Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

I. The Lay of the Evangelical Land
The Map
Classical Evangelicals
Marketers
Emergents
The Fall of the Empire

II. Christianity for Sale
Thank You, Corporate America!
Sale: Prices Slashed!
A Word of Praise
Excuse Me!
The Bottom Line

III. Truth
The Self Is Disconnected
Our Modernized World
The Changing World Inside
What Is Truth-
Christian Truth
Truth Engagement
A Better Way Forward

IV. God
The Lost Center
The Culture’s Answer
God and Modernity
The Inside God
The Outside God
And So . . . -
There Is a Law
There Is Sin
There Is a Cross
There Is Conquest
There Is Obligation

V. Self
In Pursuit of the Self
The Nation Signs On
Virtues to Values
Character to Personality
Nature to Self
Guilt to Shame
A Different Universe
Rupture
Reconciliation
It’s Not Just about Me
About the Salt
Where We Stand

VI Christ
Christian and Pagan Paths
From Below
From Above
Above but Incarnate
Above and Reigning

VII. Church
Trouble in the House
The Church’s Two Sides
Marks of Authenticity
Into the Depths
Who Builds the Church-
Let God Be God over the Church

Extract from Preface

This book started out as a simple summary of the four volumes that had preceded it. All books, however, develop a life of their own, and this has been no exception.

I needed to update what had been said in the previous volumes because some of it had been begunmore than a decade ago. In addition to this, I had to compress these volumes into a single account. How does one reduce 1,100 pages to 250-

Once this work got under way I found myself not so much compressing as recasting all that I had done and then updating it.

The result is that this book is less a summary and more an attempt at getting at the essence of the project that has engaged me over the last fifteen years. And, hopefully, it will be more accessible than the previous books, not to mention less taxing on readers!

The project began with No Place for Truth; or,Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology- (1993). That book was followed by God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (1994), Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (1998), and Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World (2005). Running through these four books have been five main doctrinal themes: truth, God, self, Christ, and the church. It is these five themes that I am taking up here. Since this is so, I am not, for the most part, documenting the literature and research upon which this book rests since that has already been done. It therefore has no footnotes. ...

Extract from chapter 1 - The Lay of the Evangelical Land

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

It takes no courage to sign up as a Protestant. After all, millions have done so throughout the West. They are not in any peril. To live by the truths of historic Protestantism, however, is an entirely different matter. That takes courage in today’s context.

That is the argument I will make in this book. But it needs to be made not only with postmodern culture in mind but also with contemporary evangelicalism in mind. The truths of historic Protestantism are sometimes no more welcome in evangelicalism than they are in the outside culture.

This is quite a remarkable thing. After all, the emergence of the evangelical movement following World War II has been a success story. So what has happened-

Evangelicals started out at the beginning of this period, let us remember, with nothing. They were few in number, not welcome in the academy, were ridiculed wherever Enlightenment attitudes were ensconced in the culture, and were on the outside of all the power centers in American society. In a very few years, though, this all began to change. Their churches grew and multiplied; they built institutions, started organizations, entered the academy, became a political constituency to be reckoned with; and they have reached out to those in need in a multitude of impressive ways. Indeed, so successful have they become that they have been granted a kind of grudging, cultural acceptance in America, though this is not of course the case in Europe. Never has the evangelical gospel been more widely heard than it is today, and never has the reach of evangelicals been so great.

And yet, at the very moment when the evangelical movement seemed to have arrived at this pinnacle, it started to fall apart. It is now separating into three quite distinct constituencies. Because this story explains where the front lines are, I will briefly describe these three constituencies before I get into the substance of this book. In the chapters that follow I will return to these issues a number of times. ...