Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision

Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision. By David F. Wells. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, 240 pp., $20.00 paper.

Trying to capture the central themes of David Wells's Losing Our Virtue is not unlike attempting to summarize the book of Proverbs in a paragraph. The book is so rich, so layered, and so loaded with both probative sub-themes and mini-jeremiads that describing its central argument almost diminishes Wells's outsized contribution to our understanding of the needs of the Church and the world. The third of Wells's biting analyses of what ails modern man, Christian and secular (his earlier, and important, works are No Place for Truth and God in the Wasteland), Losing Our Virtue is an evaluation of how postmodernism and simple worldliness have infected the thinking and practice of the Church.

Some of Wells's concerns appear rooted in personal distaste as much as theological conviction. He intensely dislikes hand clapping during church services, sappy contemporary Christian music and modern dance as an expression of worship. Yet aside from his own preferences, it is hard to dismiss his main point: "Today's churchly trendiness is really yesterday's unbelief" Wells views the infusion of popular culture into the Church as evidence of a diminution of the Church's vision of God and suggests that in our eagerness to be relevant, we have become merely desperate. We have forsaken faith in the power of the gospel to transform and replaced it with marketing strategies and appeals to the very secularism against which the kingdom of God has set itself.

But the book is much more than this. Wells engages in a careful dissection of the moral health of our culture and is disturbed by what he finds. As a result of jettisoning the concept of truth, our culture has lost its capacity to talk about good and evil. As a result, the Church is too ready to find alternative language to try to reach a generation that, in Wells's view, has difficulty distinguishing between the frivolous and the important. Even our ability to acknowledge a general sense of conscience-- Wells borrows the term "obedience to the unenforceable"-has been grossly diminished. Consider this trenchant passage from a chapter entitled "The Bonfire of the Self:" "The inevitable outcome of treating the self as the locus of all meaning and of all moral values... is that both meaning and values become relativized to each self. If self-consciousness is private, unique and individualized, then moral values, if they arise in the self, are as private and individualized as the self in which they reside." This kind of insight is rare in Christian writing today-and no less urgent for its rareness.

Wells's basic conclusion is posed as a question: "Is it too much to hope that the evangelical Church can yet again recover its moral seriousness, that it can recover its vision of the holiness of God, its trust in the greatness of his power? This is the key, strange as it may seem, to Christian effectiveness in the postmodern world."

What many would challenge is Wells's exceptionally dire appraisal of the moral and spiritual health of the church. Clearly, there is much to raise the concern of mature believers: the theological ignorance of too many who sit in our church pews; attempts to gain a hearing that produce an innocuous, and pathetic, preaching and teaching ministry; and a preoccupation with the self so pronounced that the salient purpose of the church-to know Christ and make him known, in all his love and holiness-are obscured by the "what God can do for me" mentality of the continuing "me" generation. But one must wonder if Wells does not overstate his case. The courageous, and publicly visible, orthodoxy of the Southern Baptist Convention is but one example of the way in which some evangelicals are seeking to adhere with greater fidelity to the teachings of Scripture. Many "mega-churches" with multiple thousands of members are growing not because of exotic programs but because they are composed of people who know how to love and are led by godly men who accurately handle the word of truth.

Wells is one of the most profound Christian thinkers of our time, and Losing Our Virtue is one of the most important books of recent years. His insight is keen, his burden righteous, his moral pain deeply felt. His resonant portrait of a culture that is self-destructing is in itself sufficient to justify purchasing and studying this book. Even if one disagrees with Wells's assessment of the depth to which postmodern culture has penetrated the church, it is hard to dispute his take on the general spirit of the age. And that is sobering-and convicting-enough.

Robert Schwarzwalder

Springfield, VA

Copyright Evangelical Theological Society Mar 2001
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