Review Article: No Place for Truth -- By: Michael W. Harding

Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 01:2 (Fall 1996)
Article: Review Article: No Place for Truth
Author: Michael W. Harding


Review Article:
No Place for Truth

Michael Harding*

* Rev. Harding is Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Troy, MI.

No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? by David F. Wells. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993, 319 pp., $16.00.

David F. Wells, professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and author of No Place For Truth, subtitled Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology, gives a clarion call to the evangelical world for a reformation, vis-à-vis revival, of the present historical church back to the systematic, doctrinal understanding and propagation of the “faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). Admittedly, Wells writes from a non-fundamentalist position criticizing his own peers and the evangelical movement of which he is part. His central purpose is to explore why theology is disappearing. His central plea is “for a new kind of evangelical,” much more like the “old kind used to be” (p. 13).

Making certain he does not drift into fundamentalist terminology, Wells describes the “old kind” of evangelical in terms of the Puritan Congregationalist of Wenham, MA. Wenham, the hometown of Adoniram Judson, typifies the theological and subsequent cultural changes in the Christian landscape of American evangelicalism. He carefully chronicles the unholy transformation of this “delicious paradise” to one that is “lost” and beyond recovery—a “fool’s paradise.” One of the notable contributors to Wenham’s demise was an incipient and “all pervasive” Arminianism that rose out of the Enlightenment and coincided with the democratic mood in the country (p. 32). Wells points out that Charles Finney, more than any other, supplanted the Reformation preaching of Jonathan Edwards, which produced the only theologically sound revival in America affecting the country positively for 150 years. Finney’s revivalism in response to the so-called “dead orthodoxy” of Calvinistic churches began a process of ever-declining doctrinal emphasis

which characterizes evangelicalism’s bankruptcy of truth today. This young and theologically untaught legal apprentice emphasized human autonomy vis-à-vis God’s sovereignty; that skewed idea merged neatly into the current political slogans of the post-enlightenment age such as, “let freedom ring.” The ubiquitous slogan sounded throughout the land in all human endeavors, ranging from politics to science, to religion. Nothing would be withheld from man’s ever inquiring mind. Absolutes dissolved, and many cultural manifestations of permanence disappeared du...

You must have a subscription and be logged in to read the entire article.
Click here to subscribe
visitor : : uid: ()