Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 59:2 (Fall 1997)
Article: On Being Framed
Author: David F. Wells

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WTJ 59:2 (Fall 97) p. 293

On Being Framed

David F. Wells

I am grateful for this opportunity to reply to Professor Frame’s essay although when I accepted this invitation I was unaware that I would be partly the object of his consideration! Because his critique of my two most recent books is much clearer in its negations than the rest of the essay is in its affirmations, I want to begin where he left off and then, toward the end, return to the question with which he started.

That the shots Professor Frame has taken at me are wildly amiss I think most people will easily recognize, at least those who have read my books, but I want to begin by accepting some responsibility for this misunderstanding. It is only in a forth coming book, Losing Our Virtue, that I have explained what I should have said much earlier. I am following a traditional theological sequence in No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, and Losing Our Virtue but none of this is traditional systematic theology. If there are those who are looking for, and expecting, nothing but repristinations of the earlier scholastic Reformed tradition, they will be disappointed, as Professor Frame was. Even though my own intellectual roots reach down into this older Protestant tradition, in these books I am attempting to do something rather different. What I am doing is intended as a small scale, modest parallel to Augustine’s City of God. His study was occasioned by the barbarian destruction of Rome in 410. After answering pagan charges against Christians who were blamed for this calamity, Augustine went on, in the final twelve books of his City of God, to give a much wider consideration to the relation between the City of God and the City of Man, in the process developing the providential framework within which cultural circumstances were to be understood. Augustine looked out on a world ruined by the barbarian invasions and I am looking out on a world under assault by modernity. While I am not quite ready to make an equation between these two situations, as Alistair MacIntyre and many others have done, I believe contemporary theologians now have a special responsibility to work at understanding this culture from the standpoint of biblical truth.

The first of my volumes, then, was a prologomena of a cultural kind. I was not asking the traditional questions, such as the place of reason in theology, but what we need to understand about our culture if theology is to become rooted in the life of the church. The second volume asked what we need to understand about the way that modernity reshapes our understanding of God if his reality is to weigh on the Church as it should. The

WTJ 59:2 (Fall 97) p. 294

third is asking what we need to kno...

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