Sunday, 02 May 2010 19:08
Written by Bob Flack
Book Review
Losing Our Virtue
by David F. Wells (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998)
My goal is to write a review that will persuade you to read Losing Our Virtue by David F. Wells. That won’t be easy. Current culture seems much more concerned with the challenge of losing weight than with the problem of losing virtue. The book’s subtitle doesn’t help my cause. Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision does not immediately grab the attention of people who expect churches to package vision in neat statements fit for a banner. Moral vision sounds highly impractical and severely out-of-date. But Wells will convince the careful reader otherwise. Nor will it help my cause to acknowledge that this is a theology book. Doctrine has dropped significantly in the polls of popular interest among Christians. Biblically sound thinking demands too much from minds overloaded with entertainment. A large segment of professing Christianity craves a faith that is convenient and casual. Wells has no illusions about the readiness of most to dismiss his book. In his introduction he admits that offering today’s evangelical a book on theology will mean “having to reach for the smelling salts” (2).
Wells’ approach to theology employs neither the mechanistic outline form of the modern era nor the tentative speculation of the postmodern. He values the best of the Church’s theological legacy but determines to do something different. In his own words, his project involves “bringing the truth of God’s Word into lively intersection with the life of the Church, as it exists in its own culture, with the intention of seeing Christian understanding, character, and behavior made more authentic.” (p. 2). He uses “authentic” not in its contemporary sense of something being true to itself but in the classic sense of something being true to an established standard, in this case, the Scriptures.
This is solid book. It represents Well’s third installment in a four-book series touching the broad subjects of Christian theology. Previous to this work he published No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (1993) and followed that with God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (1994). The fourth book Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World caps the series with a strong critique of the destructive elements of the thought system which has gained ascendency since he began the series. This final volume served as the inspiration for the 2006 Desiring God national conference at which Wells spoke. Those who are not familiar with Wells would find watching the video of his address a helpful introduction to his thought. It is available at the DesiringGod website. Those who have read systematic theologies will recognize certain categories popping up but the overall presentation will seem strange.
Common to all four books in Well’s series is a determination to teach theology while seated not in the seclusion of the seminary but in the center of the culture. Wells is a keen observer of the world in which we live and a discerning evaluator of the ideas that drive it. His writing embodies the biblical ideal of being in the world but not of it. He investigates carefully with an eye to rendering an accurate assessment of contemporary culture in light of biblical truth rather than seeking any appeasement with it. One may not agree with the conclusions he draws, but one could not accuse him of making hasty or superficial judgments.
The volume that stands as the focus of this review explores the Bible’s view of the individual as made in the image of God in a world paranoid about image. It is a resounding affirmation of the moral significance of every human life without echoing the shallow mantras of the therapeutic religion that has all but eliminated sin as a subject of serious discussion. Wells documents how some of the most celebrated symbols of prosperity including the shopping mall and the fitness center erode the moral identity of human beings. More means less when it comes to who we are. But the major target of criticism in Losing Our Virtue is not the world but the church and how she has adopted the culture.
The detailed argument begins with a description of two major constituencies within the professing church. Wells treats them as dueling spiritualities: classical and postmodern. They may espouse similar doctrine but they differ widely in the place they give the moral or the holy. The superscription for the chapter sets the fourth verse of Wesley’s “And Can It Be” with a 1990’s worship chorus by Brenda Lefavre. The eighteenth century hymn draws on a miraculous prison rescue account like Peter’s in Acts 12 to describe the experience of regeneration as the work of God resulting in the response of the sinner in repentance and faith (Long my imprisoned spirit lay / Fast bound bound in sin and nature's night; / Thine eye diffused a quick'ning ray, / I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; / My chains fell off, my heart was free, / I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.). The more contemporary chorus also celebrates religious experience and that direct and personal with the Lord. “I need you to hold me / Like my daddy never could / And I need you to show me / How resting in your arms can be so good.” Wells will convince the reader that whichever Christian spirituality one chooses the two are significantly different. And he leaves no doubt that rejecting classical spirituality will deepen an already severe poverty in the church.
My respect for the author elevates when in this first chapter he takes on one of the most formidable challengers to classical spirituality in the 20th century. Someone could argue that quoting a few sentimental lines from a single praise chorus from one particular publisher does not a movement describe. Agreed. But Wells traces the river back to the spring. He takes on the central thesis of the earthshaking article by Krister Stendahl (“The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 [1956]). He provides the arguments and explanatory footnotes to show how Stendahl’s contention does not fit the biblical record and then traces the significant influence of the classical understanding of Paul in church history. The author’s potent academic skills are on display (see pp. 35-41).
The rest of the book describes how the church came to find herself with this choice between two spiritualities. Chapter 2 describes the interplay between law and liberty in the culture and the church. His concern throughout is to assess the damage any shift has had on our sense of the moral and holy. Chapter 3 relates how serious the issue is because a loss of moral vision carries away the means of salvation in the gospel. Wells sets before us the portfolio of potential saviors that the world has created and the church has courted. He focuses on forces such as style, fitness, and psychotherapy as the modern gospel(s); the mall, the gym and the couch as the contemporary Calvaries; and the advertisers, personal coaches, and therapists as the saviors. The fourth chapter gets to the heart of the problem, the concept of the self, where the postmodern and biblical worlds seem most markedly disparate. He warns of the consequences of viewing shame as the greatest problem when guilt is real. One summary selection from this chapter (“The Bonfire of the Self”) serves to reflect Wells’ insight and passion.
In the psychiatric literature, as well as in the wider culture, the transition to the language of shame from that of guilt really signals the secularization of our moral life. What it suggests is that any moral discomfort, any inward pangs that are the result of our actions, should be construed as relational problems, not moral ones. They should be resolved along the horizontal plane of psychological understanding rather than against the vertical realm of theological knowledge. It is we who will dissolve our own shame, not God. It is we who will do it by technique, for when all is said and done, what is awry is simply the way we are viewing ourselves (p. 141)
As is typical in his organization of the books in this series, Wells moves toward a solution by moving backwards. His concluding chapter is called “The Faith of the Ages” in which he calls the church not only to recover a moral vision of life but to recommit herself to the gospel that answers the problems revealed in that vision. He argues that the gateway for the gospel in this postmodern world will be the direct confrontation of the emptiness that the culture senses giving way to new if misguided interest in spirituality. Culture and self try to re-label sin but the created moral order cannot be escaped. “[T]he threads of moral existence are ever present.” (p. 196). The church’s faithful response is first to communicate a biblical gospel and then to live in biblical community, though he treats these in the opposite order. At this point I insert another invitation to consider these two themes in Mark Dever’s keynote message at this year’s Together for the Gospel conference on making the gospel visible in the local church (T4G.org). There is a tension in contemporary Christianity between those who emphasize community (the fruit of the gospel) and those who wave the banner of the objective gospel message. Surely, as Dever testifies, we must find a way to champion both, together, in the same church. We cannot force people to make a false choice.
On this point of the local church I conclude and focus my single yet significant criticism of Wells. Who or what is “The” Church of the subtitle that must recover “its” moral vision? Before I draw attention to my concern with the author’s answer to the question, I introduce a small point. O how I wish the word “its” could have read “her.” Surely the more personal designation would have thrown Wells into the company of the classical theologians he loves. As it stands, we have in bold print on the cover of this book a less personal and more mechanistic label for the bride of Christ. But my disagreement with Wells over how he views the church is more substantial than a pronoun. In his introductory chapter he chronicles the moral decline of our society, comparing it to the degeneration that corrupted Roman society in the early centuries of the church’s expansion. In this Wells puts himself in company with Augustine whose more ambitious City of God remains the standard of the specific genre in which Losing Our Virtue belongs. The collapse of Rome created a vacuum that was the middle ages. The demise of the once strong empire marked a significant turning point in history. Wells does not shrink back from drawing the comparisons between Augustine’s day and ours in America especially.
At the low point of his assessment, he borrows the analysis of another philosopher and ethicist, Alisdair MacIntyre, to describe how desperate the situation has grown. “[A]midst the moral disintegration of our society, we should begin, ‘the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages that are already upon us.’ “ (p. 9) But Wells for some reason will not go that far. While he acknowledges that such “new forms” may be the “only path to survival at some point in the future” (p. 9), he also holds out the possibility of an intervening evangelical revival to save America (p. 10). He then insists that this challenge out to be the “constant preoccupation theologians and Church leaders.” (p. 10). I quote Wells at this point to note the capitalization of the singular “Church.”
My disagreement is two-fold. First, we have reached the turning point and the need for new forms is not a future possibility but a present necessity. Here I return to this book’s conclusion calling for both a strong gospel and a healthy gospel community. Modern structures have proven somewhat successful at promoting and protecting the first but rather ineffective at the second. Here is the second part of my criticism. Wells treats the church (which he would say is at least most prominently represented in the evangelical church) as a single entity. Clearly it is not. And within the society in which the church exists (which Wells so skillfully exposes), forces are at work that would homogenize the church either by making her like a global fast food franchise with predictable but marketable blandness or pushing her to some flimsy organizational unity in the name of ecumenical minimalism.
I would invite Wells to consider a revived localism for the church. Take MacIntyre’s prescription and wed it to a vibrant local church that would be the ultimate “act locally, think globally” movement for our shrinking world. The local church community could sustain not only civility, intellectual vibrancy, and moral fidelity but also theological orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Such a new localism would require a recovery of a biblical theology of the visible church. For most of the last century we took this for granted and taught that the church universal is really the only important aspect of eccesiology. But this over-emphasis morphed into a strange kind of Gnosticism which neglected the embodied, interpersonal, and biblically structured society which is the body of Christ in a particular place at a particular time living in covenant with her Head and Husband. When we survey the current landscape we find local churches seeking identity and solutions from the outside. I would add to add to Wells’ call for a recommitment to the sufficiency of the Bible (p. 208) a renewed confidence in the sufficiency of the local church. The church is not inerrant as the Scriptures are. But we have spent too much time musing about the theoretical perfection of a universal church and too little investing in the progressive sanctification of the actual, visible churches to which we belong (if we even do belong to them).
I contend that strong, local churches with solid leaders and supportive members (several pages would be in order to describe these two groups) must be the “arks” in which the gospel and true Christian community thrive and where repentant sinners find refuge while the dark flood of moral decay rises. These are “self-contained” in important ways but not isolated or self-reliant. They interact with other churches but without unhealthy dependence. They engage the local culture in which members work and participate but with a strong sense of who they are and how easily they might forfeit their other-worldly identity to some secular trend. Leaders of all kinds within these sorts of churches will find Losing Our Virtue a helpful read.