Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 07:3 (Summer 1998)
Article: A Review Article
Author: William Ralph Inge

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RAR 7:3 (Summer 1998) p. 207

A Review Article

William Ralph Inge

A Prophet For Our Times: The Jeremiads Of David F. Wells, Gary L. W. Johnson.

At the beginning of the decade the name David F. Wells was vaguely familiar to me. I knew he taught theology at Gordon-Conwell and that he had edited a very good book on Reformed theology in America1 , but beyond that I knew little else. Then came the “Evangelical Megashift” article that appeared in the February 19, 1990, issue of Christianity Today. Wells’ analysis of the “new-model” evangelicals grabbed my attention. His response to the evangelical megashift, titled “Assaulted by Modernity,” as I was later to discover, served as an appropriate introduction for his later writings. In 1993, his No Place for Truth, or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? fell like a bomb on the playground of evangelicalism. In more ways than one this book made a profound and lasting impression on me. I had become increasingly aware that, as Bob Dylan once said, “the times they are a changing,” and found myself ill at ease with much that was happening in the evangelical world. Wells was to me at this time what Interpreter was to Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. In 1994 Wells produced his equally impressive God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams. This book picks up where No Place for Truth left off. Most recently he has written the third volume in the series, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision

RAR 7:3 (Summer 1998) p. 208

(1998). Although these three books have met with critical acclaim (Time magazine, which rarely takes note of anything seriously theological, did so, calling it “a stinging indictment of evangelicalism’s theological corruption”), they have at the same time raised the ire of many who walk under the expansive evangelical banner. Christianity Today, the leading mouthpiece for the evangelical parade, gave a brief and not very flattering review of No Place for Truth.2 Christianity Today has completely ignored God in the Wasteland and, to date, has done the same with Losing Our Virtue. Why the cold shoulder? What has Wells written that would offend the good folks at Christianity 3 Today? In addition to his devastating critique of much of popular evangelicalism, Wells, like Nathan the prophet, points an accusing prophetic finger at Christianity Today as being one of the leading culprits in evangelicalism’s sad decline....

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