On my shelf and unread for many years is David Wells’ third book in his four-book series on theology and culture, Losing Our Virtue. It is now on the side arm of my reading chair and I am beginning my way through it. Even though it was written in 1998, his analysis of the contemporary Christian culture remains spot-on and vitally important for our consideration. The ills he outlines in the book not only remain nearly twenty years after he composed them, but are more more advanced in their expression and negative impact on the church. Even the contemporary reactions of a new generation to the former generation’s narcissism, remain narcissistic (perhaps I will address how I see that in a future post).
Here are a few quotes from his first chapter, “A Tale of Two Spiritualities.”
Wells begins to outline a few similarities between the culture of Martin Luther some 500 years ago and our contemporary era (though 20 years removed from today).
Technology also reduces all of life to the productive order, to measurable benefits, to the calculus of cost an profit, and what is most efficient rapidly becomes what is ethically permissible or right. In a technologically dominated world, what is real is what is found along the flat plane of human management, where effects can be strictly controlled by our own causes. The use of technology greatly enlarges the sense of autonomy, of being at the center of one’s own world and of pulling the strings of its circumstances, through it is probably also the case that different generations look on technology in slightly different ways. p 24
Is it a mere coincidence, Theodore Roszak asks, that “in the midst of so much technological mastery and economic abundance, our art and thought continue to project a nihilistic image unparalleled in human history? Are we to believe there is not a connection between these facts?” p 25
Anxiety, however, is nothing more than living to the future before it arrives, and modernity obliges us to do the many times over. The future is thereby greatly intensified for us. p 26
Similarities between Martin Luther’s day and ours:
– There was no confidence in the Word of God
While the inspiration of Scripture is cheerfully endorsed, there is not a lot of confidence that this Word of God can accomplish its purposes. . . . to make it effective, we do not resort to tradition or a formal magisterium, as do Catholics, but to business know-how and psychology.
– People did not understand the seriousness of sin
The greatness of God’s grace will never be grasped unless it is preceded by an understanding of the greatness of sin. . . . Sin is defying God.
. . . The consequence is a massive trivialization of our moral life. This happens because moral offenses against God are reduced simply into bad feelings about ourselves.
– The unique sufficiency of Christ’s death on the Cross had been lost.
Medieval piety reached for moral attainment to complete the work of Christ. We reach for psychological technique and knowledge to do the same thing. pp 27-30
Two Kinds of Spirituality
– Classical Spirituality – the general understanding of the Christian life – its doctrinal basis, its devotional habits, its moral character, and its responsibilities in Church and society. p 33
in classical spirituality what is moral is central, and in postmodern spirituality it is not. It is not that what is oral is denied in the one spirituality as that it lacks the weight which it has in the other. . . . the consequence of this is that doctrine in postmodern spirituality not only loses its importance but often also its shape. . . . It is a shift from guilt in the classical stream to shame in the postmodern. . . . It is shame experiences as inner emptiness, deprivation, loss, and disorientation. It is shame that is far more psychological in nature than moral. pp 34, 35.
It is the holiness of God that shapes the meaning of the Christian life in sanctification and service, that demands self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness and think of sin as self-centeredness an self-absorption. In consequence, worship in classical spirituality is God-centered and Cross-focused, and it is God centered because it is Christ-focused. p 35
The purpose of worship is clearly to express the greatness ofGod and not simply to find inward release or, still less, amusement. Worship is theological rather than psychological. p 40
– Postmodern.
Wherein, then, lies the difference between a classical and a postmodern spirituality? The latter begins, not so much with sin as morally framed, but with sin as psychologically experienced, not so much with sin in relation to God, but with sin in relation to ourselves. It begins with our anxiety, pain, and disillusionment, with the world in its disorder, the family or marriage in its brokenness, or the workplace in its brutality and insecurity. God, in consequence, is valued to the extent that he is able to bathe these wounds, assuage these insecurities, calm these fears, restore some sense of internal order, an during some sense of wholeness. p 42.
This psychologizing of sin and salvation has an immediacy about it that is appealing in this troubled age, this age of broken beliefs and broken lives. The cost, however, is that it so subverts the process of moral understanding that sin loses its sinfulness, at least before God. p 43.
Another difference is that the one spirituality is built around truth, but the other is defined by its search for power. In a charismatic setting this search takes the form of powerful encounters, dramatic experiences of the supernatural, healing of both physical and emotional kinds, and the exercise of the other gifts. But outside charismatic circles, the search for power is most often construed in therapeutic ways: the power to conquer anxiety, to find enthusiasm for a ew week, to repair the broken connections within the self, and to piece back together ruptured relations. It is the power to restore one’s daily functioning. It is power for survival. p 43.
The biblical teaching about sin is thus domesticated to accommodate secular notions about the self. p 51.
