David F. Wells > Quotes

“Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue. Even "humble" attitudes can be masks of pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe.”
― David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision

“In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.”
― David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

“What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?”
― David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World

“The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world--in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift form God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.”
― David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

“In fact, when we listen to the church today, at least in the West, we are often left with impression that Christianity actually has very little to do with truth. Christianity is only about feeling better about ourselves, about leaping over our difficulties, about being more satisfied, about have better relationships, about getting on with our mothers-in-law, about understanding teenage rebellion, about coping with our unreasonable bosses, about finding greater sexual satisfaction, about getting rich, about receiving our own private miracles, and much else besides. It is about everything except truth. And yet this truth, personally embodied in Christ, gives us a place to stand in order to deal with the complexities of life, such as broken relations, teenage rebellion, and job insecurities. ”
― David F. Wells

“It is this cultural dilemma that now drives the debate between Democrats and Republicans, the one wanting more law and the other more freedom. Would it be inappropriate to suggest that both parties are partly wrong and partly right? Republicans, I believe, are right that government regulation is burdensome and sometimes ineffective, but they are slow to see the consequences of having less law in a culture whose moral character is worn, where "obedience to the unenforceable" is tepid. Democrats are right to fear what will happen in such a society where the heavy hand of the law is lifted, but they rarely see that the law cannot restore what we have lost, which is our sense of "obedience to the unenforceable." The law is no substitute for what we have lost. We can, for example, pass laws against murder, but not against hatred; against adultery, but not against lust; against fraud, but not against lying; against violence, but not against the emotional neglect of children. We can condemn abuse, but we cannot command kindness. We can condemn bigotry, but we cannot require civility. Republicans ask for more freedom, Democrats for more law, but freedom in the absence of public virtue is as disastrous as more law because of the absence of public virtue.57”
― David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue

“Being transformed also means being unconformed.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“As Jonathan Edwards observed a long time ago, we act on our strongest motive. If our strongest motive, our deepest desire, is to know God, it will generate the discipline that we need to pursue this, because we will want to know God more than anything else. If this is not our strongest motive, we will find ourselves with multiple, alternative, and competing foci.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent.”
― David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

“There is a breeze blowing. I see it in the deep discontent that is being voiced with the threadbare state of the evangelical world, with its empty worship, its market-driven superficiality, and its trivial thought. It is a breeze blowing toward better, deeper, more honest things. I suspect that it is the Holy Spirit who is blowing, that this is his breeze, and that these leaves that are shaking are the signs of better things to come within an evangelical faith that is thus being reformed. Let us all pray that it is so!”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“Alongside the success of much Church marketing, and in the midst of much of the psychologized faith in the evangelical world today, a profound secularization of faith has taken place, and this despite the continued use of good biblical words like sin, grace, Christ, and atonement. This secularization is appealing because it buys the appearance of success, but it also forfeits the nature of biblical faith. The seeds of a full-blown liberalism have now been sown, and in the next generation they will surely come to maturity.”
― David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue

“As Jonathan Edwards observed a long time ago, we act on our strongest motive. If our strongest motive, our deepest desire, is to know God, it will generate the discipline that we need to pursue this, because we will want to know God more than anything else. If this is not our strongest motive, we will find ourselves with multiple, alternative, and competing foci. These will inevitably distract us.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“Let us not think, I said, that we really have a choice between having a theology and not having one. We all have our theologies, for we all have a way of putting things together in our own minds that, if we are Christian, has a shape that arises from our knowledge of God and his Word. We might not be conscious of the process. Indeed, we frequently are not. But at the very least we will organize our perceptions into some sort of pattern that seems to make sense to us. The question at issue, then, is not whether we will have a theology but whether it will be a good or bad one, whether we will become conscious of our thinking processes or not, and, more particularly, whether we will learn to bring all of our thoughts into obedience to Christ or not. The biblical authors had a theology in this sense, after all, and so too did Jesus. He explained himself in terms of biblical revelation, understood his life and work in relation to God, and viewed all of life from this perspective. He had a
worldview that originated in the purposes and character of his Father and that informed everything he said and did.”
― David F. Wells, No Place for Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

“When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.”
― David F. Wells, Above All Earthly Pow'rs: Christ in a Postmodern World

“What was once an open space between law and freedom, one governed by character and truth, is now deserted, so law must now do what character has abandoned.”
― David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue

“What has happened, of course, is that over a period of time our society has slowly exited the moral world and it now lives, instead, in a psychological world. The difference is that in one there is right and wrong and in the other there is not. In this other world, we are comfortable or not, psychologically healthy or not, dysfunctional or not, but we are never sinners.”
― David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Reformation Faith in Today's World

“Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoers might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“God’s holiness, then, is not only the opposite of evil; it is the measure by which we know evil to be evil.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“We are summoned to know him only on his terms. He is not known on our terms. This summons is heard in and through his Word. It is not heard through our intuitions.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“Can we, then, set aside the impatience that the Internet tends to breed, and the habits of being distracted which our highly compacted modern lives create, in order to focus on what really matters?”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“The evangelical Church today, with some exceptions, is not very inspiring in this regard. It is not being heroic. It is exhibiting too little of the moral splendor that Christ calls it to exhibit. Much of it, instead, is replete with tricks, gadgets, gimmicks, and marketing ploys as it shamelessly adapts itself to our emptied-out, blinded, postmodern world.”
― David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue

“In every age there are threads of continuity and discontinuity. What may be different from age to age is the political organization, the kind of economy that exists and how it works, the architectural style, the nature of the calamities that occur - such as war, famine, natural disasters, or social upheaval - the dominance or absence of religion, life expectancy, the scope of medical care, and any number of other factors that impinge on daily life. In these areas, life in seventeenth-century America, for example, was very different indeed from life in the twentieth. At the same time, if Christian assumptions can be accepted, life in these two times also shared some things. Human nature has remained unchanged as created and fallen, as has God in his character and purposes, as has the truth of the revelation he has given us in the Bible, as has the significance of his redemptive acts and most importantly the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. These have not changed. They are the threads that are woven through ages that, in many other ways, have no connections with each other at all. They give continuity to life amidst its many jarring discontinuities. For this reason, there is only one Gospel applicable to all people in all places and believed in the same way in every age. If this were not so, Christian faith would mean something entirely different today from what it meant last century, and faith would mean something entirely different in America than in Asia, Europe, or Africa.”
― David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue

“The experience of living in this modernized world has, indeed, shaken many of the assumptions upon which belief rests. It does so most often in indirect ways. It is more the psychology of our times that undermines Christian belief than it is, say, the arguments against it mounted by the new atheists”
― David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Reformation Faith in Today's World

“Descartes argued “I think, therefore I am,” and people after Freud translated that into the modern vernacular by saying, “I feel, therefore I am a self”; modern evangelicals of the relational type seem to have added their own quirk to it by saying that “I feel religiously, therefore I am a self.” The search for the religious self then becomes a search for religious good feelings. But the problem with making good feelings the end for which one is searching is, as Henry Fairlie argues, that it is possible to feel good about oneself, even religiously, “in states of total vacuity, euphoria, intoxication, and self-indulgence, and it is even possible when we are doing wrong and know what we are doing.” This kind of self-fascination is by no means an excrescence of an otherwise robust sector of religious life. It is at the very center of evangelicalism.”
― David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

“although in the sixteenth century the word of God had been taken captive by the Catholic Church, the meaning of sin had been lost, and the death of Christ had been diluted, the Reformation still happened. The Gospel was recovered, the Church was renewed, Christian life was invigorated, and Europe was changed in deep and profound ways. If the Church then, which had been all but lost despite its outward wealth and pomp, could be recovered, so can the Church today. And if Europe could be changed as drastically as it was, so might our world today. Then as now, however, the prerequisite is a Christian life that is biblically faithful and a Church that is doctrinally shaped, morally tough, intellectually vibrant, and buoyant with a faith that can lay hold of the promises of God in the face of circumstantial disconfirmation and see God's great power at work. Is this the kind of Christian life we find in evangelical churches? The answer is that what I have described here is becoming rare and is being replaced by a kind of spirituality that, because it is walking in lockstep with the culture so often, is better able to mimic that culture than to change it.”
― David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue

“God waits on us to admit him so that he can make his love real. That is how so many people think. And this is how much religion outside of Christian faith has thought about God’s love, too.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“Sanctification is about living in ways that are consistent with what we already are in Christ.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“There are a surprising number who get their spiritual uplift week by week only from the comfort of their own living rooms or from their computers. They never go to church. Well, they “go” to church but do so in their own way.”
― David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“It is true, of course, that great preachers are always few and far between in any age. But in every age there should be enough preachers to do the job, preachers who are conscientious, who know what it is to labor over Scripture during the week and then on Sunday deliver its truth with some conviction, with some insight, with some depth, and with some application to life, and in the Holy Spirit’s power.”
― David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Reformation Faith in Today's World

“sobre todos los enemigos cuya obra y carácter son oscuros. Él espera ahora hasta que todos estos enemigos sean puestos bajo sus pies. Entonces, su conquista en la cruz resonará por todo el cosmos y esa “edad”, que para nosotros aún está por llegar, vendrá de hecho con todo su esplendor.”
― David F. Wells, Dios en el torbellino: Cómo el amor santo de Dios reorienta nuestro mundo