about arriving.” They forget that Scripture is divine revelation. It is not a collection of opinions of how different people see things that tells us more about the people than the things. No. It gives us God’s perfect knowledge of himself and of all reality. It is given to us in a form we can understand. The reason God gave it to us is that he wants us to know. Not to guess. Not to have vague impressions. And certainly not to be misled. He wants us to know. It is not immodest, or arrogant, to claim that we know, when what we know is what God has given us to know through his word.

   Listen to the new Testament . . . Hear plain speaking and words that ring with conviction: “We know. . . . We know. . . . We know.” in the Johannine Epistles, for example, we are told that we know the truth (1 John 2:21; 2 John 1; cf. John 8:32). And not only in the Johannines. Paul speaks of coming to a “knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 2:25; cf. 3:7–8; 4:4). The writer of Hebrews speaks of a “knowledge of the truth” (Heb. 10:26), and Peter speaks of “obedience to the truth” (1 Pet. 1:22). If truth is uncertain, elusive, out-of-reach, lost on us as we live in our own private worlds of (post)modern “reality,” what on earth are the apostles talking about?

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 77, 79.

Modern, postmodern — day after day, century after century, men prove that there truly is nothing new under the sun. David Wells writes of the overthrow of truth, and the causes and motives behind it.

Truth is hot today. Hotly disputed, that is. . . . Doubts about truth are aired in rarified intellectual circles and heard in movies. It is a question in law journals as in the wider popular culture. Everywhere we are hearing the same uncertainties about the very possibility of truth.
   In the church it is tempting to exploit these uncertainties, and many are falling prey to this temptation. The temptation is that sounding diffident about truth, about whether we can know the truth, does have its attractions today. It establishes an immediate bond with those in our postmodern culture. Postmoderns have become very leery about truth and about those who think they know it.
   This apparent gain by way of connection however, is more than matched by a loss. What makes for a bond with culture makes for a rupture, I will argue, with the ways of God.*

Why is it that truth has so fallen out of fashion in the world? And why is it that the church is rejecting absolute truth claims as well? The answer begins with one basic fact:

. . . American Christians rate themselves high on relationships and low on Bible knowledge. The Bible, after all, is the source of truth God gave us. Of the seven characteristics [George] Barna selected for measuring spirituality in 2005, Bible knowledge came out the lowest.
   This is part of our picture today. We are spiritual. We want relationships, but we do not want to be religious. Bible knowledge is increasingly considered part of religion in this growing and damaging separation of spirituality from religion. This explains why so many of our churches, especially the most prominent marketing mega churches, give the impression that Christianity is about many things, but truth is not one of them. . . .

   My conclusion is that absolute truth and morality are fast receding in society because their grounding in God as objective, as outside of our self, as our transcendent point of reference, is disappearing. There is nothing outside the individual that stands over against the individual, that remains as the measure for the individual’s actions, the standard for what is right or wrong, or as the test of what is true and what is not.
. . . I am talking about what is called the “autonomous self.” It does have a connection with the earlier individualism that was so much a part of the American story. However, it is not simply individualism. It is what has happened to individualism in our highly modernized society. It is how individualism looks in its postmodern dress.†

Postmoderns, of course, reject individualism. Individualism was a part of modernism, with which they vehemently deny any connection. Postoderns are all about community — and it is evident that they do long for community. However,

. . . postmoderns are deceiving themselves if they think the autonomous self died with modernity. It did not. This is one of the threads that weaves its way, unbroken, from old Enlightenment days into our newer, postmodern disposition and explains an awful lot about the way truth is being understood.
   Then it was that Enlightenment thinkers demanded to be freed from all external authority in order to make up their own minds. They demanded to be freed from God, religious authority, and the past. . . . This attitude has come down to our own time in the form of secular humanism.
   It is true, of course, that postmoderns, in and out of the church, despise this older rationalism. . . . There is much to be said for this rejection of Enlightenment rationalism . . . However, the breach here with the past is not nearly as complete as postmoderns imagine. There is actually a thread of continuity that ties that age to ours, and this thread is quite unbroken.
   This thread is our understanding about the self. Then, as now, it has been loosed from every external constraint, be it God, the past, or religious authority. We demand to be free. We today, postmodern that we may be, are more unconstrained, more emancipated from everything except our own selves than were the proponents of the enlightenment.‡

In the few millennia since Adam, little has changed. Self and its demands for autonomy are still the ultimate motivation of every sin.

David Wells on Church Consumerism:

Part One
Part Two

The third mistake of the market-driven church is to have made the wrong analogy. David Wells writes, “The analogy du jour is between the way proficient marketers like Pepsi do their business and how the church should do its business.”

Wells notes two main parallels in this analogy. First, they have observed that Christ came into the world of men as a man, entered the culture, and spoke the language of the culture. “His teaching was contextualized. Our church life, our message, should be, too.”

   Our context today, at least in the West, is principally one of commerce and consumption. To speak in the language of consumption, to use its speech and ways, is to speak contextually. It is to speak the language everyone understands. It is to enter the culture and mindset of twenty-first century Westerners. It is to meet them on their own terms, incarnation ally, just as Jesus met the people of his own day. That is the logic.1

Second, the marketers have drawn a parallel between marketing and evangelism. Great effort is put into researching the market. The target audience is identified, and the product is customized to meet its demands.

   The parallels with evangelism are not of course exact, but a great many evangelical churches have signed off on this analogy. . . . Now, churches are likely to be ledby former CEOs, advertisin executives,corporate managers, few of whom have, or want, a theological education. The skills that made them successful n the business world make them successful in the church world. That, at least, is what is assumed.
   The gospel is a product, evangelism is about selling it, and church (pastoral) staff is there to make it happen. . . .
   In both forms of marketing — in the world and in the church — the result is an exchange of goods. In the one, a new sound system, a new BMW, or the latest and most alluring perfume. In the other, eternal life.
   So, what is wrong with this? What is wrong if it clearly works? After all, some churches that have marketed themselves and their product, the gospel, have grown rather astoundingly, though those that have failed rarely get noticed. Can we argue with success?2

Wells says, yes, we can and we should, because the reason it has “worked” is that, in order to make the product attractive to the consumer, it has been stripped of truths that are fundamental and essential, but unattractive to potential buyers.

   Success can be had along marketing lines, but truth is not an intrinsic part of that success. There is the formula. Does that not raise a red flag? Is the gospel not about truth? The Christian message is not about anything else than the “truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:5), the “truth [as it] is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:21). Gospel truth, biblically speaking, is not a formula, not simply a relationship, not just about spirituality. It is about the triune God acting in this world redemptively, in the course of time, in the fabric of history, and bringing all of this to its climax in Christ. . . .
   That is where this gospel really parts company from the way in which productsand services are marketed in our modernized world. These products and services are no more than products and services. They are simply there for our use. The gospel is not. The gospel calls us not to use it but to submit to the God of the universe through his Son. A methodology for success that circumvents issues of truth is one that will rapidly emancipate itself from biblical Christianity . . .3

The result is a church with a gospel stripped of saving truth. This is necessarily so, because the gospel as a product has been defined by the felt needs of the consumer, rather than the actual needs identified by an omniscient God — and the two perspectives could not be more different.

   We suppress the truth about God, holding it down in “unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18). We are not subject to his moral law and in our fallenness are incapable of being obedient to it (Rom 8:7), so how likely is it, outside the intervention of God, through the Holy Spirit, that we will identify our needs as those arising from our rebellion against God? No, the product we will seek naturally will not be the gospel. It will be a therapy of some kind, a technique for life, perhaps a way of connecting more deeply with our own spiritual selves on our own terms, terms that require no repentance and no redemption. It will not be the gospel. The gospel cannot be a product that the church sells because there are no consumers for it. When we find consumers, we will find that what they are interested in buying, on their own terms, is not the gospel.4

The Great Commission is not analogous to the marketing and sale of any product. “It is the benefits of believing that can be marketed, not the truth from which the benefits derive.” As a product, that truth has no takers. It is only desirable to those whom it has already set free.

The second mistake of the church marketers, according to David Wells, was making the “wrong calculation.” They have calculated that “unless [the church] makes deep, serious cultural adaptations, it will go out of business, especially with the younger generations.”

The market-driven church brings up legitimate concerns about the stagnation of evangelicalism. However, this stagnation is taking place primarily in the West, in the United States and Europe. In other parts of the world — Africa, Latin America, and Asia — Christianity is growing.

The face of Christianity is changing . . . It is no longer predominantly northern, European, and Anglo-saxon. It is the face of the underdeveloped world. It is predominantly from the Southern Hemisphere, young, quite uneducated, poor, and very traditional. The question Westerners need to ponder is why, despite our best efforts at cultural accommodation in America, God seems to be taking his work elsewhere. Is there a lesson lurking somewhere in this story?*

The motive driving evangelical pastors today, says Wells, is fear: the fear of being obsolete and irrelevant to this postmodern culture.

   This, of course, was the fear that haunted the older generation of Protestant liberals . . . They were overwhelmed by the need to be relevant to the culture. . . . It was the purveyors of the Enlightenment . . . with whom they sought an intellectual truce, a working compromise. From this capitulation — for that is what it was — was born a synthesis in which elements from Christian faith and elements from the humanistic world were drawn together into a single package that was Christian in name and humanistic in much of its substance. The downfall and wreckage of the mainline denominations in North America in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as their counterparts in Europe, bear eloquent testimony to the impossibility of accommodating Christ to culture in this way.
   This lesson, however, is entirely lost on most evangelicals today. The reason is partly that they are treading a different path and so the do not see the parallels. Theirs is not the accommodation to high culture as was the liberals’. . . . The parallels between these older liberals and today’s evangelicals is not in the culture to which they are accommodating but in the process of accommodation. Behind each is the same mindset. The difference is only in what is being accommodated. . . . Evangelical Christianity is as endangered by its postmodern dance partner as the earlier liberals were by their Enlightenment partner.†

Compromise is a dangerous game. The church that has attempted to gain the whole world through compromise is losing its soul. And what if, after all that risk, the game is lost? Wells concludes that, because of the church marketers fear going out of business with the younger generations,

What it has not considered carefully enough is that it might well be putting itself out of business with God. And the further irony is that the younger generations who are less impressed by whiz-bang technology, who often see through what is slick and glitzy, and who have been on the receiving end of enough marketing to nauseate them, are as likely to walk away from these oh-so-relevant churches as to walk into them.‡

David Wells lists four mistakes made by the church marketers: they have achieved the “wrong result,” made the “wrong calculation” and “wrong analogy,” and targeted the “wrong customer.”

Of the “wrong result,” he writes,

   George Barna was one of the primary architects of this new approach to “doing” church. He was in on the ground floor three decades ago. As the church’s most assiduous poller, he undoubtedly expected by this time to be the bearer of good news once his marketing strategies were widely adopted, as they have been. It has not turned out that way. It has fallen to him to be the most important chronicler of his own failure.*

Wells describes how Barna is now “leaving behind this long trail of failure as if it had never happened, . . . [striking] out in a new direction with the same old panache, bravado, and undented self-assurance.” Now, according to his book Revolution (2005), it doesn’t matter that the church as an institution has failed, because, Wells says, “serious spiritual revolutionaries can simply cut themselves loose from every local church. Just walk away! And find biblical Christianity elsewhere.”

   What is resulting from Barna’s approach is barely recognizable as Christianity today. And that is what makes the desire of some of the leading American marketing pastors to export their experiment to the rest of the world almost incomprehensible. It certainly is an expression of unbounded chutzpah.*

Biblical Christianity without the local church? It seems that their Bible is missing parts — like the New Testament.

These are just a few reviews of the book I am currently reading, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World by David Wells.

• Albert Mohler: On the Other Hand, Protestant Courage
• Tim Challies: The Courage to Be Protestant
• Nathan Pitchford: Book Review: The Courage to Be Protestant
• Roger Overton: Interview with David Wells on The Courage to Be Protestant Part I, Part II

I’ve been posting some excerpts this week, and I’ve been amazed at the difficulty of choosing highlights. It seems as if each paragraph is fairly bursting with potent insights into today’s church and culture. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that is so immediately — if you’ll forgive the cliché — relevant.

David Wells on the consumerism of the church marketers:

If we are going to market the church and its gospel, where are we going to start? We start, of course, with our customer. What does the customer want? . . .

   One of the ways of making the experience of going to church more pleasant is to offer choice. . . . Having a wide array of choices is, after all, the way the world is going.
   It once was that a person who wanted to listen to music went to a public performance and there listened to the whole selection being played by the orchestra or band. Then came records, which made it possible, though not convenient, to select one of the songs and not listen to the others. However, it required some effort and dexterity. Then came CDs in which the selection of the songs was much easier. Finally, in came iPods, where the unwanted songs do not even appear and do not have to be selected “out.” Why can’t we have something like this in the church? That is what I, the consumer, really want. I want to be able to select what I hear and choose what I do in church. Why should worship not be customized, consumers and pastors alike without asking?
   This, in fact, is exactly what a number of churches are now facilitating. They are aiming to please. Instead of offering the set two-, three-, four-, or five-course meal for everyone, they are letting people choose which aspects of worship they want. Customers can choose between different themes in worship, or different activities, or different styles in different parts of the building. It is much more like a buffet than a set meal. That way people can choose which aspect of worship suits them best on that particular day. If all they want to do is pray, then let them pray in a room in the building. If they want to watch a video, let them watch a video.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 28–30.

This kind of “church” has no appeal to me. I don’t want to be entertained. I don’t want to hear jokes (I can think frivolously enough on my own, thank you). I don’t want noise, and I don’t want a show. I want music that is reverent in tone and rich in theology. More — far more — I want God’s Word preached. I want all of it — not just the happy parts; not just the exciting parts; not just the encouraging parts; not just the promises. I want the sad parts; the terrifying parts; the convicting parts; the heart-breaking parts. I want the whole counsel of God brought to bear on my heart and life.

Why is that? Is it because I’m so intelligent, wise, righteous, or mature? Is it because I’m in some way better than those who flock to these houses of merchandise? Not likely. It can only be because of who I am as a new creature in Christ. These are the things that one who is in Christ and filled with the Holy Spirit desires, and loves. Because I have been born from above, I have an appetite for heavenly things, and anything less leaves me hungry.

I can’t help concluding that the vast majority of those who fill the seeker-sensitive consumer-oriented “churches” are simply unregenerate. How else could they stand it?

David Wells on the shrinking of doctrine as a cause of death in the evangelical movement:

To become a cohesive movement, evangelicalism had to agree on essentials and agree to allow differences on nonessentials, doctrinally speaking. That is what happened. The essentials were the authority of inspired Scripture and the centrality and necessity of Christ’s substitutionary work on the cross.
   Through the 1950s, 1960s, and even 1970s, much else besides the two core principles was part and parcel of evangelical belief and practice. There was, however, a tacit agreement that liberty would be allowed in all these other matters provided that the core principles were honored. As long as the center held, as long as the grounds of unity were strong, the diversity of beliefs in church government, glossalalia, baptism, and the millennium could be sustained. At the time, this seemed quite safe, because the core at the center was strong and because evangelicals took seriously all the surrounding beliefs, too.
   What happened was, though, was that this doctrinal vision began to contract. The goal that diversity in secondary matters would be welcomed quite soon passed over into an attitude that evangelicalism could in fact be reduced simply to its core principles of Scripture and Christ. In hindsight, it is now rather clear that the toleration of diversity slowly became an indifference toward much of the fabric of belief that makes up Christian faith. . . .

   The unraveling of evengelical truth was signaled initially in a series of definitional tags that became evident in the 1980s and 1990s. that was when a whole series of hybrids emerged: feminist evangelicals, liberal evangelicals, liberals who were evangelical, charismatic evangelicals, Catholic evangelicals, evangelicals who were Catholic, and so it went. The additional — be it feminist, Catolic, or charismatic — signaled that the additional interest was at least as important as the core principles that defined who an evangelical was. Indeed, the additional interest usually said far more about the person’s interests than anything else. The core principles, in fact, wer losing tere power to shape people, define the movement, prescribe who was and who was not an evangelical. . . .

   The last time I walked over the bridge that links Zambia to Zimbabwe, just below the Victoria Falls, I watched a bungee jumper launch himself into space from the center of the bridge. The waters beneath are some four hundred feet down, full of froth and crocodiles. This is Africa. Equipment of the kind he was using may not be tested regularly and replaced on schedule. In fact, what I saw were cords that appeared already to have been overused. They were very frayed, and I wondered how long it would be before an intrepid bungee jumper did not make the return journey to the bridge’s edge and simply continued into the churning waters in the gorge far, far below.
   Something like this happened in the evangelical world. The cords plaited together out of the formal and material principles became frayed and then, for an increasing number, snapped. They are no longer able to return the jumpers to the fellowship.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 7–9.

As a tender youth growing up in an evangelical Lutheran denomination, I watched the mainline Lutheran churches in their slide away from Biblical Christianity. This was not a new development. Indeed, my denomination’s birth was two years before my own, when the Lutheran Free Church merged with the liberal American Lutheran Church. Belief in the inerrancy of Scripture had been jettisoned. They were liberal, I was told. I’m sure I never understood the full meaning of that at the time. At first, I only saw the consequential effects: the ordination of women as pastors, to name a big one. Eventually, I came to recognize the absence of the Gospel among them. Later still, I saw that they did actually have some remnants of the gospel, but it was a gospel that no one needed. Of what use is the promise of salvation when no one is going to hell anyway? When people are sinners because of what they do (and then, only if it is sufficiently evil), who needs redemption?

This was the tail-end of the original liberal church movement, a movement that still lives but is dying a lingering death as it passionately embraces apostasy. I have just begun reading David Wells’s book The Courage to Be Protestant. He writes of a new liberal movement:

   The evangelical movement is now dividing into three rather distinct constituencies. Actually, it is dividing into many, many subconstituencies as well because this rather amazing empire of belief is fragmenting across the board. So my map with only three major constituencies portrays the land as it looks from afar, not up close. The important point here, though, is that two of these constituencies are new, and like large icebergs, they are separating from the others. They are, as I see it, transitional movements. They are the stepping stones away from the classical orthodoxy of the earlier evangelicals and, however unwittingly, toward a more liberalized Christianity. In due course the children of these evangelicals will become full-blown liberals, I suspect, just like those against whom the evangelical grandparents originally protested.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 2.