David F. Wells
The Center of Reality
How is it that our culture may get in our way of knowing God as he has revealed himself to be?
Let me begin with a baseline truth of Scripture. It is that God stands before us. He summons us to come out of ourselves and to know him. This is the most profound truth that we ever encounter—or should I say, the most profound truth by which we are encountered?—and it is key to many other truths. And yet our culture is pushing us into exactly the opposite pattern. Our culture says that we must go into ourselves to know God. This is the cultural question that we must begin to understand, because otherwise it will shape how we read Scripture, how we see God, how we approach him, and what we want from him. So, here goes!
I should say right away that real faith, faith of a biblical kind, has always had a subjective side to it. That is not in question. When we hear the gospel, it is we who must respond. It is we who must repent and believe. And it is the Holy Spirit who works within us supernaturally to regenerate us, to give new life where there was only death, new appetites for God and his truth where before there were none, joining us to the death of Christ so that we might have the status of sons. And not only the status but also the experience of being God’s children. We have received, Paul declares, “the Spirit of adoption as sons” whereby “we cry ‘Abba! Father’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God…” (Rom. 8:15-16). All of this, of course, is internal. It takes place in the depths of our soul and it encompasses all that we are. And in no way are these truths being doubted when I say that God stands before us and summons us to come out of ourselves and know him. But what does it mean to say that God stands before us, that he is, in this sense, objective to us?
Let me begin at some distance from the Christian faith and slowly work toward the center, where we want to be. Along the way, we will be thinking about how our experience in this pressure-filled, affluent, globalized culture shapes our understanding of who God is and what we expect from him.
God Is Out There, Somewhere
That God is before us will seem like an unexceptional statement. When some people hear those words they may only think that God exists and that he is in our world. In the West, the number of those who believe in God’s existence has usually been in the 90-97 percent range. In 2013, though, only 80 percent of Americans put themselves in this category in a Pew study. Nevertheless, when those who subscribe to the “New Atheism” mock this belief in God’s existence—a “delusion,” as Richard Dawkins calls it; an “anachronism,” Steven Pinker declares; and just a set of “fantasies,” says Sam Harris—they find themselves outside the mainstream in all our Western cultures. Furthermore, about 80 percent of people in the West also consider themselves to be “spiritual.” Remarkably, this is true even in Europe, where the processes of secularization have run very deeply for a very long time.
But the real question to ask about belief in God’s existence is this: what “weight” does that belief have? The U.S. Congress had the words “In God We Trust” placed on our paper currency in 1956, but it is also clear that this belief, for many, is a bit skinny and peripheral to how they actually live. They believe in God’s existence but it is a belief without much cash value. To say that God is “before” them, therefore, would be somewhat meaningless. It does not necessarily have the weight to define how they think about life and how they live. Indeed, one of the defining marks of our time, at least here in the West, is the practical atheism that is true of so many people. They say that God is there but then they live as if he were not.
How a person thinks about God, Paul Froese and Christopher Bader show in their America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God—and What That Says about Us, is shaped by their answers to two other questions. First, does God ever intervene in life? Second, does God ever make moral judgments about what we do and say?
If the answer to both of these questions is “yes,” then saying that God is before us will mean something entirely different from what it would mean if the answer to these questions is “no.” If we think that God has a hands-off approach to life, how we think of being in his presence will be one thing; if we think he has a hands-on approach, it will be something quite different. Should we think of him, then as a landlord who keeps the building in repair but does not interfere in the lives of those who live there? Should we think of him more as a cheerleader who shouts encouragement from the sidelines but is not himself in the game? Or a therapist who always maintains an arms-length relationship with the patient so that the analysis is not skewed but who knows that, in the end, it is the patient who must right his or her own ship? Should we think of God as being nonjudgmental, one who keeps his moral thoughts to himself? This is the direction in which our culture is pushing us: God does not interfere. He is a God of love and he is not judgmental.
The other angle here is how much God cares about our weaknesses and failures. Indeed, how much does he know? And what weight does he give to different failures?
Ours is a day in which information about the world—about its wars, tragedies, suffering, and hatreds—is instantaneous and simultaneous. We are becoming knowledgeable, through TV and the Internet, of everything of significance that happens. And a whole lot of what is entirely insignificant, too! This raises in our minds some interesting questions. Given the awful cruelties that go on in the world, does God really care about our own private, comparatively small peccadilloes? Does he get bent out of shape by a little moment of deceit here or there when we are simply trying to avoid embarrassment? Is it so terrible to tell a lie if there is no malice? How about a sexual weakness that we cannot resist? Or a little self-promotion that drifts loose of the facts? Does he obsess over these private failures? Does he really care? Or is he large and generous and does he overlook what we are powerless to change? Is he not more preoccupied with cheering us on than with condemning us? This, too, is where our culture wants to take us.
We hear this cultural way of thinking even being echoed in the church. Joel Osteen, pastor of America’s largest church audience—not to mention his worldwide following of 200 million—takes us down this road every week. In his (saccharin-like) view, God is our greatest booster who, sadly, is frustrated that he cannot shower on us more health, wealth, happiness, and self-fulfillment. The reason is simply that we have not stretched out our hands to take these things. God really, really wants us to have them. If we do not have them, well, the fault is ours.
Actually, Osteen’s message is not much different from the way that a majority of American teenagers think about God today. In his Soul Searching, Christian Smith has given us the fruit of a large study he conducted on our teenagers. It was released in 2005.
What is really striking in this study is Smith’s findings of the view of God that is dominant among a majority of these teenagers. He calls it “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” The dominant view, even among evangelical teenagers, is that God made everything and established a moral order, but he does not intervene. Actually, for most he is not even Trinitarian, and the incarnation and resurrection of Christ play little part in church teenage thinking—even in evangelical teenage thinking. They see God as not demanding much from them because he is chiefly engaged in solving their problems and making them feel good. Religion is about experiencing happiness, contentedness, having God solve one’s problems and provide stuff like homes, the Internet, iPods, iPads, and iPhones.
This is a widespread view of God within modern culture, not only among adolescents but among many adults as well. It is the view of God most common in Western contexts. These are the contexts of brilliantly spectacular technology, the abundance churned out by capitalism, the enormous range of opportunities that we have, the unending choices in everything from toothpaste to travel, and the fact that we are now knowledgeable of the entire world into which we are wired. All of these factors interconnect in our experience and do strange things to the way we think. Most importantly, they have obviously done strange things to how we think about God.
Indeed, Ross Douthat, in his Bad Religion, speaks of this as a pervasive “heresy” that has now swept America. He is quite correct, though most people would not think of heresy in this way. However, what so many Americans think about God is a distortion of what is true. And as a distortion it is a substitute for the real thing. And that is why it is heretical. So, why are people thinking like this? Let me take a stab at answering what is, no doubt, a highly complex question.
Content taken from God in the Whirlwind by David Wells, ©2014. Used by permission of Crossway, www.crossway.org.
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We recommend this book. It is available for purchase at Trinity Book Service.
Building on years of research, writing, and cross-cultural ministry, renowned author and theologian David Wells calls our attention to that which defines God’s greatness and gives shape to the Christian life: the holy-love of God.
In God in the Whirlwind, Wells explores the depths of the paradox that God is both holy and loving, showing how his holy-love provides the foundation for our understanding of the cross, sanctification, the nature of worship, and our life of service in the world. What’s more, a renewed vision of God’s character is the cure for evangelicalism’s shallow theology, with its weightless God and sentimental gospel.
Written by one of evangelicalism’s most insightful minds, this book will help you stand firm in your faith despite the changing winds and raging storms of the modern world.
“Rich, deep, and faithful—God in the Whirlwind invites us to come before the very heart of God. No theologian understands the modern world better than David Wells, yet not theologian uses the modern world more powerfully to wrench us back to truths that are foundational and never to be superseded by the latest anything.” –Os Guinness
“A timely and necessary antidote to the spirit of the age which is manifested in the prevailing man-centeredness of contemporary evangelicalism.” –Alistair Begg
“Part biblical theology, part systematic theology, and part cultural reconnaissance, this is a powerful work that my generation—really any generation—cannot afford to ignore. After years of pointing out the shallowness of evangelicalism, this is Well’s masterful summary of what should be our depth, our ballast, our center.” –Kevin DeYoung
David F. Wells (PhD, University of Manchester) is distinguished senior research professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. In addition to serving as academic dean of Gordon-Conwell’s Charlotte campus, Wells has also been a member of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization and is involved in ministry in Africa. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including a series that was initiated by a Pew grant exploring the nature of Christian faith in the contemporary, modernized world.