We need the faith of the ages, not the reconstructions of a therapeutically driven or commercially inspired faith. And we need it, not least, because without it our postmodern world will become starved for the Word of God.

The following article is an excerpt from David F. Wells’s 1999 work entitled Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision, published by Eerdmans Publishing Co. It is reproduced by permission of the publisher.

It was the contention of the Protestant Reformers that Christian faith will always be misunderstood if the Cross is misunderstood. Or, to put the matter positively, those who understand the Cross aright, grasp the meaning of Christ aright and can then see the entire purpose of revelation clearly. For Christ and his Cross stand at the center of God’s disclosure of his moral will and saving ways in Scripture. Indeed, without the Cross we are without the magnifying glass through which his love and holiness are most keenly seen. To stand beneath the Cross is to stand at the one place where the character of God burns brightest and where his resolution of the problem of sin is sounded for all time.

It is hard to stand here, though. The cost of admission to this place is the humbling of our pride — intellectual, moral, and religious. For to stand here is to repent of our proclivity to elevate our own standards of what is right and wrong to universal norms and to accept the judgment of God in their place. It is to repent of our trust in the innocence of the self, which is the fount of our self-righteousness, and to acknowledge instead the corruption of the self. It is to displace ourselves from the center of the universe we inhabit and to elevate Christ to that place of honor. It is to see in our chronic self-absorption nothing other than chronic self-centeredness. It is to accept the sobering evaluation of God on fallen life rather than the rosy assessment we are inclined to register upon ourselves. This is a hard place to stand, and few choose to stand here. That is why so many have dismissed the Cross. It is why in the last century liberal theology claimed that Paul had perverted the original doctrine of Christ’s death to give us this kind of Cross. It is why in our own time, much contemporary theology is proposing, in one scheme after another, that since the Cross achieved universal salvation, there is no price of admission to its benefits. No humbling, no repenting, no believing is necessary.

The reality, however, is that in the postmodern world the enmity sustained is toward God and not toward our fallen selves and their extension in culture. Indeed, wherever the Church has lost its sense of sin, and much of it has, this antithesis toward the self and culture naturally disappears on the mistaken assumption that it can all be lost without an antithesis toward God, his Christ, and his Word replacing it.

That is as profound a mistake as any Christian can make. In this fallen world, the issue is not whether we will sustain this sense of antithesis. The issue only will be who is its object. Is the antithesis against God or against the world?

The evangelical Church today imagines that this choice does not have to be made, that it can be on friendly terms with both. This attitude, more than anything else, accounts for the Church’s diminished spiritual stature – for why it appears as a moral pygmy among the dilemmas of the modern world, which seem to be giants. Amidst enormous pain and confusion, evangelical faith seems by comparison to be trivial, as it indulges itself with “happy clappy” praise songs, light Sunday morning dialogs or, worse yet, drama in their place. Contemporary evangelicalism places a premium on being amused and, like a petulant consumer, makes its sales people in the pulpit tremble. The consumer, after all, is always right. Unless it recovers some spiritual gravity, some seriousness, some authenticity, indeed, unless it recovers the substance of classical spirituality, the evangelical Church will rapidly become an irrelevance in the modern world.

Scripture is clear in its teaching that the “old man,” who has lived comfortably in the fallen world, must die with its entire understanding of the self and of its relationship to God, if the “new man” is to emerge in Christ. Faith lives in the midst of this polemical context. It lives between the ways of death in culture and in the self, on the one hand, and the ways of life in Christ, who is above it, on the other.

Faith thus requires both a transition in loyalties and in enmities. The transition from the existence of the “old man” to that of the “new” is one from faith in one’s self to faith in Christ, but it is also a transition from enmity toward God to enmity toward the world. That is why the Church’s idolatry is so profoundly wrong. The enmity that should be expressed toward the self in its fallenness-Jesus, after all, did speak of the necessity of crucifying the self if one is to become a follower – must inevitably be redirected against God if the self is going to be indulged rather than crucified. This is why James asks indignantly: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity against God?” (James 4:4). The problem of idolatry is always a problem of both misplaced love and misplaced enmity. So, how can we exchange the enmity we have for God by one for the world? How can we exchange the love we have of self and the world by a love for God?

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