God in the Wasteland - Wells, David

We have thus become pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God in which God’s creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world.

Image and appearance assume the function that character and morality once had.

We have ended up with more, but we ourselves have ended up being much less.

We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives — including the soil in which our Christian faith grows — is constantly shifting.

The protestant liberalism represented by these churches unabashedly sought a synthesis between Christian faith and modern culture. The liberals held that culture was flawed but that it was not estranged from the life of God. because God is to be found immanently within all human beings, they said, the meaning a morality by which America should live is to be found in religious consciousness.

The more modern they felt themselves compelled to be, the less Christian they were able to remain. It was a predicament from which they could find no way to extricated themselves.

Without God’s truth, without his Word as its center, a civil religion also forfeits his grace and his judgment — and without these, it has not means to survive in the modern world.

If a convergence ha sin fact taken place between modernity and evangelicalism, it is not because modernity has become more theological but because evangelicalism has become modern.

Modernity has be hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is largely private and internal. Belief has shrunk from being a contemporary confession of Gods Truth in the church and beyond to being simply a part of personal identity and psychological makeup. Many evangelicals quietly assume , perhaps even without much thought, that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension to noticeably or noisely on others or into the public square.…… Modern culture grants me absolute freedom to believe whatever I want to believe — so long as keep those believes from infringing on the consciousness or behavior of anyone else, especially on points of controversy.

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests to inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is to distant, His grace too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common.

Why do people choose the substitute over God himself? Probably the most important reason is that it obviates accountability to God. We can meet idols on our own terms because they are our own creations. They are safe, predictable, and controllable; they are, in Jeremiah’s colorful language, the “scarecrows in a cucumber field” (10.5).

There was a time when individualists lived by the internal gyroscope of character. They thought for themselves, did what they believed to be right even if they received no approbation from others, judging that it was better, as David Heisman put it, to be right than to be president.

We now blithely speak of marketing the gospel like any other commodity, oblivious to the fact that such rhetoric betrays a vast intrusion of worldliness into the church. It was once one of the hallmarks of evangelicalism that it offered a pronounced cultural critique, but now it is attentive as any other aspect of that culture to the pronouncements of the pollster.

It is true that the self has lost its capacity for connectedness in the world outside of itself, but it is also the case that it nevertheless seeks to adapt itself to the multiple shifting worlds of meaning through which it must pass each day and that this has a powerful effect on personal identity.…

Personal identity now is being shaped on the basis of a vision of freedom that amounts to little more than complete randomness.

Families have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is breaking down.

modernization is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless, bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new freedom from various parochialism is in some sense exhilarating, but it does not come without a price

Where the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost

Personal identity became increasingly associated not with the narrative of one’s inner life but with the projection of one’s public image .…In this world self is not something that is; it is something that is constructed.…In the modern world,…we are required to construct multiple selves because we live in so many different “worlds,” play so many different audiences, encounter so many different experiences, and juggle so many different values.

There is a hunger for religious experience bu an aversion to theological definition of that experience. There is a hunger for God but a disenchantment with dogma or doctrine.

When the consumer is sovereign the product (in this case God himself)must be subservient.

Neitzche…He declared that God had died, or more precisely, that he had been murdered.… He was speaking of the passing of a world in which meaning and values had been rooted in the transcendent. Hi saw a world in which human beings were wresting sovereignty for themselves, and hencea world in which there were no longer ultimate values but only present possibilities — possibilities that were fluid, open, and unstructured by the divine or by an absolute moral order.

What may start out as an additional authority alongside the word of God will eventually supplant its authority altogether.

In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well, and so we have transformed the God of mercy into a God who is at our mercy

We imagine that for those who love God and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for their satisfaction and the inner tranquility of their lives.

The New Testament never promises anyone a life of psychological wholeness or offers a guarantee of the consumers satisfaction with Christ. To the contrary, it offers the prospect of indignities, loss, damage, disease, and pain. The faithfully Scripture were scorned, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed.

[In dealing with the worship of the “virgin” Mary] It was assumed that when Mary approached Christ, her Son, she could expect a far more gracious reception than common sinners, and Christ, in turn, could approach the yet more distant father on their behalf.

The people of Our Time are strongly inclined to trace all internal confusion, pain, disappointment or lost advantage back to someone else’s door.

Our experience of the modern world produces the sense that there is no sure and steady purpose pervading life, that purpose, like life itself, has broken apart into small, unrelated fragments, that our daily routine is severed from the meaning that God once provide to it.

There is no way, he said, that we can extrapolate from the world’s pain and disorder, or even from what is good in the world, to what the designs of God might be. We cannot have any hope of success if we begin below… Those who begin with the human perspective inevitably end with the human perspective. We must begin with God, for only in this way will we end with the divine perspective.

Modernity has gone a long way toward robbing us of our faith convictions. While we may believe in God’s existence and his goodness, we find ourselves psychologically disabled in our attempts to bring this belief into incisive relation with the stuff of daily experience, unable to frame effectively our daily routine within the context of ultimatum.

There is some artificiality involved in slicing the work of God too finely, for his purposes were conceived in eternity and are worked out in history as an interconnected whole. What God did in bringing the world into being cannot be separated from his ongoing work of sustaining it, nor can his purposes in creating human life be separated from his purposes of redemption and judgement(John 17.24: 1Peter1:17-20). The beginning must be read in the light of the end, because the end was present in the mind of God in the beginning and hence all that comes to pass has been in the mind of God from the beginning(Isaiah 14.24,27; 22.11; 40.10)

Efforts to build character have been replaced by efforts to manage the impression we make on others. behind this constant game of charades, this shifting of cultural guises, is a personality that is typically shallow, self-absorbed, elusive, leery of commitments, unattached to people or place, dedicated to keeping all options open, and frequently incapable of either loyalty or gratitude.… On the other hand, this kind of person often proves unwilling to accept the limitations of life and hence is inclined to believe in what is deeply irrational. Thus primitive myths and superstitions are now making their appearance side by side with computer wizardry and rampant secularization.

in the post-literate and post-rational world we are entering, the truth of Christian faith may no longer travel on the wings of logical argument as it has in the past, but it will be compelling nonetheless as churches reform their inner lives to embody a fitting counter cultural spirituality centered in a serious, worshipful recognition of the presence of God, an obedient submission to his Word, and a compassionate outworking of His grace in loving service of the stricken of this world.

God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in A World of Fading Dreams

Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing Co. Grand Rapids , USA and Intervarsity Press, Leicester, UK