Preface: David Wells gave us a warning in 1993....and there were a number of other warnings given....that there was no longer a real evangelical theology....that in fact theology itself was dead. There was no unity....not a unity in that we all came up with the same doctrines....but that we were not even under the same grid in determining doctrine....that the obsession with the self not only led us into wildly different interpretations of God's Word....but that we were happy with this method....that it was actually healthy that everyone democratically had their own interpretation. We see the continuing results of this chaos today....for not only have we not....come out from among them in the material....but we think like the world does.....and change when it changes....for there is no objective truth....only our own subjective 'truth'....and the only unity that the evangelical has....the only truth to be considered....comes from talk radio....or its associated punditry on cable television....or authorized literature....telling us that we have freedom....and must fight for it....but stifling....and even purging the freedom to choose God's Word as our guide....and the old paths as our route....and the Celestial City as our destination....and God's glory as our only banner.
It was a seminal book in the church....1993's....No Place For Truth....Or Whatever Happened To Evangelical Theology.....by David F. Wells....then Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. There were other good books at the time....lots of other good books of this nature....in the 80s and 90s. We owned a Christian bookstore at the time....and highlighted those books....and they sold like hotcakes....on the dinner menu.
There is a reason that evangelicalism today latched onto a false prophet and con man like Donald Trump....and why we completely blew it in our response to the coronavirus. God's Word describes it as....'delusion'....Wells might call it the effects of modernity on the church....as in the death of theology.....as it effects everything else today...."theology as a worldview" he might say....but it is where we are at right now....able to process huge amounts of information....but analyze little of it.....and thus become dominated and transformed by it....away from a Christian mind...."We are one glorious nation under God....and our best is yet to come!"
I was ripe for books like this as other books such as.....The Closing Of The American Mind by Allan Bloom (87)....and Anti-Intellectualism In American Life by Richard Hofstadter (63) and The Culture of Narcissism by Chrisopher Lasch (79) had been a staple even before I became a Christian....all of this eventually leading to graduate study on Higher Education itself....where the issues were further explored.
The Cambridge Declaration was a formal critique of evangelicalism....written by top Reformed and Lutheran theologians in 1996. It was a result of the Wells book. I took that Cambridge Declaration and had it framed....the length was about four feet long.....and it hung on the wall of our bookstore. Today it is in our basement leaning up against the wall next to the Christmas tree....and if I ever get the gumption....(it's not exactly normal home wall decor).....I'm going to bring it up and hang it up right here next to my framed original Spurgeon sermon.
I'll recommend that you send for the book.....but who is going to listen to me....especially on an almost thirty year old book that tells us that we have a problem.....ourselves?
I'm not going to list one quote after another....I never do that....but I will give a couple of clues as to what is inside the book. Individualism and freedom and democracy are terms we evangelicals hear all the time today....but thirty years ago David Wells gave a few warnings as to where we were going on these definitions....as that 'individualism' was becoming nothing but self-centeredness....kind of a peek at America First....which was to come. "Leadership....(church leadership)....is now in the hands of....'managers' "....wrote Wells....along with this...."Thus it is that the pastor seeks to embody what modernity admires and to redefine what pastoral ministry now means in light of this culture's two most admired types....the manager and the psychologist."
Wells tells us....."In order to think biblically, about our world, we have to put ourselves in the minds of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Paul and Peter and accept for ourselves the norms and habits by which they functioned. And their starting place was this category of truth"....and not the...."subjective reality".....of today....for...."A Christian mind sees truth as objective." Wells writes that...."We stand at its door, like Bunyan's Pilgrim before the Cross, the bundle of our self-understanding and of self-interpreted world upon our back"....and that burden along with that of our sin....needs to fall off at the cross. Wells points out what we already know in that moral absolutes are absent in our secular world today.....but adds that in light of the sermons and books published today....there are also no absolutes in the theology of modern evangelicalism.
No Place For Truth concludes with this...."Unless the evangelical church can recover the knowledge of what it means to live before a holy God, unless in its worship it can relearn humility, wonder, love, and praise, unless it can find again a moral purpose in the world that resonates with the holiness of God and that is accordingly deep and unyielding-unless the evangelical church can do all these things, theology will have no place in its life." It will be conversational and not confessional....pragmatic....(even using the lie if necessary)....instead of standing for truth.
This book by David F. Wells can be read as if it were written yesterday. We need to return to the efforts of those who produced that Cambridge Declaration....to try once again....pick up that banner once again....and many of these men are still here and still trying....as you can go to whitehorseinn.org....or ligonier.org....or desiringgod.org...and many other resources....to see for yourself.
