No Place for Truth

Has something indeed happened to evangelical theology and to evangelical churches? According to David Wells, the evidence indicates that evangelical pastors have abandoned their traditional role as ministers of the Word to become therapists and “managers of the small enterprises we call churches.” Along with their parishioners, they have abandoned genuine Christianity and biblical truth in favor of the sort of inner-directed experiential religion that now pervades Western society.

Specifically, Wells explores the wholesale disappearance of theology in the church, the academy, and modern culture. Western culture as a whole, argues Wells, has been transformed by modernity, and the church has simply gone with the flow. The new environment in which we live, with its huge cities, triumphant capitalism, invasive technology, and pervasive amusements, has vanquished and homogenized the entire world. While the modern world has produced astonishing abundance, it has also taken a toll on the human spirit, emptying it of enduring meaning and morality.

Seeking respite from the acids of modernity, people today have increasingly turned to religions and therapies centered on the self. And, whether consciously or not, evangelicals have taken the same path, refashioning their faith into a religion of the self. They have been co-opted by modernity, have sold their soul for a mess of pottage. According to Wells, they have lost the truth that God stands outside all human experience, that he still summons sinners to repentance and belief regardless of their self-image, and that he calls his church to stand fast in his truth against the blandishments of a godless world.

The first of three volumes meant to encourage renewal in evangelical theology (the other two to be written by Cornelius Plantinga Jr. and Mark Noll), No Place for Truth is a contemporary jeremiad, a clarion call to all evangelicals to note well what a pass they have come to in capitulating to modernity, what a risk they are running by abandoning historic orthodoxy. It is provocative reading for scholars, ministers, seminary students, and all theologically concerned individuals.

1. Opening
2. Introduction
3. Prologue
4. The Delicious Paradise
5. A Puritan Town Revisited
6. The True Woman
7. A Quiet And Staid Revival
8. The True Woman About Town
9. A Small Town In A Big World
10. Reaching Out To America
11. Chapter Two
12. Decay And Renewal
13. The New Civilization
14. Modernization And Modernity
15. Secularization And Secularism
16. The Emperor's Lost Clothes
17. The Boiling Of The Frog
18. The Circumstance Of Faith
19. Theology Disappears
20. How Theology Is Disappearing
21. That Theology Is Disappearing
22. A Tale Of Two Worlds
23. The Declining Years Of Evangelicalism
24. Chapter 4
25. Modern Individuality
26. The Protestant Reformation
27. The Heritage In America
28. I See, Therefore I Am
29. The Naked Public Square
30. The Revised (Evangelical) Version
31. The Results
32. Chapter 5
33. Who Is Everyperson
34. The Middling Standard
35. Les Liaisons Dangereuses
36. Postcards From The Edge
37. Innocent Radicals
38. There They Go And I Am Their Leader
39. Chapter 6
40. The New Mandarins
41. The New Knowledge
42. The Ministry And The Guild
43. Toward A New Order Of Sacred Fools
44. The Minister In Search Of A Niche
45. The Minister As Impermanent
46. The Minister As Theologian
47. Chapter 7
48. The Pagan Mind
49. The Biblical Mind
50. The Modern Mind
51. Chapter 8
52. Believers And Unbelievers
53. The Use Of God
54. The Recovery Of God