How Did I Miss David Wells?

NOTE: The talk linked below is "must listen" ... and "No Place For Truth" is "must read" for any serious student of culture.

I have been reading about philosophy, theology, and apologetics since I ran across Francis Schaeffer's film series "How Shall We Then Live?" in college.

Most critiques fall either into the rationalist or empiricist camps, with the pre-supposionalists making up an influential minority (see Boa & Bowman's "Faith Has Its Reasons" for a good overview of apologetic camps).

However, David Wells' critique recently came to my attention. His approach is primarily sociological, an approach I've never been much impressed by. However, Wells' trilogy of "No Place For Truth", "God In The Wasteland", and "Losing Our Virtue" is perhaps the best single critique of Western Christianity (and, increasingly global Christianity) I've ever read.

This is stunningly good stuff, and required reading if you like C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Nancy Pearcy, various intelligent design authors, etc.

Here's a small sample from this MP3 recording (skip the first 5:30 unless you want to hear a longgggg introduction) (more Wells recordings here and here; some of the links on these pages are out-of-date (e.g., the Covenant Seminary "Disappearance of Theology" series summarizing "No Place For Truth"); see the Gospel Coalition's page if a link fails:

"It is a global culture, it is a generic culture. Because it belongs to everybody, it belongs to no one in particular; it is therefore paper thin and it invades our souls with its triviality.

What happens, though the exact mechanisms are a little bit complicated, when we live in this sort of environment, is that slowly but surely we get detached from a moral world.

Instead we enter a therapeutic world, a psychologized view of life. We want the benefits of Christian faith without faith itself. Then begins a whole series of substitutions:

• Righteousness is replaced by a search for happiness,
• Holiness by wholeness,
• Truth by feeling,
• Ethics by simply feeling good about ourselves

The church contracts, it is now about me and my needs and comforts. The past recedes, good and evil lose their moral status, good becomes simply having a nice day and evil is having a bad hair day.

God in this context becomes weightless, no longer relevant to the internal life of the church. So, triviality, and secondly, uncertainty (the disappearance of conviction from the life of the church) become pervasive. "