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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.‡

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.

David Wells on YouTube:

Church Consumerism:
Part One
Part Two

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.