No Place for Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology [Paperback]

David Wells (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1994

Written expressly to encourage renewal in evangelical theology, this book explores the interface between Christian faith and the modern world in entirely new ways and with uncommon rigor.This sweeping analysis examines the collapse of theology in the church, the academy, and modern culture, raising profound questions about the future of conservative Protestant faith.

Product Details

• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (December 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080280747X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802807472
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #332,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutally frank critique of modern evangelical church, August 24, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: No Place for Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Paperback)

In this brutally frank critique of modern evangelicalism, Wells demonstrates how the quest for "cultural relevance" in the evangelical church has in fact led to the church being co-opted by the some of the worst aspects of modern secular culture. Wells pulls no punches here. For instance, he characterizes the current vogue of "servant leadership" as simply being a crutch for pastors with no vision or ideas of their own, who must depend upon their congregations (or "audience") for direction. Although Wells seems a bit pessimistic in his overall view of modern society and culture, he is on target as far as the effects that modern culture has had on the evangelical church. Wells does an excellent job of describing the problem and tracing its origins, but he offers only some very general solutions - apparently he offers more in the way of answers in the companion volume to this book, God in the Wasteland. Proponents of the current models of "church growth" will probably find much to disagree with in this book; however, for those evangelicals who find themselves trying to make sense out of the changes that have swept the church in the past decade, this book is an excellent place to start.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is for your heart!, February 4, 2001

By 

Marcelino Carvalho (Fortaleza, Ceará Brazil) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Place for Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Paperback)

The people of God need to stop and to consider the path that they have been walking in the world. To become a relevant people, without losing a deep fidelity to the Scriptures, it has been the big challenge of those that profess to believe in Jesus Christ. In this book you will be invited to reflect on which type of Christianity you profess. About which kind of God you say: I believe in him. You will be invited to escape of the religions teachings and to immerse in the Bible, looking for the God who Lord Jesus preached and who He obeyed until his death on the cross. If you are feeling that nobody around you knows what is right or what is wrong, this book is for you. Fantastic book is this! Don't lose it!

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A magisterial analysis!, September 4, 2006

By 

Martin Adams (Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Place for Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Paperback)

This is a provocative, demanding and rewarding book that attempts to grapple with some of the central challenges of Christian thought and life in a modern or post-modern world. Looking through Amazon and one or two other online sites, it is clear that many readers have also read Mark A. Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I have too; and by way of introduction to David F. Wells' book, it is worth making brief reference to the other.

Both books touch on similar subjects, though with different emphases. Both are concerned with the decline of what Noll calls "the life of the mind" within American evangelicalism; and both are concerned with how authoritative Christian thought can be sustained in this modern or postmodern world. I suspect that Noll's book has proved the more popular, even if the only direct evidence for that is the number of customer reviews on this site: 29 for Noll; 12 for Wells. And both books were published a year apart -- Wells in 1993, and Noll the following year. With a title like that, Noll was always going to be onto a winner!

However, I suspect that one of the reasons for these differing figures is that Wells writes from a different perspective, one that ultimately makes more demands on the reader. Another might be that Wells' position is subtly yet noticeably more pessimistic. Noll is an historian who is eminently capable of working in theology; Wells is a theologian who is eminently capable of working in history. One only has to look at satellite television to realise which of these subjects is the more popular; and I hope that nobody reading this review imagines that Christian television has any connection with theology!

One of the great strengths of this book is that it approaches its subject with the very breadth of thought that both authors find wanting in evangelicalism in general. While its focus is on North America, it spreads its net wide; and Wells is especially good at teasing out subtle relationships between culture and religious thought. It also manages to be at once highly opinionated, generous in spirit, full of subtle humour, and intensely passionate.

How's this for a start? When, in his Introduction Wells asserts his "disbelief in much that the modern world holds dear" (p. 10), he also says that while he feels he must use this pugnacious style, he intends "no disrespect either for the reader or for the modern world. After all, I work for the one and must live with the other. The pugnacity is only in the appearance, not in the intention. The problem is that even the mildest assertion of Christian truth today sounds like a thunderclap because the well-polished civility of our religious talk has kept us from hearing much of this kind of thing." He then draws on John Kenneth Galbraith and G.K. Chesterton, to demonstrate a point that has nothing of religion or theology in it -- at first. So when the theological point arrives, it has force: "Evangelicals are antimodern only across a narrow front; I write from a position that is antimodern across the entire front. It is only where assumptions in culture directly and obviously contradict articles of faith that most evangelicals become aroused and rise up to battle 'secular humanism'; aside from these specific matters, they tend to view culture as neutral and harmless. More than that, they often view culture as a partner amenable to being coopted in the cause of celebrating Christian truth. I cannot share that naivete; indeed, I consider it dangerous. Culture is laden with values, many of which work to rearrange the substance of faith, even when they are mediated to us through the benefits that the modern world also bestows upon us."

This epitomises Wells' ability to lay a profoundly humane groundwork for a theological starting-point, and then for an entire historical and theological argument; and that is one of the main reasons why this book is such a compelling indictment of contemporary evangelical theology. Or perhaps I should say non-theology; for that is what Wells finds everywhere -- though like Noll, he finds the malady less prevalent outside the USA.

Beavers who are over-eager might get impatient at Wells' methods. Indeed, I suspect that at the root of one or two of the more negative responses this book has received, there lies a typically modern impatience. But for those willing to take time, there are rewards a-plenty. For example, the opening chapter's title is "A Delicious Paradise Lost." The Eden-like innocence belongs to the town of Wenham, Massachusetts, in the two hundered of so years after the town's foundation in the 1630s by a group of puritans of English descent. Less than ten years later an English visitor described the place as "a delicious paradise" which he would choose "above all towns in America to dwell in." Via authoritative comparisons with contemporary towns in Britain and America (the book has plenty of informative footnotes and cross-references), Wells charts Wenham's growth, which was very slow. He embraces the role of the church as a building and as community of believers (and a community which included many who were nominal believers); he shows how, as people of differing religious backgrounds moved into the town, they interacted with the dominant puritan heritage; and he follows the lives of a number of prominent figures, notably the schoolteacher. This was a community defined partly by its strong sense of place, and partly by its awareness of how people lived together -- or how they should live together. Of course, it wasn't really Eden. But until well into the 19th century it was so utterly different from the modern world that we might imagine it to be such.

In a series of similar historically rooted pictures, Wells shows how those qualities disappeared, to be replaced by transience, by superficiality. In one of his many virtuoso analogies, he shows how Truman Capote (1924-84) was transformed by publicity "from an author of some initial repute into a personality. . . He bonded briefly with his devotees, but the bond was synthetic. In this new world, the statues are made of celluloid, not of stone; here the achievements are those of personality, seldom of character. . . This is experience without community. It is the experience of mankind in the mass, bereft of the forces that once drew it into centers of human fraternity and organization." Gloomy stuff! But it has precision and insight.

All this proves to be an essential preliminary for the theological discussion that makes up by far the larger part of this book. The theological discussion is fed from the ground up, by being rooted in the communities in which theology should, and at one time did, hold its discourse. The third chapter takes its title, "Things Fall Apart", from Yeats' poem The Second Coming (yet another example of the broad synthesis that characterises this book), and charts the decline of theology from its place as the "queen of sciences" to an irrelevance, even in the evangelical world to which Wells and most of those who will read his book belong.

Wells explains, with a magisterial grasp of history, culture and theology, how the decline of evangelical theology in the last two hundred is a direct result of the church's engagement with the world and its prevailing culture. It is a striking demonstration of the adage that the church rarely now turns the world upside (Acts 17:6); rather, the world has turned the church upside down. Hence the title: the church has been so concerned with accommodating itself to the world that it has forgotten how to sustain the mission God intended it to have to the world.

Wells shows how thought, including that of some greats of American theology, became gradually corrupted by this accommodation. Along the way the religious institutions have become corrupted too. One of his most devastating critiques is of the modern seminary. Great institutions like Princeton and Yale began with Christian values at their core, with subjects designed from a Christian perspective. But as these universities have become inexorably secularised, other institutions had to take over their role; and those in turn have been run off their feet to maintain recognition by the world. Many of the qualifications issued by modern Christian colleges, including doctorates, have very little real value: they merely provide a veneer of respectability so that being a pastor might appear to have the same worldly status as being a lawyer, an academic or a doctor. It is not just that there is little reflection: there is no time for it.

As for the corruption of the church's life . . . I'll leave you to read the examples Wells gives, which are shocking even to someone who knows something of what the God Channel and things of that kind spew out indiscriminately.

As I say, this is not an optimistic book. But it is honest. It offers few large-scale solutions. But it is a clarion call to those who read it, and who believe that we should indeed love the Lord our God with all our minds. If one follows Well's thesis through, it becomes clear that institutions are not readily amenable to reformation. But individuals are. Just as the Gospel began with individuals, so it will be with individuals that any reformation of theology will begin.