What is the church to do? “It is time for us to recover our lost universe. What we need to do is to think, once again, with an entirely different set of connections. The connections are not primarily in reference to self, but to God. The connections that have to be reforged in the moral world we actually inhabit rather than the artificial world of appearances we have manufactured. It is about making connections into the world of reality that endures rather than the one that does not” (134).

In The Courage to Be Protestant, David F. Wells exposes the postmodern project as built upon the shifting sand of the autonomous self. He issues a clarion call for the evangelical church to stand against (certainly not upon) this foundation and instead build its house upon the only lasting foundation: the rock of the revelation of God in Scripture. This would require the church to recover the doctrines of the Reformation, which, far from being irrelevant, concretely answer the postmodern problem. Wells further observes that the emergence of the autonomous self paralleled a perceived cosmological change: man no longer viewed himself as existing in a moral world in which he found an objective reference and standard outside of himself, but in a psychological or therapeutic world in which subjectivity reigns and the self is liberated from all external constraints, whether God, the past, or religious authority. The evangelical movement has not remained unaffected by the spirit of the age, but has in many ways submitted itself to its dictates under the false guise of relevancy and reaching the culture.

So what is the church to do? “It is time for us to recover our lost universe. What we need to do is to think, once again, with an entirely different set of connections. The connections are not primarily in reference to self, but to God. The connections that have to be reforged in the moral world we actually inhabit rather than the artificial world of appearances we have manufactured. It is about making connections into the world of reality that endures rather than the one that does not” (134). Herein is the comfort of the true gospel: no matter how disillusioned the world becomes in its therapeutic world and no matter how forceful the world pushes the autonomous self, it will always be, at bottom, a fantasy that will never correspond with reality. Man cannot refashion after his own imaginings the world God has created. The church must call postmoderns back to reality, to turn from self to God in faith and repentance. This is nothing less than the Great Commission: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.

In the opening chapter, Wells surveys the history of the evangelical movement from the end of the Second World War to the present. The major weakness that has eroded evangelicalism over the span of seven generations has been “the decline in the role that biblical doctrine once played” (3). This decline, he argues, arose from a “diminished interest in the Word of God in the life of the church” (4). This is evident not so much in the forthright rejection of the Word, but deafness to its call not to be conformed to this world. The Word came to be heard not as challenging, but as “endorsing our way of life today, our cultural expectations, and our priorities” (4). Scripture was smuggled out of the moral world and into the new psychological world so that Christianity became “increasingly reduced to private, internal, therapeutic experience” (15). Consequently, the doctrinal foundation of postwar evangelicalism—which had agreed upon the essentials of the authority of inspired Scripture and the centrality and necessity of Christ’s substitutionary atonement—was compromised and soon crumbled. Out of the debris arose new experiments in how to “do church,” such as the marketing movement made infamous by Willow Creek that capitulated to consumerist modernity and the subsequent emergent movement that sought to recover the personal and relational dimensions in a postmodern form that elevated experience at the expense of objective doctrinal truth. Both were built upon sand and their collapse was inevitable. “Once the truth of Scripture lost its hold on the practice of evangelical faith, that faith lost its direction in the culture” (19). Wells calls the church away from the binding authority of culture (sola cultura) to that of the Word of God (sola Scriptura).

Wells concludes the chapter by noting the parallel between the needed repairs today and what Protestant Reformers faced five hundred years ago. He begins with four differences. First, Luther inhabited a religious world, while today secularism has expelled religion from the public sphere and confined it to private life. Second, in the sixteenth century the reality of sin, which belongs to a moral world, was not in dispute as it is in today’s psychological world. In the past there was right and wrong, but today “we are comfortable or not, psychologically healthy or not, dysfunctional or not, but we are never sinners” (25). Third, the concept of salvation has migrated out of the religious world and into the therapeutic world. “It is no longer about right standing with God. Now it is about right standing with ourselves. And that is all it is about. It is about self-fulfillment, self-esteem, self-realization, and self-expression” (25). Fourth, Luther was able to identify his enemy as the power and teaching of the Catholic Church, but today the enemy is illusive and amorphous. The factors that shape the present culture are constantly changing: massive urbanization that creates anonymous cities, globalization that spawns profound relativism, capitalism that encourages a consumer mentality, technology that expands our natural powers but evacuates God from the world, and rationalization that idealizes human techniques.

There are also substantial similarities. First, there is no confidence that Scripture is sufficient in and of itself to direct and sustain the Christian life. The Catholic Church supplemented Scripture with tradition and a magisterium, while postmoderns look to “psychology, cultural savvy, and business techniques to do the same kind of thing for us” (29). Second, while the Catholic church reduced the effect of sin to a sickness and postmoderns have gone further in rejecting any and all moral absolutes, neither conforms to Scripture, which teaches that man is dead in his sins. “[T]hen as now, dead people had to be given life. … God’s grace accomplished this transition then, and the same grace is accomplishing it today” (31). Third, the sufficiency of the death and resurrection of Christ had to be recovered in the Reformation as it does today. For neither Rome nor postmoderns can say with the apostle Paul, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1).

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