How are we to explain the fragmentation of evangelical faith today and the current turmoil in the churches? According to David Wells, the answer lies in seeing how modernity is reshaping the whole of Western culture, including that part of it which is religious. This book provides a compelling critique of the modern world and the state of evangelical theology. Wells's sweeping analysis explores the collapse of theology in the church, the academy, and modern culture. The new environment in which we live, with its huge cities, triumphant capitalism, invasive technology, and incessant amusements, is homogenizing daily experience, bringing about a world cliche culture. While the modern world has produced astonishing abundance, it has also taken a dreadful toll on the human spirit, emptying it of meaning, depth, 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. Because the modern churchgoer is so often a consumer, pastors are redefining their roles in terms of their own marketability. Evangelicals, argues Wells, have largely lost the truth that God also 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 the modern world. Written expressly to encourage renewal in evangelical theology, No Place for Truth explores the interface between Christian faith and the modern world in entirely new ways and with uncommon rigor. Itraises profound questions about the future of conservative Protestant faith. Here is provocative reading for scholars, ministers, Christian leaders, seminary students, and all theologically concerned people.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format: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.
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format: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!
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful
By Martin Adams
Format: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.
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
More relevant than ever
"No Place for Truth," by David F. Wells is as relevant if not more so today (2013) than it was when it was written twenty years ago. Read more
Published 19 days ago by Douglas K. Erlandson
5.0 out of 5 stars
No Place For Truth
This is an excellent prognosis of current malaise of the church and how it has been influenced by the popular culture.
Published 7 months ago by Suman Jha
5.0 out of 5 stars
ONE OF THE MOST CHALLENGING EVANGELICAL BOOKS OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY
David Falconer Wells (born 1939) is a Professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; he has written many other books, such as God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Steven H. Propp
3.0 out of 5 stars
Where's the Biblical material, though?
Wells's thesis can be summarized thus: "Since the church has adopted all the vestiges of modernity, it has become irrelevant to God, and as such can no longer deliver the demands... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Jacob
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eye-opening, Informative, and Transformative
This book has it all: a winsome and engaging style as well as thoroughly researched. The book tries to identify the causes of the decline in confessional theological churches. Read more
Published on March 2, 2011 by SBehar
5.0 out of 5 stars
How All Theological Books Should Be Written
I read this book at the recommendation of a friend. Inside, although it was thick and hard to chew off at times, Wells hit on the perils of postmodernism before the word took on... Read more
Published on February 16, 2010 by John M. Alexander
5.0 out of 5 stars
No Place for Truth
David D. Wells, a professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, launched a missile, a polemical manifesto, entitled No Place For Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to... Read more
Published on March 18, 2009 by Gerard Reed
5.0 out of 5 stars
Are we in trouble?
Although written almost two decades ago this book still hits home. In "No Place For Truth" David Wells describes what he and many others see as the decline of evangelical... Read more
Published on April 17, 2008 by M. J. Keel
4.0 out of 5 stars
A call to Repentance
This is a book that really sets out to accomplish a monumental task. It attempts to grapple with the broad questions of why theology and objective truth are so absent in the... Read more
Published on June 23, 2007 by Joshua V. Schneider
4.0 out of 5 stars
Makes You Think
The following situations and beliefs are true in many Protestant/Evangelical churches today.
- `Worship' is the pinnacle of the church service. Read more
- `Worship' is the pinnacle of the church service. Read more
Published on November 27, 2005 by Josh Moffit
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
See all 100 books this book cites
4
books
cite this book:
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville on 5 pages
- The Uses of the University: Fifth Edition (Godkin Lectures on the Essentials of Free Government and the Duties of the Citizen) by Clark Kerr on page 239, page 240, and Back Matter
- Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet on page 169, page 182, and Back Matter
- People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Walgreen Foundation Lectures) by David M. Potter on page 139, page 190, and Back Matter
- New Rules by Daniel Yankelovich on page 160, page 161, and Back Matter
See all 100 books this book cites
- Rediscovering Pastoral Ministry by John MacArthur on page 4, page 344, and Back Matter
- Introduction to Biblical Counseling by John F. MacArthur Jr. on page 345
- The NIV Application Commentary 2 Peter, Jude by Douglas J. Moo on page 237
- Help for the Small-Church Pastor by Steve R. Bierly in Back Matter
Books on Related Topics
(learn more)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
