Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Emmaus Journal
Volume: EMJ 02:2 (Winter 1993)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Editor
Kenneth Alan Daughters

No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? By David F. Wells. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993. 318 pages. $24.99c; $14.99p.

As the Andrew Mutch Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, David F. Wells is well qualified to write about the loss of theology from the center of evangelicalism. Wells’ many years of study, teaching, and writing have not caused him to mock the simplicity of Christianity. On the contrary, this scholar eloquently decries the demise of biblical Christianity within evangelicalism and the substitution of a drive toward a religion of “self-fulfillment” and “modern relevance.” This book is a well-researched and convincingly written work which warns those of us from conservative evangelical circles that many of us may have forfeited the very message that makes us biblical Christians in order to gain acceptance from our culture and unity with the wider religion entitled Christianity.

Wells rightly understands theology not as a discipline of the academic, but the expression of the core beliefs of biblical Christianity. Consequently, “theology is a knowledge that belongs first and foremost to the people of God and the proper and primary audience for theology is therefore the Church, not

the learned guild” (p. 5). Further, “theology in not simply a philosophical reflection about the nature of things, but is rather the cogent articulation of the knowledge of God. Its substance is not drawn from mere human reflection, no matter how brilliant, but from the biblical Word by which it is nurtured and disciplined” (p. 5). Wells describes theology as comprised of three elements: a confessional element, reflection on this confession, and the cultivation of a set of virtues that are grounded in the first two elements (p. 98). The confessional element is the clear statement of what the Church believes. Understand that this is not a call for mere recitation of the creeds of historic Christendom, but a proper challenge for the believer to know from the Bible what it is he believes. To look to other sources or to have an unclear understanding of the doctrines of Scripture is to allow modernism a free hand within the Church. Reflection is the process whereby the believer takes these statements formed from Scripture and wrestles with them as one who must live in this world. Finally, the believer’s life is to evidence the virtues “built upon the pillars of confession and surrounded by a scaffolding of reflection” (p. 100). The goal is for the believer to know and act upon what he believes so that the world in which he lives does not...

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