Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
83 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant Work, April 22, 2008
My interest in reading good books came a little bit too late to read David Wells' four part series of books as they were released (No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, Losing Our Virtue and Above All Earthly Pow'rs). I now have the four volumes sitting on my bookshelf and have often thumbed through them wishing I could muster up the motivation to dive into the series. The problem is that I am intimidated as I look at them and consider that each of them weighs in at several hundred pages. I know that twelve hundred or more pages of dense content would prove quite the challenge to me and to my too-short attention span.
This is the very reason Wells chose to write The Courage To Be Protestant. This is not a fifth entry in the series as much as it is, or as much as it began at least, as a summary of them. "Once this work got under way," Wells writes, "I found myself not so much compressing as recasting all that I had done and then updating it. The result is that this book is less a summary and more an attempt at getting at the essence of the project that has engaged me over the last fifteen years. And, hopefully, it will be more accessible than the previous books, not to mention less taxing on readers!"
Wells gets straight to the point. "It takes no courage to sign up as a Protestant...To live by the truths of historic Protestantism, however, is an entirely different matter. That takes courage in today's context." The truths that Protestants have lived and died by have somehow become no more welcome within a Protestant context than in the outside culture. Those who would seek to live by the distinctives of the theology of the Bible must have courage to stand not only against the world but against much of the church.
In an opening chapter Wells describes the lay of the Evangelical land and here he refers to three distinct constituencies into which Protestantism seems to be dividing in our day. These constituencies, though, are not drawn around issues of theology as they may have been in days past. "When all is said and done today, many evangelicals are indifferent to doctrine." What rearranges the evangelical territory in our day is the culture around us and our engagement with it. This is not a serious engagement with culture, but instead a pragmatic catering to it. "This quest for success, which passes under the language of `relevance,' is what is partitioning the evangelical world into its three segments." The partitions Wells refers to are classic evangelicalism, marketers and emergents.
Having described how marketers and emergents arose out of classical evangelicalism, he provides a chapter called "Christianity for Sale" in which he shows how in recent decades churches became convinced that they must change their way of doing business or face inevitable extinction. This "church as business" model transformed the way churches perceived themselves and led to the raising of methodology over theology. "What began as a simple recognition by church marketers that parking should be convenient, signs evident, and bathrooms clean has somehow begun a migration." The migration eventually led to the transformation of not only the traditional church but also the traditional theology it lives by. The church began to look at the unchurched men and women around them as customers and those customers soon became their theology. The Bible fell out of favor as pragmatism took over.
The bulk of the book looks to the five predominant themes arising from Wells' previous four books. The themes are truth, God, self, Christ and church. Each one is treated in a substantial chapter. Time would fail me to describe each of these chapters. Suffice it to say that this book is much like watching Sportscenter or another sports highlights show. It is a highlight reel of the previous books. Where during the course of a typical ballgame you can expect there will be stretches where you will witness little of great importance, during the highlight shows you need to pay attention as you'll see only the most important moments. This book is similar. Every page is important and every chapter is packed with fascinating content. Rare is the page in my copy of the book that is not stained with substantial amounts of highlighter.
The Courage To Be Protestant marks the end of Wells' magnum opus--the work to which he has dedicated himself for almost two decades. It is an utterly brilliant book and one that I feel is a recommended read, and maybe even a must read, for any Protestant. Wells kept me glued to his text for page after page as he challenged me, as one who seeks to be a classical evangelical and who seeks to hold faithfully to the theology of Scripture, to display the courage it takes to be Protestant in the church today.
|
|
|
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Gentleman and a Scholar, June 18, 2008
The last quarter century of church growth methodology has left something of a burnt over stain on the evangelical church. Regrettably, many today crinkle their brow at doctrine as if it is some type of family secret that we try not to think too much about. How in the world have we gotten to the point where marketing and entertainment are pursued and embraced with the fervency that our forefathers clung to theology, prayer and preaching?
Enter David Wells. Wells is, among other things a very smart man. He is an astute observer of what is happening in our day and helpfully contextualizes this movement within its overall historical development. Wells has written extensively on this subject in his previous books, No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, Losing Our Virtue, and Above All Eartly Pow'rs. The Courage to Be Protestant builds on these previous works in his traditional Jeremiad tone.
The first 57 pages are outstanding. Wells writes with his usual clarity, biblical faithfulness, and subtly sarcastic humor. If you have ever wondered how gentlemen argue passionately while maintaining their status as a gentleman read Wells. He just does a fantastic job connecting the theological dots of where we have come from in evangelicalism. Wells contends that in all of our zeal to reach the unchurched, we are unchurching the reached.
Wells also spends some time in the ring with the folks in the emerging movement. He sees much of this as a reincarnation of `old liberalism' that never fully died anyway. It is helpful to read Wells and see the theological continuity between today's emerging church and those in the early 1900's.
There is little doubt that Wells is fed up, and rightly so. He sees little hope to rescue the term evangelical and instead opts for the recovery of the term Protestant. He sees this term more rooted in Reformational truths (ie Scripture) rather than a movement of people that are about a movement of people.
The rest of the book interacts with the contemporary theological and philosophical worldview. I wish I could say it was as interesting as the first two chapters. While there are a lot of helpful chapters, I felt the book dropped off a bit after page 57.
The first two chapters make the book a must read for pastors. Wells puts on a clinic in logic, theology, observing church history and connecting the (painful) dots.
|
|
|
23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Stinging Critique of Contemporary Evangelicalism, October 19, 2008
In his newest book, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), David Wells launches a stinging critique of contemporary evangelicalism, particularly in its market-driven and Emerging forms. Bundling together the insights from his previous books, Wells advocates a return to doctrinal fidelity and a renewed trust in Scriptural authority.
David Wells reminds me of a curmudgeonly grandfather - a man full of wisdom who is also highly opinionated. The Courage to Be Protestant contains piercing insights into the problems of today's evangelical movement along with a good dose of "attitude" that keeps the book entertaining. (Take for example Wells' description of the hip-hop culture "set apart by their getups, their tattoos, their piercings, jewelry, hoodies, off-kilter baseball caps, and pants that look like they were made by a drunken tailor." [15])
Wells is at his best when offering insight into why our culture is going through its contemporary turmoil. He rightly notices how our terminology has shifted (for example, we no longer look at lost people as "unconverted" but as merely "unchurched" [45].) He sees through the market-driven mentality of many churches, where "the benefits of believing [Christianity] are marketed, not the truth from which the benefits derive. (53)"
Wells' chapter on God is terrific. He writes: "Culture does not give the church its agenda. All it gives the church is its context. The church's belief and mission come from the Word of God." (98) He argues that we have lost our center, and this because we have lost the God that is outside of ourselves. We have misunderstood God's nearness and immanence as if he were inside us. The truth of the God that stands outside of us is what gives us the Law, defines sin, and makes the cross necessary. Here, Wells calls us to recover God's transcendence.
In later chapters, he makes his case for the public nature of Christian truth claims. Particularly insightful is the way that Wells shows how many Christians have become both secular and spiritual. "Secularization does not mean that all religion and spirituality must wither away. It simply means that all religion and spirituality need to be kept private." (187) Wells articulates a robust understanding of the penal substitutionary atonement, and yet he nuances it in all the right places. For instance, he believes we should make the distinction that Christ took upon himself the penalty of our sin, not that he was punished for sin. (201). In other words, God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus; God did not condemn Jesus.
Yet The Courage to Be Protestant has several problems. Wells puts too much stock in surveys and polls. For example, he worries that only 32 percent of evangelicals believe in absolutes (93). I cannot help but wonder if most evangelicals even speak in these categories enough to be able to answer such a survey question accurately.
Other times, he makes sweeping generalizations without the documentation to back up his point. For example, he argues (without any documentation) that the overwhelming majority of evangelical pastors have become seeker-sensitive (44). A brief glance at the layout of the large number of smaller, rural evangelical churches might change that perception.
Or take his common refrain that Americans are "spiritual, but not religious" (60, 185). Researchers are beginning to see how this generalization is not only undocumented, but simply untrue. (See Robert Wuthnow's After the Baby Boomers for some surprising statistics.)
Throughout the book, Wells advocates a return to the doctrinal convictions of previous eras, but he sometimes conflates doctrinal conviction with the re-adoption of certain forms and traditions not specifically prescribed in Scripture. In a terrific chapter that takes the evangelical church to task for making Christianity "for sale" through the embrace of a market mentality, Wells shows how consumerism has changed American evangelicalism. But the chapter is marred by his lament over the contemporary preacher who sits on a barstool (which replaced the Plexiglas stand, which earlier replaced the pulpit). Wells seems to think the pulpit is the most sacred place for a pastor to stand (29). The absence of pulpits might indeed be due to the market mentality of some mega-churches, but surely the answer to our consumerism is not merely returning to the pulpit!
Other problems surface in some of Wells' contradictions. For example, on page 80, he argues that "Scripture is... the truth. Scripture is not only a measure, not only a standard, but is also truth." Two pages later, he distinguishes between Jesus and Scripture by saying "Scripture is true, but he is the truth." And then, "...only of Christ can it be said that he is the truth." Without further elaboration, the reader is left wondering what the relationship between Jesus and the Bible might be.
The Courage to Be Protestant is a book that should be read and digested by evangelical leaders today. Most of Wells' analysis is correct. He puts his finger on many of the foundational problems that are corroding our evangelical identity. Though his tone is often pessimistic and he offers little evidence or hope for a resurgence of biblical orthodoxy, Wells' counsel and instruction are worthy of receiving and hearing. Readers may disagree at times with the "grumpy Grandpa," but I, for one, am glad that the wise curmudgeon had the courage to write such a book.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by David F. Wells
