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May 10
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Lorien Johnson
gave  to:
God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Paperback)
by
David F. Wells
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my rating:
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read in September, 2008
Lorien said:
"David F. Wells wrote in 1994 an assessment of evangelicalism in relation to modernity in contemporary culture entitled, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of a World of Fading Dreams. Wasteland is a sequel to Well’s previous book No Place for Truth,...more
David F. Wells wrote in 1994 an assessment of evangelicalism in relation to modernity in contemporary culture entitled, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of a World of Fading Dreams. Wasteland is a sequel to Well’s previous book No Place for Truth, which originally described modernity in more detail as being one of the major cultural factors which has “diminished the place and importance of theology in the church”. He presents Wasteland as the “first step” of action that is required to resolve the problems he previously described. Wasteland is a contemplative book that presents valuable points regarding the state of evangelicalism, but his proposed solutions are strictly theoretical and simply inadequate if the goal is to achieve cultural healing and secure biblical theology.
Wells states that evangelicalism “has become modern” in that it draws its primary power from the culture rather than from theology. Modernity, meanwhile, reduces evangelicalism to an internal, private faith and a religion of civility. God, in turn, has become inconsequential to the people and leadership of the church as the church becomes progressively more worldly. Enlightenment systems of humanism and capitalism are entrenched throughout modernity, and the church has incorporated the principles thereof, resulting in a Christian-based market of spiritual satisfaction.
Modern satisfaction, achieved by evangelicalism’s strength in identifying with the people, leads to the substitution of self over God in a fundamental rejection human accountability to Him. Sovereignty is granted to the consumer. God has become a weightless element for the church and for culture, resulting in a loss of connectedness and sense of grounding, but whose presence is not considered welcome for fear that He would constrain the individual.
Wells argues that the solution is to reject worldliness from our churches by becoming a powerful counter-culture movement. Christians should cease striving to engage the world on its terms; instead, Christians must become distinctively otherworldly. He portrays Old Testamental holiness as being a “radical departure” from theology of that of the rest of the world, and maintains that contemporary Christianity must return to the “burning purity” and “loftiness” of classic theology. Wells argues that the contemporary church and the coming generation of leadership are both thoroughly tainted by worldliness and modernity, and both must revert in order to achieve a biblical and powerful theology.
David F. Wells is the senior research professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, specializing in historical and systematic theology. His personal theology is distinctly Calvinistic, and his bias is apparent during passages that discuss the historical development of modernity in the context of culture and Christianity. He approaches his subject from a conservative Reformed theological perspective. Wells wrote Wasteland in order to further pinpoint modernity as the most significant threat to the contemporary church, and to provide the basic solution necessary to resolve that threat.
The general threat is made evidently clear; the “weightlessness of God” is rampant in culture, churches, and lives. To this end his survey-study of theological seminary students is at times chilling, and is a worthy complement to his extended chapters describing the philosophical issues present in modernity. When surveyed on the subject of their beliefs and perspectives, although most of the students answered questions indicated that they consider theology to be rooted in the Scriptures and vital in their lives and ideology. However, other statements show the presence of unbiblical ideologies having blended in, such as 64.6% agreeing that “[a:]s a Christian, realizing my full potentials as a human being is just as important as putting others before myself.” Wells also briefly mentions that evangelicals are converting to Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy at a growing rate in a desire to find more depth in the religious experience.
The solution, however, is far less well established. His prescription is highly theoretical: become counter-culture, embrace otherworldliness, and reform. Wells does specify that the upcoming generations of Christian leaders, the seminarians, must be taught these principles. This is, unfortunately, as specific an instruction as Wells provides in his text. The theoretical commands are valuable but when alone they prove difficult to implement for many ministers interested in adapting such principles to their ministry environment. That difficulty, however, is indicative of Wells’ limitations.
Wells does not separate theology from methodology. He rightly rejects the self-centeredness of the contemporary church environment, but he groups into the theological matters a rejection of the methodologies, such as marketing strategies, used by many churches. For example, Wells frequently refers to modern individuals as having the attitude of consumers. If the church is to draw people from the world and to meet them at some level from which it can raise them up, then logic would suggest that market strategies in the general methodology could prove effective in evangelism so long as the theological content is kept pure. Similarly, the upcoming generations of seminarians, whom Wells considers vital, are being raised in the culture of modernity. These generations have been trained by culture to need practical, explanatory solutions with easily targeted applications. If these are the men and women who must be taught to become counter-culture and pursue God’s burning purity, then they need to be given practical applications in order to begin a path of change, but Wells’ book fails to provide the application of his theoretical solution.
Published criticism is relatively split in regards to Wells’ text. Amos Yong, in his review of Wasteland, makes two interesting points. Wells’ central solution is to revert backwards to a “classic Reformed” theology , and we have seen that he uses ‘theology’ to include ‘methodology’. Yong pointedly references Wells’ failure to make the connection that the methodologically conservative Calvinistic churches are those experiencing the least amount of growth and apparent revival Continuing the issue of Wells’ vocal Calvinism as it relates to Wells’ thesis, Yong questions how the extremely pessimistic idea of the failing church can align with the deterministic nature of God’s relationship to Christianity. Other critics find extraordinary value in Wells’ eloquent, occasionally poetic, exposition and his “powerfully compelling” message.
God in the Wasteland: The reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams does carry a powerful message that Christians and the Christian leadership need to address. Wells brilliantly conveys the tragedy of our omnipotent God being made weightless in our lives and churches. His passionate attempt to portray the dangers that await Christianity if changes are not made causes him to frequently paint with too broad a brush, and his failure to provide applicable methods of change is a significant limitation in his text. However, other scholars, pastors, and teachers may use Wasteland to evaluate the problem and Wells’ theoretical solutions in order to develop a wide variety of applications with which they can bring about reformation and inspire that so desired burning purity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bolt John, "God in the wasteland: the reality of truth in a world of fading dreams." Calvin
Theological Journal, 31 no. 1 (April 1996): 264-267.
Wells, David F. God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams.
Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994.
Yong, Amos. "God in the wasteland: the reality of truth in a world of fading dreams." Pneuma
18, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 239-243.
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Lorien Johnson
gave  to:
Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament (Paperback)
by
Christopher J.H. Wright
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my rating:
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read in November, 2008
Lorien said:
"Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament is an eloquently insightful, although fundamentally flawed, text written by Dr. Christopher J. Wright whose intention was to place Jesus within the intellectually historical context of the Old Testament. The au...more
Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament is an eloquently insightful, although fundamentally flawed, text written by Dr. Christopher J. Wright whose intention was to place Jesus within the intellectually historical context of the Old Testament. The author was raised as a Presbyterian and was later ordained as a minister in the Anglican Church of England. Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament has a thoroughly missiological emphasis which flows naturally from Wright’s experience as an “evangelical Anglican” missionary in India and as a dean, and later principal, of a missions-training institution, All Nations Christian College in the United Kingdom. Wright’s work is an interesting primer to the consideration of Old Testament insights into Jesus, but his work is severely hampered by a humanist perspective which limits Jesus’ omniscient divinity.
Wright delineated his manuscript into five areas in which Jesus is considered in light of the Old Testament: the Old Testament story, promise, identity, mission, and values. He emphasized that the Old Testament sheds light and additional “levels of significance” on the “full understanding” of Jesus, just as He in turn “sheds light backwards” on the Old Testament. The history of Israel is particularly unique and relevant to the understanding of Jesus as a series of “redemptive acts of God in [H:]is dealings with a people in a covenant relationship with [H:]imself”. The unique salvation history of the Old Testament has “universal effects” and is directly connected to and completed by Jesus.
The Old Testament story which Jesus completed also declares the promise which Jesus fulfilled, according to Wright. Israel’s existence “was the substance of the promise”, and that promise extended to a “universal blessing to all the nations” through Israel. The Old Testament promise is inherently interactive because that promise requires an act of acceptance on the part of the people. God repeatedly took the initiative by making a promise and the humans involved responded to that promise. The Old Testament portrays a strong history of covenants which follow a consistent pattern of a promise made, the acceptance of the promise by the people, the fulfillment of that promise, and a fresh promise made in response. Wright is definitive in his determination that the promises of the Old Testament were figurative in nature, not literal; the as yet unfulfilled promises of the Old Testament are not literal predictions of things to come, but rather have been transformed into new living promise fulfillments in God’s “unwavering intention to bless”.
Wright clearly expressed that Jesus determined His identity through an interactive understanding with the Old Testament. Jesus absorbed three Old Testament figures into His identity: the Davidic King, the Son of God, and the Servant. Although Jesus was aware of being God’s Son, the baptismal experience affirmed that reality. The Old Testament further contributes to an understanding of Jesus’ identity as a macrocosmic metaphor which depicts Jesus’ relationship to God the Father via the sonship of Israel.
The key to Wright’s understanding of Jesus is in a study of His mission as seen through His titles. Wright purports that Jesus “derived” His Messiahship from reading the Scriptures; a Messiahship which was radical in that, ultimately, Jesus was the personification of Israel. Jesus learned of and claimed His titles from the Old Testament, including that of the Son of Man from Daniel 7, while He “interpreted [H:]is mission […:] in terms of Isaiah 53.”
The values of Jesus were innately the values of the Old Testament, according to Wright, for Jesus placed Himself in relative place of the law while restoring its essence. The teachings of Jesus were essentially Old Testament teachings, including to love one’s neighbor, to imitate God’s mercy, to be different from the world, and the need for a full reorientation to enter the Kingdom of God. The law, which is by design a universal blessing, follows a scale of values which Wright argued that Jesus affirmed. That scale of Old Testament law places God first, emphasizes that people “matter more than things”, and that “needs matter more than rights”.
Wright’s intention with Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament was to establish the Old Testament as the source of Jesus’ insights into God the Father and Jesus’ roots to His personal identity and mission. Wright purported that Jesus saw Himself in constant relation to the Old Testament; indeed, that Jesus determined His very path by reading the Old Testament texts. Wright broached a curiously humanist perspective in his presentation of Jesus’ relationship with the Scriptures. The occasional element of humanism can be explained by the culture of the modern Anglican Church in which Wright teaches and ministers, but his overriding approach to Jesus’ self-consciousness was consistent in its assertion of His lack of omniscience. Wright’s perspective guided his research, and subsequently the entire text suffers from an awkward and theologically errant attempt to establish Jesus’ historical self-awareness.
Wright argued extensively that Jesus determined his identity, mission, and values from the Old Testament. Such a stance removes from Jesus the omniscience accountable to Him as a co-equal part of the triune Godhead. Jesus is proclaimed by Wright as “Lord” and indicates that He is deserving of worship only in the concluding paragraph of the book, while the Jesus presented throughout the rest of Wright’s text is remarkably human. Wright even went as far as to narrate an imagined scenario in which a traveling, yet studious, Jesus observed the inadequacies of His contemporary society, entered a synagogue and read a passage of Scripture, and “launched his new ministry on the basis” of that Scripture. Jesus is depicted as an incredibly good human whose relationship with God is such that it demands the use of father/son language and who deliberately, and voluntarily, chooses to step into the role of the Messiah. The reader is left to wonder: to what extent does Wright consider Jesus to be God?
Jesus is said to have interpreted, absorbed, and learned from the Old Testament, and almost no indication is given that as part of the Godhead Jesus was integral to the origination, inspiration, and writing of the Old Testament. Wright therefore places Jesus in direct subjugation to the Scriptures, whereas sound biblical theology demands that Jesus was their true and then fulfilled that which He had written. Wright’s humanist perspective weighs heavily on his work and significantly limits its theological impact.
Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament does, however, benefit from Wright’s well-written and clearly presented links between Old Testament concepts and Jesus’ purpose. Wright implemented a frequently wonderful clarity in his articulation of the Old Testament grounds and references for Jesus’ many titles, the unique moral value scales in biblical theology, and the Bible’s covenantal history. Additional elements were included into the work, including a brief but sufficient overview of the role of typology in biblical analysis as it relates to Jesus in light of the Old Testament.
Peer reviews of Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament find little middle ground in the consideration of Wright’s work. V. Philips Long of Regent College in Vancouver wrote in the Presbyterion that Wright’s book was “clear”, “informative”, and “exhilarating”, and was “ideal” for “Christian students embarking on a course of biblical and theological study”. Stanley M. Horton of Springfield, Missouri, however, wrote in his review for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society that Wright took too great a liberty in his expression of replacement theology and labeling of many Old Testament promises as being figurative – “‘living’ and ‘transformable’” – rather than literal. Frank Thielman, of Beeson Divinity School of Birmingham, Alabama, published a review in Christianity Today in which he described Wright’s work as “illuminating” but less detailed in analysis than Walter Kaiser’s The Messiah in the Old Testament.
Ministers can find insights in eloquent passages which frequently present familiar ideas in relatively fresh contexts. One such example, seemingly tucked into the latter regions of the text, would have served as an excellent introductory passage to the book as it proclaims monotheism to be a “fighting faith” which demands a basic reorientation of humanity towards God and relates to the law under God’s terms – an orientation which Jesus proclaimed and fulfilled. All such insights must always be held in check, however, by remembrance that Wright both limited Jesus’ self-awareness of divinity and labeled swaths of covenantal promises as being figurative, not literal, when the biblical texts themselves make no such indications. The mature reader should be capable of discerning between valuable insights and illogical misrepresentations of Scriptures. The scholastic usefulness of Wright’s book is limited to an additional degree by Wright’s determination to eschew the use of footnotes. His included bibliography is to be appreciated, but scholars will be stymied in their pursuit for further depth. Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament does not present new information or ideas, but rather provides interesting insights into preexisting content. Footnotes to his work would have been valuable as they might have provided a bread trail guiding backwards into his bibliography with greater focus.
Christopher Wright achieved to an introductory degree his goal of expressing the placement of Jesus in the context of the Old Testament. Wright’s placement is off-target, however, because Jesus is depicted as being subservient to the Scriptures rather than their divine Author. The humanistic misrepresentation is significantly unsettling. When read with discernment, however, Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament can be a valuable primer for those new to evaluating Jesus in light of the Old Testament and for experienced Christians, ministers, and scholars the book can be a source for fresh insight from a perspective outside of modern conservative evangelicalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"Biography: Langham Partnership International", http://www.langhampartnership.org/chris-... (accessed 17 November 2009).
Horton, Stanley M. "Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40, no. 2 (1997): 287-287.
Long, V. Philips. "Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament." Presbyterion 19, no. 1 (1993): 61-62.
Thielman, Frank. "Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament." Christianity Today 40, no. 3 (1996): 58-58.
Wright, Christopher J. H. Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament. Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992.(less)
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April 15
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Lorien Johnson
gave  to:
Heatherstone
by
Letitia Harmon (Goodreads author)
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my rating:
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October 11, 2008
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Lorien Johnson
added:
Cases Lost, Causes Won: The Supreme Court and the Judicial Process (Paperback)
by
Alice Fleetwood Bartee
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my rating:
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Lorien Johnson
gave  to:
Magicians of Quality (Sorcery & Cecilia / The Grand Tour)
by
Patricia C. Wrede
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my rating:
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June 12, 2008
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Lorien Johnson
gave to:
Unnatural Death (Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries (Paperback))
by
Dorothy L. Sayers
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my rating:
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Lorien Johnson
gave to:
Perilous Seas (A Man of His Word #3)
by
Dave Duncan
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my rating:
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Lorien Johnson
gave to:
The Magic Casement (A Man of His Word, Book 1)
by
Dave Duncan
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my rating:
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Lorien Johnson
gave to:
Faery Lands Forlorn (A Man of His Word, Book 2)
by
Dave Duncan
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my rating:
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Lorien Johnson
gave to:
Living God (A Handful of Men, Part 4)
by
Dave Duncan
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my rating:
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