The church...

THE PLACE OF THEOLOGY IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD

I endeavored to write this book because we are living in a world that is without direction or moral compass. As I stated in chapter 1, Christians are in a world that has repudiated many of the assumptions of modernity: the importance of the rational, the propriety of the orderly and the possibility of objective truth. Ours is a culture where personality has more Street value than character, psychological wholeness than spiritual authenticity We find ourselves in a world where pleasures are embraced without moral norms and social responsibility.

Christian truth is attacked not so much for its particular assertions, but for its fundamental claim that there is such a thing as binding, objective truth. The quest for truth has been replaced with an emphasis on pleasure and entertainment. We live in a world of the therapeutic and the psychological, an endless quest for self-fulfillment and entitlement. Sin has become little more than the infringement of personal rights and privileges; there is little thought of defining it by the standard of the holiness of God. With so much interest in the management of life, what is the benefit of a volume on such a seemingly esoteric topic as timeless, transcendent, historic truth?

This question is complicated by the fact that modern Evangelicalism is in a state of crisis. The very community that historically has been deeply interested in transcendent, timeless truth seems more focused on the merely private, personal, and temporal than ever before. If I could be so blunt, the church has lost its soul, at least some think so. The Evangelical Church, I believe, is on the brink of becoming another of the many Social, do-good agencies whose mission-purpose is to help people to more fully enjoy this life, but neglect the implications of eternity.

As our culture has shown marked inclination to secularism, the church seems to have followed suit. One of our recent Christian social critics has summarized the problem quite succinctly: �The stream of historic orthodoxy that once watered the evangelical soul is now dammed by a worldliness that many fail to recognize as worldliness because of the cultural innocence with which it presents itself.�

Another has described the current situation in the church as an �ecclesiastical swamp.� In accepting the vogue of postmodernity Thomas Oden suggests that segments of the contemporary church have fallen victim to �an intellectual immune deficiency syndrome. This malaise is characterized by a decline of Christian content in teaching and preaching with an accompanying increased interest in self-help directions that merely promise better management of everyday crises.�

There is also an appalling ignorance in the church of its rich Christian heritage. Mark Noll speaks of �the scandal of the evangelical mind,� the denigration o the intellectual content of the faith accompanied by the elevation of the subjective and personal.3 George Barna complains that the average Christian is uninterested in life-changing religious convictions, having little more than the most superficial awareness of sin, grace, and redemption.

This moral and intellectual crisis comes to the Evangelical Church when Christianity is without serious opponent; there are no potent rivals in our culture making claims o having objective, final truth. Such truth claims have been abandoned in the postmodern experience. David Wells has found a general parallel to the situation in the churches today in the era prior to the Reformation in the sixteenth century.

First, the two churches, he suggests, are similar in that they each manifest a lack of confidence in the Word of God. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the denigration of the Scriptures was manifested in the church�s reversion to papal pronouncen1ents, today to business know-how and psychological counseling. Second, both churches reflect a flawed understanding of the seriousness of sin. One of our philosophers, having reflected on the decline of the discussion of sin within his own religious heritage, simply has stated: �The new language of Zion fudges: �Let us confess our problem with human relational adjustment dynamics, and especially our feebleness in networking� . . . . �Peanut Butter Binge� and �Chocolate Decadence� are sinful; lying is not. The measure of sin is caloric.� Third, in both instances the church, having lost its grasp on sin, has minimized the glory and efficacy of the death of Christ.

These very circumstances (the moralizing of virtue and the trivializing of sin, the psychologizing of the Scriptures to make it user friendly and inoffensive, and the marginalizing of the centrality of the cross of Christ) are the reasons or this book. This is a call for the church (its pastors, teachers, and laity) to reverse the trends that pose a threat to the historic gospel of Christ and speak so lightly of the work of the Savior. It is time for us to listen to the Scriptures for our message, not the inebriated culture. The need of the hour is not for revival; it is for something even more fundamental. It is time for reformation in the church. Revival has to do with the extension of the gospel; the greatest need in the contemporary church is to rediscover the gospel, its glory and its power. It is time to turn to the fundamentals of the faith and be refreshed in its truths, to gain a new love and respect for the Holy Scriptures. Revival without Reformation is religious enthusiasm at best; revival without reformation is the only hope of the church.