Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World

by David F. Wells

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2006

In our postmodern world, every view has a place at the table but none has the final say. How should the church confess Christ in today’s cultural context?

Above All Earthly Pow’rs, the fourth and final volume of the series that began in 1993 with No Place for Truth, portrays the West in all its complexity, brilliance, and emptiness. As David F. Wells masterfully depicts it, the postmodern ethos of the West is relativistic, individualistic, therapeutic, and yet remarkably spiritual. Wells shows how this postmodern ethos has incorporated into itself the new religious and cultural relativism, the fear and confusion, that began with the last century’s waves of immigration and have continued apace in recent decades.

Wells’ book culminates in a critique of contemporary evangelicalism aimed at both unsettling and reinvigorating readers. Churches that market themselves as relevant and palatable to consumption-oriented postmoderns are indeed swelling in size. But they are doing so, Wells contends, at the expense of the truth of the gospel. By placing a premium on marketing rather than truth, the evangelical church is in danger of trading authentic engagement with culture for worldly success.

Welding extensive cultural analysis with serious theology, Above All Earthly Pow’rs issues a prophetic call that the evangelical church cannot afford to ignore.

Contents

Top Highlights

“This preoccupation with the future is, therefore, not harmless” (Page 240)

“off methodologies for succeeding in which that success requires little or no theology” (Page 265)

“In the postmodern world, truth is now relative, not to the multitude of gods and goddesses, but to the multitude of human knowers. The categories of true and false, right and wrong, therefore fall away and are replaced by a different kind of distinction: religion which is useful as opposed to that which is not.” (Pages 149–150)

“First, that the self is fragmented, not innocent; second, that truth is public, not private; third, that reality is personal, not impersonal.” (Page 164)

“Evangelicalism, now much absorbed by the arts and tricks of marketing, is simply not very serious anymore.” (Page 4)

Product Details

• Title: Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World
• Author: David F. Wells
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2006
• Logos Release Date: 2019
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subject: Postmodernism › Religious aspects--Christianity
• ISBNs: 9780802824554, 9780802829023, 9781844741069, 0802824552, 0802829023, 1844741060
• Resource ID: LLS:BVLLPSTMDRNWRLD
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T22:23:59Z

About David F. Wells

David Falconer Wells (born 1939) is Distinguished Senior Research Professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books in which his evangelical theology engages with the modern world. Wells received his B.D. from the University of London; Th.M. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; Ph.D. from Manchester University (England); and was a post-doctoral Research Fellow at Yale Divinity School. Wells is a Council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.