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"David F. Wells's award-winning book No Place for Truth - called "a stinging indictment of evangelicalism's theological corruption" by TIME magazine - woke many evangelicals to the fact that their tradition has slowly but surely capitulated to the values and structures of modernity. In God in the Wasteland Wells continues his trenchant analysis of the cultural corruption now weakening the church's thought and witness with the intent of getting evangelicals to rethink their relationship to the "world."" "Wells argues that the church is enfeebled in part because it has lost its sense of God's sovereignty and holiness. "The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today," says Wells, "is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common." God has become weightless to the extent that the church no longer allows him to shape its character, outlook, and practice." "Evangelicals have become heavily invested in the mind-set of modernity - a mind-set that Wells correlates with the biblical concept of the "world." They have become enamored of advanced management and marketing techniques, have blurred the distinctions between Christ and culture, and have largely abandoned their traditional emphasis on divine transcendence in favor of an emphasis on divine immanence. In doing so, they have produced a faith in God that is of little consequence to those who believe. An extensive survey of students at seven evangelical theological seminaries - the results of which are included in this book - indicates that the next generation of evangelical leaders is as caught up in these trends as the laity." "Arguing that the church's diminished appetite for truth will not be restored without repentance and a fresh encounter with the holy God, Wells makes a compelling case for urgently needed reform in the evangelical church. Without such reform, he says, evangelical faith will be lost in and to the modernity that has invaded the church."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (mais)
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God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams de David F. Wells (1994)

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LT God in the Wasteland, the reality of truth in a world of fading dreams, David F. Wells, Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, Grand Rapids, MIC, 1994, 4/10/17

Read book jacket. This is one evangelical’s (we are evangelicals) diagnosis and prescription for what ails the Christian community. But what saith the LORD?! (Eisegesis or exegesis?) Romans 12:1-2 (based on 1-12), I John 2:15-17; any other writing apostles besides Paul and John? I Peter 2:9-12 (also 1:13-16); James 4:4; who does that leave? Jude! (the vestibule to the rapture!)—Jude 3!

Theme: evangelicalism has been corrupted by the world; Christendom is (and many professing Christians have become) part of the world (modernity, p. 29) 56, 115, 223
Purpose: to offer antidote to problem identified in previous work (No Place for Truth, 1989)
Type: a critique of contemporary evangelicalism
Value: 1-
Age: college
Interest: 1-
Objectionable: 19-RCC, 25-seeing problem as largely getting away from agreement on sola Scriptura and sola gratia (modernity’s emphasis on personal autonomy seems to be his overall point), 205, 215, 226-stand alone
Synopsis/Noteworthy: see below; DW waves in antidote throughout book (pg, 41); self becomes God (100, 110-111, 112, 136); awareness of God’s holiness is a crucial part of the solution (138-145)

God in the Wasteland—The Reality of Truth in [a transcendent God delivers from] a World of Fading Dreams [a world without Christ, trying to live without God (“Life isn’t supposed to work without God,” “worldliness”]

(I don’t think that his chapter titles summarize content clearly, so I have attempted to do that as follows.)

PROLOGUE
Chapter 1 AN ACCIDENT IN HISTORY—there has been a confluence of four forces in contemporary culture which have shaped our culture: capitalism, technology, urbanization, and telecommunications
Chapter 2 AN ACCIDENT OF FAITH—tracing modernity’s (worldliness’s) conforming the church to itself

STRANGERS AND ALIENS
Chapter 3 THE ALTERNATIVE TO GOD—the world is (p. 54)
Chapter 4 CLERICS ANONYMOUS—pastors (the church) are not here to meet felt needs (i.e., gratify the flesh) but to preach Christ, the living truth, who will truly, deeply, eternally satisfy
Chapter 5 THE WEIGHTLESSNESS OF GOD—the replacement of God with self; tracing this historical/philosophical devolution
Chapter 6 THE OUTSIDE GOD—the transcendence of God which needs to be recovered
Chapter 7 GOD ON THE INSIDE—God is personally involved in creation, history, and in our personal lives
Chapter 8 THE COMING GENERATION—what can be expected of the upcoming Christian leaders based on what they profess and then how they apply it
Chapter 9 SPEAKING WITH A DIFFERENT VOICE—break with world entanglements of preponderance of contemporary evangelicalism, experience revival of the Spirit, operate with a Christina worldview, and restore more intense community with God’s people (226)

Evangelicals are worldlings and need to repent and turn to the holy, objective (externally existent) God known only through Spirit-inspired, Spirit-enlightened Word. 57, 68, 113, 223 (this is my interpretation of his wording 215, 223).

kids: 14, 18-20, 29, 37/39, 40/118-vocation, 44, 55-discernment, 56, 107-postmodern lit, 136, 196
Ethan: 31, 56, 61, 67, 81, 115, 134-disinclination, 203-leadership,224, 212-culture, 217-parenting
Cyndi 115
Alan 112, 193
Board 77ff, 91
Mark Minnick 7/7/02 “philosophy,” where is exposition, even scripture references? 1993? NAE address
K: 24-27, 41-44, 59, 82, 83, 91, 97-dread, 103-self/know God, 113, 115-torment, 116/123-5-transcendence, 127-129-anfechung, 136-love holiness, 169-providence, 170-evil, 172-173-future/ends. 182-185-what God is doing, 190-traditions, 216-post-modern person, 219-consumption, 223-joining crowd illu, 153/183-cross, 158-magazines, 203-consensus

2
CBC x-read, 11-obituaries, 14 (2)-meaning, 15-homeless, 24-NAE, 27-29-blend, 55-wisdom, 57-58-herd, 59-church, 61/85 pragmatism, 76/82-83-preaching, 78-size, 80-self help, 91/114-God, 118-119/151-escaping worldliness, 146-failure to teach, 193-intuition, 193-194 civility, 215-solution, 223-conclusion

Preface x Finally, I wish to express my appreciation for those who are still serious readers in America. Without them, I and many others would be silenced. The time and attention they give to their reading flies in the face of the habits that modernity inculcates so insidiously. And so, I wish to salute their stubborn resistance to modernity! Against all the odds, may their number increase, and may the church, in consequence, once again become a place where life is given its most serious and searching analysis.
11 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most obituaries made some mention of the character of the deceased; by the end of the century this was rarely the case. By contrast, a person’s occupation was seldom an important detail in obituaries at the beginning of nineteenth century, but by 1990 it had become the key means by which a person was identified. This substitution of function for character is consistent both with the rise of anonymity in our large, complex, and specialized world and with a new sense that it is inappropriate to define a person on the basis of character in a public context that offers no consensus concerning (and, if it comes to that, is not much interested in) what constitutes good character. [What is important (as I approach 65th milestone)?! Walking with God, pointing others to Christ, being faithful to God, friends, responsibilities, callings-vocations, family, being thankful and content, serving God in and through my local church]
14 [We have lost purpose to live.] Meanwhile, we also pay the price of destroying all interest in the Transcendent, the sole source of genuine meaning in life.
14 We have become T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘hollow men,’’ without weight, for whom appearance and image must suffice. Image and appearance assume the functions that character and morality once had. It is now considered better to look good than to be good. The facade is more important than the substance — and, that being the case, the substance has largely disappeared.
15 [True homelessness is not having a spiritual home.] “We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to.”
15 No, our faith must go with us as we walk the labyrinthine [irregular and twisting] paths of modern life. It must go with us as we traverse the world each night with the help of television cameras that linger tearless over the worn and spent bodies of the starving of Africa... [Here is his solution.]
24 [NAE has fallen into the same problem as the liberal denominations of the first half of the 20th century—corruption by the world.] The 1960’s, then, represent the end of the liberal era, although liberal ideas still have their advocates in the churches today and especially in academia. But while this decade pulled the covers off the emptiness of the liberal Protestant establishment, it ironically seems to have propelled evangelicalism into the same religious void. Before the 1960’s, evangelicalism was a cultural outsider; after, it rapidly became a part of the inside…
27-29 [The problem of blending in with the world continues.] …evangelicalism has brought cultural acceptability by emptying itself of serious thought, serious theology, serious worship, and serious practice in the larger culture. And most evangelicals appear completely oblivious to this sellout or at
least unconvinced that the deal was a bad one. (new paragraph) Modernity has been hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is largely private and internal. … Many evangelicals quietly assume, perhaps even without much thought, that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension too noticeably or noisily on others into the public square.
55 [Wisdom is needed!] Now there is nothing wrong with entrepreneurship or organizational wizardry or public relations or television images and glossy magazines per se.
57-58 [The desire to be liked by and to be like others is extremely powerful in today’s world.] This combination of a desire to be like admired people and a discomfort in being unlike them goes a long way toward explaining how it is that the church has found it so hard to recognize worldliness and even harder to dislodge it. Indeed, without a powerful theological vision as its antithesis [focal point], these cultural currents are impossible to resist. 3
59 [What is the role of the church in all this?] It is especially important for the church, in its own cultural location, to be able to discern generically [in a way that relates to a class or group of similar things; not specifically] how sin is made to look normal and normative and how righteousness is made to look strange [who is normal?!]. If it is unable to make this discernment, it will cloud the difference between sin and righteousness, its message will become confused and distorted, its practice will be compromised, and the honor of God will be besmirched. [The scriptural way for this to happen is for the spiritually mature of the congregation (while listening to the younger people), submitting to each other, to draw lines for that particular people in that particular time and place, distinguishing weightier matters, and not giving burdens too grievous to be borne (I Tim. 3:1-15, especially vs. 4-7, 15; Eph. 5:21; I Pet. 5:5; Mt. 23:4,23).]
61/85 [We have a problem with pragmatism.] 61 Malls are monuments to consumption—but so are mega-churches. Both places celebrate the coupling of the appetites of consumption with religion. 85 As moderns we are now disposed to believe that the audience is always sovereign and that ideas are valid only to the extent that they prove their usefulness in the marketplace. . . The American disposition to think that ideas have no intrinsic value was formalized into pragmatism. The infiltration of capitalism and pragmatism into evangelicalism during this period has produced a form of Christian faith that has so adapted to its context as to be uniquely American and increasingly modern in its psychology and appetites.
76/82-83 [Pray for better and stronger preaching!] 76 Simply put, the church is in the business of truth, not profit. Its message—the message of God’s Word—enters the innermost place in a person’s life, the place of secrets and anguish, of hope and despair, of guilt and forgiveness, and it demands to be heard and obeyed in a way that not even the most brazen and unprincipled advertisers would think of emulating. Businesses offer goods and services to make life easier or more pleasant; the Bible points the way to Life itself, and the way will not always be easy or pleasant. At most, businesses are accountable only to stockholders and a variety of regulators; the church is accountable to God.
82 We all have needs. Some people live with an aching sense of emptiness, a sense that things have gone awry; some are crushed by a burden of guilt, by pain that won’t go away; some live in dread of what the future may hold; some long for friendship, a sense of belonging. There are needs like these in every pew in every church. But God does not want us to interpret the meaning of these needs ourselves because, being sinners, we resist seeing such needs in terms of our broken and violated relationship with him. Christ’s gospel calls sinners to surrender their self-centeredness, to stop granting sovereignty to their own needs and recognize his claim of sovereignty over their lives. This is the reversal, the transposition of loyalties that is entailed in all genuine Christian believing. Barna’s program inverts this basic truth; it is the antithesis of the biblical affirmation that the church will grow only through greater fidelity to the radical commands of the gospel—commands that God himself
authorized to challenge all of our natural expectations. In order to market the church, Barna must obscure its essential reality. It has to be marketed as an organization rather than an organism, as a place to meet people rather than as the place where one meets God on terms that he establishes, as a commodity for consumption rather than an authority calling for penitence and surrender.
83 It is true, as Richard Rorty asserts, that pragmatism is “a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word,” but in essence it constitutes a “principled aversion” to formulating general principles. James contrasted pragmatism with what he called “rationalism,” a term that he idiosyncratically used to connote devotion to a body of timeless, unchanging principles.
78 [How does average church size compare today with earlier years?] A century ago, in 1890, for example, the average Protestant church had only 91.5 members, not all of whom would have been in attendance on any given Sunday; a century before that, in 1776, the average Methodist congregation had 75.7 members. It seems to be the case that our churches today are about the same size as they have always been, on average, and the supposition that we are now experiencing drastic shrinkage needs to be clearly justified before it can be allowed to become the premise for new and radical strategies. 4
80 [Here is a problem within at least some evangelical churches—self-help.] An important part of the recovery process, regardless of the addiction from which recovery is being sought, is to lay claim to one’s own power.
91/114 [How significant is God?] 91 The pollsters are not asking whether this or that religion is true; they are not asking how people understand the nature and character of God; they are simply trying to find out how people feel about religion, what internal value it has for them. What they have found is that there is a sizable yearning for things religious in the American psyche. My comments on the weightlessness of God, on the other hand, focus on his objective significance—a matter of truth rather than psychology.
114 We have turned to a God that we can use rather than to a God we must obey; we have turned to a God who will fulfill our needs rather than to a God before whom we must surrender our rights to ourselves. What has been lost in all of this, of course, is God’s angularity, the sharp edges that truth so often has and that He has preeminently.
118-119/151 [Can the church escape worldliness?] 118 Our thirst for the blessings of the modern world is not easily slaked. Can the church survive the modern world and worldliness that it brings? 119 The power and seductiveness of modernity do not impede God one bit in actualizing his truth in the church, introducing his character into the lives of ordinary men and women, realizing his saving purposes in the world, and exercising providential control over its direction and outcomes. 151 His transcendent holiness and knowledge enable us to stand outside the charms of modernity in order to act morally within it. Only those who are counter-cultural by way of being other-worldly have what modern culture most needs to hear—a Word from God that can cut through the deceits of modernity to reach the hearts that lie within.
146 [We must not fail to teach and train our children.] Our families and our schools have become so enamored of the ostensible virtues of pluralism (or intimidated by the prospect of failing to be value-neutral) that they no longer even make a token effort to give the next generation moral instruction. [Consider the currently-proposed “Benedict Solution.”]
153 [The cross resolves all.] …the doctrine of the cross…asserts that God has secured through the crucifixion of His Son a resolution of what has disordered the world and robbed it of its meaning.
193 [Consider inerrancy.] Those who were most inclined toward the inerrancy position were in the Baptist tradition; those least likely to endorse it were in the Holiness-Pentecostal tradition (see Table 10), though the differences between the groups were not great.
193-194 [Beware pietistic intuition.] 193 ...leaning on intuition in making life’s decisions have become
routine and acceptable for many. 194 There is evidence that the streams of pietism and of charismatic experience now pervasive in the evangelical world have brought into it the broader cultural self-orientation in a variety of ways.
215 [Can this slide be reversed?] I believe it can, but not until these leaders have successfully accomplished two major projects. First, the church is going to have to learn how to detect worldliness and make a clear decision to be weaned from it. Around us today there looms a post-modern world that is bringing about many ominous breaks from our cultural past. Second, the church is going to have to get much more serious about itself, cease trying to be a supermarket serving the needs of religious consumers, and become instead a force of counter-cultural spirituality that draws from the interconnected lives of its members and is expressed through their love, service, worship, understanding, and proclamation.

5
223-226 He offers an eight-part conclusion solution!
1. “[The church must begin] to form itself, by His grace and truth, into an outcropping [a visible exposure of bedrock or ancient superficial deposits on the surface of the Earth] of counter-cultural spirituality.” “[The church] must give up what the post-modern world holds most dear: it must give up the freedom to do anything it happens to desire” (repentance):
a. self-cultivation for self-surrender
b. entertainment for worship
c. intuition for truth
d. slick marketing for authentic witness
e. success for faithfulness
f. power for humility
2. “[The church must] reform their inner lives to embody a fitting counter-cultural spirituality centered in” (faith):
a. a serious, worshipful recognition of the presence of God
b. an obedient submission to His word [catechisms]
c. a compassionate outworking of His grace in loving service of the stricken of this world
3. The church must confront. “The church has adopted a sort of cocktail party atmosphere, serving up pleasantries and trying to avoid unpleasantness.”
4. The church must deepen, and get beyond living for entertainment. “Real reform will have to look beneath the surface to see the poverty of spirit in the evangelical world, its lack of seriousness, its tendency to engage in superficial rather than penetrating analyses, its childish inability to withstand the diversions of flash, fun, and glamour.” “It is God that the church needs most—God in His grace and truth, God in His awesome and holy presence, not a folder full of hot ideas for reviving the church’s flagging programs.”
5. “Evangelicals should be hungering for a genuine revival of the church…”
6. “God’s word [must be] heard afresh.”
7. “The individual [must be] embodied in a structure that gives corporate expression to private spirituality, in which the lone thread is woven into a fabric.” “Unless the dissident can return to a center and receive a fresh confirmation of his or her biblical worldview, a fresh understanding of the world and human life, fresh nourishment in believing, and a renewed connectedness with the people of God, failure is as predictable as the rising of the sun.
8. The church must ask much of its people. “Those who ask little find that the little they ask is resented or resisted; those who ask much find that they are given much and strengthened by the giving.”

What are fundamentalists needs?! Resurrection power!
1. “Oh for a closer walk with God!” Intensifying love affair with Christ! Memorizing Scripture!
2. Hungering and thirsting after righteousness—prayer!
3. Not being so cliquish!
4. Not being so enamored with this world’s amusements and food (yet enjoy)!
5. Being Spirit-filled, more consciously grace-dependent!
6. Reaching the lost!!
  keithhamblen | Apr 8, 2017 |
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"David F. Wells's award-winning book No Place for Truth - called "a stinging indictment of evangelicalism's theological corruption" by TIME magazine - woke many evangelicals to the fact that their tradition has slowly but surely capitulated to the values and structures of modernity. In God in the Wasteland Wells continues his trenchant analysis of the cultural corruption now weakening the church's thought and witness with the intent of getting evangelicals to rethink their relationship to the "world."" "Wells argues that the church is enfeebled in part because it has lost its sense of God's sovereignty and holiness. "The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today," says Wells, "is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common." God has become weightless to the extent that the church no longer allows him to shape its character, outlook, and practice." "Evangelicals have become heavily invested in the mind-set of modernity - a mind-set that Wells correlates with the biblical concept of the "world." They have become enamored of advanced management and marketing techniques, have blurred the distinctions between Christ and culture, and have largely abandoned their traditional emphasis on divine transcendence in favor of an emphasis on divine immanence. In doing so, they have produced a faith in God that is of little consequence to those who believe. An extensive survey of students at seven evangelical theological seminaries - the results of which are included in this book - indicates that the next generation of evangelical leaders is as caught up in these trends as the laity." "Arguing that the church's diminished appetite for truth will not be restored without repentance and a fresh encounter with the holy God, Wells makes a compelling case for urgently needed reform in the evangelical church. Without such reform, he says, evangelical faith will be lost in and to the modernity that has invaded the church."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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