The Courage to Be Protestant

From Neoredemptive

The Courage to Be Protestant
David Wells Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008
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Contents 1 Synopsis 2 Doc's Take 3 Quotes 3.1 Regarding the Evangelical World 3.2 Regarding the Marketing Church 3.3 Regarding the Emergent church

Synopsis

Wells recaps the major themes and conclusions of his previous books -- No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, Losing Our Virtue, and Above All Earthly Pow'rs -- calling the Evangelical church to rediscover its theological backbone, recommit itself to the authority of scripture, and reevaluate its laodicean attitude toward co-opting (and being co-opted by) our culture's patterns of psychologizing, secularization, privatized religious belief, commoditization, marketing, and epistemological deconstruction. Particularly critical of the seeker church and emergent movements.

Doc's Take

Breathtaking. Easily the best book I've picked up this year.

Wells is, for my money, the clearest-thinking theological diagnostician of the Evangelical Church alive today. He has a gift for cutting through the pretense of marketing-speak and the shameless self-absorption of emergent nonsense, and in their place offers a clear call to confessional and doctrinal fidelity.

Fans of his previous books (No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, Losing Our Virtue, Above All Earthly Pow'rs) will recognize a lot of the themes.

I have only two complaints worth mentioning with the book.

The first is that in his discussion of truth, lies, and "spin" (p.72-75), the category of bullshit -- things said to convey an impression without regard to their truthfulness -- represents an important fourth category. See On Bullshit -- this is the marketing of the self, a strange confluence of lies, spin, and preaching that is the M.O. of a lot of today's opinion-makers. Wells does pick this idea up later in the chapter on "Self" - "a shift from what is important in itself to how it appears to others" (p.148) -- but I would like to have seen these ideas integrated.

My second concern is that, in the final chapter, Wells drifts (IMVHO) unnecessarily far into the hyper-sufficiency of scripture, a position that tends to diminish the ongoing roll that the Holy Spirit must play in the vital life of the church as a community. On this very particular point (and here I am thinking of only a few paragraphs), a gentle corrective in the direction of Gordon Fee's Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God would be useful.

... Disintegration of "obedience to the unenforceable" ...

Quotes

• Commitment -- actual commitment, real bonds, a real sense of belonging, not just the idea of commitment -- has become a precious stone, rare, much sought after and, when found, treasured. (p.33)
• The needs consumers have are needs they identify for themselves. The needs sinners have are needs God identifies for us. (p.52)
• Our children are being "raised" by other children, by television, by fading fads, by inner-city culture, and by the equivalent elsewhere, the affluent way of life. They are in effect being abandoned. (p.66)
• Secularists, with their low cognitive horizons, their tired agenda, their world with rooms that had only windows and no skylights, became thoroughly boring. They began as rebels and ended up as little-minded conformists. Postmoderns are not boring -- at least not yet -- but they are very trivial. (p.101)
• Here, though, is the difference between sin and evil (as we use this word today). Evil is simply badness. Sin, though, is altogether more serious because it sets up human badness in relation to God.
• Let us not mince words. If we could see more clearly God in the full blaze of his burning purity, we would not be on easy terms with all the sins that now infect our souls and breed easy compromises with the spirit of the postmodern age. (p.133)
• Character is not fascinating, glowing, or masterful. By the same token, personality is not dutiful, honorable, or full of golden deeds. Character is good or bad; personality is attractive, forceful, or magnetic. (p.147)
• What has to be forgiven is not just what we do by who we are, not just our sinning but our sinfulness, not just our choices but what we have chosen in place of God. (p.167)
• Images we may want, entertainment we may desire, but it is the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen that is the church's truth to tell. (p.207)
• I remain convinced that recovering such a church is not a matter of technique, searching for some lost formula, rereading a forgotten confession, introducing an ancient litany in worship, or finding some business strategy. [...] I continue to think such strategies for recovery may bring the church even lower if all they do is deepen our present love affair, as pragmatists, with technique. No, we need to think a little more deeply than this. (p.218)
• No, it is not the church we need to rethink. Rather, it is our thoughts about the church that need to be rethought. It is the church's faithfulness that needs to be reexamined. [...] We need to ask ourselves how well, or how badly, we are realizing our life in Christ in the church, how far and how well churches stand as the outposts of the kingdom of God in our particular culture. (p.223)
• Churches that actually do influence the culture [...] do not offer what can already be had on secular terms in the culture. They are an alternative to it. (p.224)
• Without God's holiness, grace would be nothing more than sentimental benevolence. (p.241)

Regarding the Evangelical World

• The truth is that evangelicals have brought this bad press upon themselves. There have been just too many instances of obnoxious empire-building going on, too much in evangelicalism that is partisan and small, too much pandering to seekers, and too much adaptation of the Christian message until little remains. Too many of its leaders have been disgraced. There have been too many venal television preachers. There are too many of the born-again who show no signs of regenerate life. For many people, the world "evangelical" has become a synonym for what is trite, superficial, and moneygrubbing, a byword for what has gone wrong with Protestantism. (p.19)
• George Barna was one of the primary architects of this new approach to "doing" church. He was in on the ground floor three decades ago. As the church's most assiduous poller, he undoubtedly expected by this time to be the bearer of good news once his marketing strategies were widely adopted, as they have been. It has not turned out that way. It has fallen to him to be the most important chronicler of his own failure. [...] Leaving behind this long trail of failure as if it had never happened, Barna has nevertheless struck out in a new direction with the same old panache, bravado, and undented self-assurance. The evangelical world has neither gasped nor blinked. In 2005 he published his book [Revolution], which predicted that the church in the coming decade would lose much of its "market share," but never mind, because now it could climb aboard a different cultural trend and succeed even more spectacularly. Now, serious spiritual revolutionaries can simply cut themselves loose from every local church. Just walk away! Permanently. And find biblical Christianity elsewhere. [...] What is resulting from Barna's approach is barely recognizable as Christian today. And that is what makes the desire of some of the leading American marketing pastors to export their experiment to the rest of the world almost incomprehensible. It certainly is an expression of unbounded chutzpah. (p.47)
• The question Westerners need to ponder is why, despite our best efforts at cultural accommodation in America, God seems to be taking his work elsewhere. Is there a lesson lurking somewhere in this story? (p.48)
• If there is an analogy here, perhaps it is in young people who bear the marks of the broken homes from which they come. [...] What, then, should a home look like? What does it mean to be in a Christian marriage, to be a Christian father or mother? There is little in their experience from which they can draw. That, I think, is the situation we face in the evangelical church today. We are increasingly remote from the practice of historic Christian believing. (p.217)

Regarding the Marketing Church

• However, these large structures only deepen the sense of not belonging we carry with us much of the time. Why, then, would we want to experience this in church, too? And why would we content ourselves with having yet one more product plugged to us in church when we are bombarded by products and telemarketers all week? This is a point of acute vulnerability for the marketing churches. (p.41)
• And the further irony is that the younger generation who are less impressed by whiz-bang technology, who often see through what is slick and glitzy, and who have been on the receiving end of enough marketing to nauseate them, are as likely to walk away from these oh-so-relevant churches as to walk into them. (p.50)
• But what always happens in every form of spirituality from below is that the seeker ends up controlling what is sought.

Regarding the Emergent church

• They are not eager to engage (post)modernity critically. Indeed, they are as much submerged beneath it as they are emerging from it. (p.17)
• Here, among the emergents, am I mistaken in thinking that a different kind of offsetting is happening? The loss of truth is being offset by increasingly adventurous experiments in worship and by various attempts at recovering a lost sense of mystery. [...] When our knowledge of God's truth is diminished, our understanding of God is diminished, and no amount of contrived mystery through ancient liturgies or gathering in the presence of dim, flickering candlelight can compensate for this loss. (p.18)
• However, while the emergents are intent on making connections, they do not want to make those connections across generations. They are niche-driven. The niche is Gen X. Emergent churches are typically made up from the same social slice. They are as look-alike as the marketing churches are for those of another generation. (p.41)
• The problem, though, is that now there is no burden to be unloaded, no guilt to be cleansed, nothing of which to be ashamed. All that remains is that each one of us has the right to "tell our own story," in our own way. And that is what people are doing with very little sense that they actually do inhabit a moral world where there are enduring rights and wrongs.
• They forget that Scripture is divine revelation. It is not a collection of opinions of how different people see things that tells us more about the people than the things. No. [...] The reason God gave it to us is that he wants us to know. Not to guess. Not to have vague impressions. And certainly not to be misled. (p.77)
• We today, you see, are living in a moment when the multi-vocalities of postcolonial others are entering our intra/post/spatialities and are exposing the antisociality concealed in the hegemony of our discourse and sensibilities. This kind of empty obfuscation is what we hear all too often from the emergent church, though usually without the veneer of intellectual sophistication. In its place [...] we hear the confidence of those who have a sense of being on the edge of what-is-happening-now but who, for that very reason, are diffident, unsure, tentative, and, more often than not, simply confused. (p.78)
• Here is the postmodern preoccupation with the self into which the whole of reality has been contracted, the self at the center of the universe and, despite all the Christian words that are spattered around, actually refusing to be part of God's (objective) narrative. (p.87)
• [...] for the believer this age or world has passed and its so-called wisdom has been exposed by Christ (1 Cor. 1:20). May we say that what has been exposed includes how we are today thinking, in this postmodern world, about how to be spiritual? (p.197)
• Let us be clear. Churchless Christianity has nothing to do with biblical Christianity and everything to do with pragmatic, methodological, and reductionistic thinking. (p.216)