Reading Providence Like Personal Tea Leaves

I've had my share of unexpected, favorable "providences" in life, and read too much of the Bible, to believe that God is neither interested nor active in my life. However, I've also been tempted, as I know many Christians today are, to identify particular events in my life as what are called a "God-thing": events which are so completely extra-ordinary that they defy "normal" explanations, and that are (curiously) in my favor. But while this kind of "tea-leaves" identification has always bothered me to one degree or another, only recently have I come across a way to articulate the positive sense in which God is present and active without being pressed into identifying this or that event as "of God" (as though he is neither interested nor active in the rest of life, mine or anyone else's).

In The Courage to Be Protestant, David Wells says:

[God's greatness over all of life] is a reminder to us that God cannot be had on our terms. He cannot be manipulated. He cannot be bought. He is never subject to our will. If we know him, it is only on his terms. And the result often is that much of what he does by way of his providential rule is hidden from us. Even God's way of working with and through Israel, Paul says, is "unsearchable," and his ways "inscrutible" (Rom. 11:33).

His apparent absence from our lives, then, may not be a sign of his judgment. It may simply be an indication that his ways are beyond us, that he has not felt obliged to explain himself to us in every detail.

Does this not explain the unsettled feeling that even comes over Christians when someone starts to speak of God "doing this" or "wanting that" for us? Is this not acting and speaking as though God's ways of working (with Israel or anyone else) were not all that difficult to see or understand? Why must the natural expectation that "there must be a reason for this or that" issue in our prognosticating what that reason is or will be? Why is it not enough for us to believe the Scriptures when they say that there is, in fact, a reason for this or that, that it has to do with the cross of Christ, our (eternal) welfare and the glory of God, and then carry on in such confident faith?

It may have to do with the fact that we don't like not being able to justify God to skeptics we know, particularly when they are hostile. Regardless of why, it is instructive to us that Scripture, when it identifies God's purposes in particular events, almost always connects them to God's global purposes of redemption through his Son, Jesus Christ, the Messiah; the fact that our "prophetic utterances" almost never do that should indicate how disconnected our vision of life is from God's, and what vision we can and should strive to adopt for ourselves.

This is, of course, a life-purpose that we who know God in Christ will only begin to do in this life and will continue to do throughout eternity; but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try our hand at it now. It also doesn't mean that we stop looking for God's hand in the world. It simply means that when we find it we will see our employment, our spouse, our health, our team's victory, even the grocery store trip, in connection with the redemption of the world and the glory of God in it. It also means that we'll be more thoughtful in our attempts to "take every thought captive to obey Christ" when we attempt to understand and explain God's providential work in the lives of his people, of which we, individually, are each only one.

BHT

NPFT: Part 3

This third installment of summarizing David Wells' critique of Modernity and the particular strain of Evangelicalism that it has spawned addresses some of the factors that have contributed to make public (and private) life feel superficial. This is not to say that nothing in modern life is substantive; rather, the atmoshere of modernity behaves and functions as though life is not as "weighty" as we might otherwise suspect. The longing for meaning and purpose that so haunts modern humanity does so precisely because we were made for meaning and purpose, and modernity denies this in its own peculiar ways. Why and How it does so is picked up in Chapter 2 of No Place for Truth, as summarized below.

Book thesis: historic, orthodox theological conviction and action are largely absent in the contemporary evangelical church, and this absence has led to a church driven by visions of pragmatic methodology and psychological need. This absence of theological conviction and purpose leaves the church adrift on the sea of human autonomy, and she is thus unable to be of any lasting value to the world and unable to glorify God.

Chapter 2 thesis: with all of its obvious material advantages - improved travel, communications, medical care, educational opportunities, freedom from provincialism - globalization has also released people from the regional and cultural distinctions from and in which they previously found meaning; in the process, a larger, more superficial "world cliche culture" has been created.

We live in a new civilization, one in which the values of modernity – technological progress, expansive knowledge, material affluence – have impoverished the modern spirit. One of the principal effects of the Enlightenment is that humanity is now freed from God and all other transcendent, traditional, and external forms of authority. We naively believe that scientific, technological, and material progress all imply an ability in human beings to also make better selves. This new civilization is a-cultural: urbanization is creating a world civilization that is technological and urban in nature (rather than national and cultural), has little regard for indigenous habits of mind, and is virtually the same in London, Tel Aviv, Washington, or Hong Kong.

Modernization is the process that organizes society around cities for the purpose of manufacturing and commerce. It is driven by capitalism and fueled by technological innovation, and is impersonal because its priorities are production and efficiency. Modernity is the public environment created by urbanization. In this public setting, city life requires a kind of friendliness that will facilitate and perpetuate progress, efficiency, and production – a friendliness that precludes people from being honest about themselves and their views, lest such honesty fracture interpersonal relationships and threaten or reduce productivity. Secularism is the psychological effect of modernity; it is the values and worldview that arise in a modern society, one that no longer takes its bearings from a transcendent order. The relativity and impermanence of everything – from values to possessions – creates a deep sense of homelessness, lost-ness, not belonging, of not belonging in our world. Secularism is the values of the modern age that accommodate life to the absence or irrelevance of God. Secularization is what makes that way of life believable and seem natural. Having stripped public and social life of the transcendent, secularization makes the values of secularism appear plausible and compelling. For this reason, secularization makes Christian faith appear odd and strips it of truthfulness.

BHT

NPFT: Part 2

My previous post, NPFT: Part 1, as a summary of the entire book No Place for Truth by David Wells, is now followed by my summary of the first chapter. I begin by stating a thesis that I think fairly summarizes the the whole volume, then a statement summarizing the chapter, then a more developed summary of the chapter. My hope is that anyone jumping in can get caught up by reading the statements without having to go back and read everything (though that would help).

Book thesis: historic, orthodox theological conviction and action are largely absent in the contemporary evangelical church, and this absence has led to a church driven by visions of pragmatic methodology and psychological need.

Chapter 1 summary: Modern humanity is stretched too thin. The old world of traditional, established boundaries (e.g. moral, geographic, and knowledge) ensured social and cultural stability; our modern world exposes us to disorienting experience- and information-overload.

Prior to the 19th century in America, the church was “both the place where God addressed his people … and the knot that bound society together.” (p. 24) With the onset of modernity, that knot has been loosed. Part of the Old World’s sense of stability came from the bonds formed by each town’s boundaries (i.e. geographical, organizational, economic, psychological). Today, via television, for example, “we are contemporary observers of the entire world; we are everywhere and have access to everything and thus carry the awful load of being omniscient and omnipresent.” (p. 43) The automobile offers freedom from one’s geographic community (not by psychological escape like that of television, but by physically removing one from one’s community) and has hastened the disappearance of one’s ties to location. Our experience is now universal, not local. It is boundless, not personal. Modernization has worked to bring about the intrusion of the gigantic world outside. Wenham, Mass. (Wells’ case study) made it’s own passage into the modern world principally through these channels of travel and communication. Notably, these two phenomena (travel and communication) are developments that are uniquely suited to rapidly and indiscriminately distributing people and information across geographic space, by which the “awful load” is created and felt.

BHT

NPFT: Part 1

In 1993, I was a college freshman and knew nothing of the term "evangelical", let alone what others, either friend or foe, thought of it. That year, David Wells published the first in a line of four volumes aimed at constructively criticizing the movement. That first volume, No Place for Truth, was said to possibly be "the most provocative book evangelical pastors and laypeople ever read". That has been true for me.

Over the next several weeks, I will be posting first a summary of the book's thesis, followed by chapter summaries that support that thesis. In my summaries, I will aim less at evaluating his argument than I will at strictly summarizing it so that his message is heard without having to sift explicitly through my thoughts as well. This exercise will likely be more fruitful for myself than for any of you, I suppose, since I will have had to wrestle first with Wells, then with myself to articulate it without distorting it. Of course, I will fail at times, and you'll be able to tell what I think of his points.

Since what he has to say is meant for the health and welfare of the church, I will appreciate comments or inquiries, of which I may well not have thought myself. Others' perspectives are always welcome.

Engaging ministry, culture, and the world on the basis of theological reflection and conviction has all but disappeared from the church in America and in the West today, and we are not the better for it. To a large degree, this has come about as a result of the modernization of the West. In the wake and as a result of the 18th century Enlightenment, capitalism, technological innovation, urbanization, and telecommunications have converged to create a milieu (known as “modernity”) in which transcendent meaning to life and objective truth governing morality (seen as left-over consequences of the God-hypothesis of pre-Enlightenment views) have been abandoned. In their place, the values of modernity – efficiency and pragmatism – have usurped God as the ultimate criteria for truth and meaning and have relegated religion and revelation to the status of myths from a bygone era. As a result, moral conviction and theological truth no longer exercise authority over human pursuits; rather, pragmatism now governs society, both inside and outside the church.

With respect to 20th century Evangelicalism, David Wells argues that such a shift in thinking and doing has taken place as follows: first, that the modernization of the West came as a result of the technological and economic development that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment, and that it has taken over the urban centers of the West (“urban” being defined as a city that is technologically and economically developed); second, that this modernization ushered in a new value system called “modernity” that prizes efficiency and pragmatism for progress above moral or principled criteria; third, that this effect has reduced man from a moral, existential being in search of objective truth and in need of redemption to a psychological being in search merely of psychological wholeness and in need of subjective affirmation; this renders transcendence and theology irrelevant and makes experience and pragmatism ultimate and authoritative; and, fourth, that Evangelicals have embraced modernity and its values uncritically (often unknowingly) and are now operating within this framework, using efficiency and relevance as ultimate criteria of truth and progress. Evangelicalism is now defined sociologically and by ministry-methods rather than by theological conviction and confession; we have embraced modernity’s values of efficiency and pragmatism without asking whether we should do so, or what effects it may or may not have on our message and ministry.

Evangelicals today do not dismiss theology because of their unbelief, but because of its perceived uselessness; that is, they confess orthodox theology but more typically do not self-consciously minister in light of it. Nonetheless, they do operate with a theology: it is centered on a God who is on easy terms with modernity and Who, in the absence of moral realities, is quick to endorse modern theories regarding church growth and making people psychologically whole. “Without a vision of God as Other, different from and standing over against the modern world, there is no compelling reason to think thoughts about the world which are not essentially modern.” (p. 291) Pastors today stand or fall by their personality, not their character. Our questions today hardly ever penetrate to the heart of moral reality because modern life is hardly ever about moral concerns. Those who are most relevant to the modern world are those who are irrelevant to the moral purpose of God; ironically, though, those who are irrelevant to the world by virtue of their relevance to God actually have the most to say to the world. They are, in fact, the only ones who have anything to say to it.

C.F.H. Henry: Unbelief Is Not Modern

With all the attention and adulation that I've given David Wells' thesis (that modernity has made the gospel implausible), the late Carl F.H. Henry has some comments that have given me pause and that I think have begun to clarify what the root of unbelief is and modernity's challenge to biblical faith.

The crisis of word and truth is not, however, in all respects peculiar to contemporary technocratic civilization. Its backdrop is not to be found in the mass media per se, as if these sophisticated mechanical instruments of modern communication were uniquely and inherently evil.

Why is it that the magnificent civilizations fashioned by human endeavor throughout history have tumbled and collapsed one after another with apocalyptic suddenness? Is it not because, ever since man's original fall...sin has plummeted human existence into an unbroken crisis of word and truth? A cosmic struggle between truth and falsehood, between good and evil, shadows the whole history of mankind. The Bible depicts it as a conflict between the authority of God and the claims of the Evil One.

We need therefore to abandon the notion that modern science and its discoveries are the major obstacles to a living faith in the God of revelation and redemption. In earlier prescientific times, men negotiated their spiritual revolt just as vigorously and did so without invoking science and technology as a pretext.

[quoting Oscar Cullman, he continues:] "We must see clearly ... that the most recent discoveries ... in no way make faith in salvation history more difficult than it was for men during the days of early Christianity." (God, Revelation and Authority, Volume 1: God Who Speaks and Shows, p. 21)

This last statement is what caught my attention, and I had to ask myself if that is what I had heard Wells arguing: Does modernity make the gospel more difficult to believe? Then I recalled that Wells himself chose his words carefully when he wrote that "divine Providence was much easier to assert [not necessarily "to believe"] when Western culture still believed in progress." (p. 160, God in the Wasteland). Among other things, modernity has helped break down the Enlightenment assumption of human progress, which is closely linked with (though not identical to) the Christian doctrine of Providence. This is significant because, in saying this, Wells can still affirm that while the gospel may be less plausible in the modern world (over against the pre-modern and/or ancient worlds), it is nonetheless still just as repugnant to those who do understand it intellectually (whether ancient, pre-modern, modern, or postmodern) and still refuse to embrace it as true and beautiful.

It is one thing for a message to be hard to communicate, and another thing for that message to be joyfully embraced once it is understood. Stripping the modern canvass off the world may make the gospel more plausible, but it won't do anything to soften the unrepentant hearts of a fallen humanity, nor will it make the gospel any more attractive to such blinded souls, though it stood before them in the everlasting light of the Son.

BHT

Needed: Leaders for the Church

I continue to plod through Wells' diagnosis of what ails the church and his prescription for her restoration and health. As I read him, I find myself "strangely warmed" by his vision of what the future leaders of the church will be called upon to be. Note: I said "be" and not "do", mainly because what I think is mostly wrong in the church is that we know all to well how to "do" and have lost what it means to "be" what God called us to be. From God in the Wasteland,

I believe the vision of the evangelical church is now clouded, its internal life greatly weakened, its future very uncertain, and I want something better for it. I want the evangelical church to be the church. I want it to embody a vibrant spirituality. I want the church to be an alternative to post-modern culture, not a mere echo of it. I want a church that is bold to be different and unafraid to be faithful, a church that is interested in something better than using slick marketing techniques to swell the numbers of warm bodies occupying sanctuaries, a church that reflects an integral and undiminished confidence in the power of God's Word, a church that can find in the midst of our present cultural breakdown the opportunity to be God's people in a world that has abandoned God.

To be the church in this way, it is also going to have to find in the coming generation leaders who exemplify this hope for its future and who will devote themselves to seeing it realized. To succeed, they will have to be people of large vision, people of courage, people who have learned again what it means to live by the Word of God, and, most importantly, what it means to live before the holy God of that Word.

First, the church is going to have to learn how to detect worldiness and make a clear decision to be weaned from it. ...unless we recognize the ways in which the world has insinuated its tentacles into the life of the church, unless we unmask its deceits, the church will continue to wander in the wasteland, weakened and bewildered.

Second, the church is going to have to get much more serious about itself, cease trying to be a supermarket serving the needs of religious consumers, and become instead a force of countercultural spirituality that draws from the interconnected lives of its members and is expressed through their love, service, worship, understanding, and proclamation. That is a tall order, for the tempo and organization of the modern world, which exact a heavy toll on all who attempt to keep pace with it, clearly mitigate against this happening. But it can happen. (214-15)

We must begin to see the ways in which we are already too much indebted to modernity's esteem and methods and ask what it is that the world needs and what the gospel provides: to believe that all is not as it appears in this present age of naturalistic, segmented, and discordant living. We are not homeless in the cosmos but are very much under the watchful eye and hand of God, and thus are in need of coming to terms with his reality. But the nature of his reality is precisely the question today, and that is why the biblical revelation is so valuable. In it, "God is there and he is not silent".

All the world will not embrace such a God proclaimed, but it cannot ignore him.

BHT

Why Providence Has Fallen On Hard Times

In communicating the truths of Christianity, few efforts are more greatly rewarded than understanding why and how those truths may be difficult to believe or make little to no sense to one's hearers. In this regard, David Wells comments on why the traditional Christian understanding of Providence has become downright unintelligible to many today. The following quotations come from God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams.

The question he asks is, “What is it in the modern consciousness that so militates against the historic Christian understanding of God’s sovereign, ‘inside’ relationship to creation, history, and our own personal narratives? The answer,” he says, “is complex because our social world is complex, but I believe it involves three main factors.”

Factor #1, from page 154:

First, there is little doubt that alongside the revelry that modern plenty and modern opportunity have provided [i.e. science, industry, capitalism, liberal democracy, innovative technology], a deep foreboding has also been churned up, an apprehension that our world has gone dreadfully awry, morally, socially, and spiritually. 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 provided to it.

Factor #2, from page 158:

Second, the suffering and brutality arising out of man’s inhumanity to man [ironically, through his misuse of the plenty and opportunity that modernity has secured for us] have, as Wendy Farley says, "assaulted us in this century with terrible intensity. …" We gawk at more catastrophe than any previous generation has ever observed – perhaps more mayhem than the fragile human constitution can bear. Is it not the case that the sheer weight of all of this calamity also extinguishes our hope that somehow there must be some meaning that can be retrieved from these ashes?

Factor #3, from page 160:

Finally, divine providence was much easier to assert [it was not, however, necessarily easier to believe] when Western culture still believed in progress. Belief in progress [post-Enlightenment] was really a secularized version of belief in divine providence, … but it is now clear that it was never more than the opiate of Western intellectuals and had little basis in reality. … the death of the idea of progress has led many people to abandon all rationality, all purpose, all meaning. In this new context of general bleakness, talk about divine providence has a hollow ring to it for many people.

Knowing that these (and probably other) factors are influencing people's thoughts these days (including our own) is part of how we can become good listeners in order to be good helpers: we need to know how what we say is being heard if we are to say it in a way that can be helpful. And this won’t come by keeping people at arms length; it will require that we befriend and embrace all kinds of people that are (probably) already in our spheres of influence and who are just as in need of friendship, encouragement, help, and direction as we ourselves are.

Modernity: The Worldliness of Our Time

The ways in which modernity has influenced and even altered human values and priorities are many and complex, and those who attempt to ellucidate such findings are like fish trying to tell other fish what it's like to be wet. Of course, fish are supposed to be wet, and human beings are supposed to have values and social customs (in a word, culture); but while being wet is no sin for a fish, being a worldly human being is. Thus, the many human cultures through time and around the globe will give manifold expressions of their fallenness (in addition to God's image in which they are still made, though fallen), and discerning such fallen expressions is both difficult and necessary. In his book God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, David Wells explains just how central this discernment of one's culture is and why it is so important if we are to understand the ways of unbelief and fight against them (p. 28ff):

The central issue I am seeking to deal with in this book [is] the relationship between Christ and culture. Is modernity one issue among many with which Christian faith must be engaged, or is it the issue that is encountered in every aspect of the modern world? Contemporary evangelicalism has, for the most part, assumed that modernity is simply one issue among many that may require some thought from time to time, that it is not a pervasive reality intruding on virtually every aspect of the inner life of faith. It is quite natural that evangelicals should adopt this view, because they typically think of culture as neutral and no more a carrier of implicit or explicit values than are the clothes that they wear. From time to time, modernity may raise its head, like atheism and humanism, and then the faithful must rise to denounce the danger, but for the most part modern culture seems a safe place in which to practice faith.

…modernity is not simply an issue; it is the issue, because it envelops all our worlds – commerce, entertainment, social organization, government, technology – and because its grasp is lethal. There is no part of culture that can gain any distance from it and hence no part of culture that is neutral or safe. All of culture is touched by the values and appetites, the horizons and hopes that modernity excites.

Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, thinking processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is that system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to their periphery any thought about God.
Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.

As if to anticipate his skeptical readers’ response, Wells then addresses those who are eager for a simple, straightforward answer to the challenge that modernism, as he’s presented it, poses for Christian faith:

Too often the quest for answers is driven by impatience, by a refusal to do the hard work in taking the measure of the problem first. Answers assembled apart from such work tend to treat symptoms rather than the disease; they are often little more than management techniques, mere Band-Aids. Those whose instincts are most in tune with modernity will be most inclined to rush to these sorts of solutions, because it is precisely these sorts of techniques that the modern world most prizes. The modern mind will be quick to conclude that evangelical faith is faltering because it is not efficient enough, for example, or because it is not appealing enough, because it has not adapted itself adequately to the inner needs of those in the modern world.

Then comes his conclusion and what Wells sees as the root of the problem for evangelical faith today and, implicitly, how we are to regain our vibrant and biblical heritage for the good of the modern world as well as the nations:

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to stanch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common. (bold mine)

In hearing his criticisms of modernity, it is important to recognize that Wells is not so naive as to think we just need to return to the "good old days" of the pre-modern world. Rather, salvation is to be found in God and his Word, whatever the century. No, we don't need time machines; what we need is discernment: the kind of "spiritual insight that comes with Christian wisdom." (p. 55)

There is nothing wrong with organizational wizardry or public relations or television images ... per se. The problem lies in the current evangelical inability to see how these things carry within them values that are hostile to Christian faith. The problem, furthermore, lies in the unwillingness of evangelicals to forsake the immediate and overwhelming benefits of modernity, even when corrupted values are part and parcel of those benefits. What is plainly missing, then, is discernment, and this has much to do with the dislocation of biblical truth from the life of the church today and much to do with the dying of its theological soul.

It is not our embrace or employment of that which is new or that which works that is here condemned, but rather our uncritical embrace and our naive employment of the new and what works. In doing so without discernment, we unwittingly expose ourselves to their vices as much as to their virtues.

From Tribe to Print to TV to Tribe again

David Wells is an insightful author whose work I enjoy tremendously. Although he's been writing for several decades, I only discovered him last year. In No Place For Truth; Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?, Wells comments on how the Age of Television (over against the preceeding centuries in which print was the dominant medium of knowledge) has been a major factor in changing how Americans in particular have come to think of themselves, life, and Truth (however we conceive it).

It is open to debate whether the invention of the printing press was by itself responsible for ending feudal society in Europe, but there is no doubt that where a print culture has flourished, so, too, has individualism. It is easy to see why. In the Middle Ages, people learned within a network of personal relations. In these largely preliterate societies, as in traditional societies outside of Europe even today, knowledge about life was transmitted by rehearsal, for there were no written documents that were widely accessible. The tribe or clan would relive its past together, reaffirm its meaning, reappropriate the old wisdom, and in some cases reaffirm fiath in the old gods [not unlike what Deuteronomy depicts in which Moses and Israel renew the covenant given them by Yahweh]. This was done collectively
through a variety of forms, such as dance, religious ritual, and stylized narrative. With the arrival of the printing press, it became possible and feasible to transmit all of the old wisdom through books rather than in the old ways. The book, as a result, rendereed the community redundant.

He goes on,

Under the aegis of television, however, a strange reversal begins to take place, ... . With our electronic wizardry, we are able to relay whatever meaning is to be found within the modern world by a means other than the printed page and in a way that replaces the printed page. We are creating a new trible based not on relational but electronic connections. We are creating a new tribal democracy that has the character of the tribe while retaining the form of a democracy. It is a tribe in which self-understanding comes less from the world and more from sight and sound, less from thought and more from experience.

What I find worth noting here is the recognition that there is a profound role for one's geographic and/or ethnic community to play in one's self-understanding; it does "take a village" in one sense. But this new "village" or tribe, as Wells calls it, is not the relational or personal one of ethnicity, geography, or even religion; the tribe of which TV makes us members

no longer bears much resemblance to the family, community, or religious tradition that used to serve this purpose. Now it is an impersonal society, as mirrored in the mass media, that typically confirms private choices and assures the individual that he or she is really not that different from others.