The Courage to Be Protestant: Reformation Faith in Today’s World, 2nd ed.

by David F. Wells

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2017

Overview

At its heart, the Protestant Reformation was about a deep, doctrinally shaped faith centered on God and his Word. But that historic, substantive faith is not faring so well in our contemporary Western context. In the first edition of The Courage to Be Protestant, David Wells issued a summons to return to the historic Protestant faith, defined by the Reformation solas (grace, faith, and Scripture alone) and by a high regard for doctrine.

In this thoroughly reworked second edition, Wells presents an updated look at the state of evangelicalism and the changes that have taken place since the original publication of his book. There is no better time than now to hear and heed Wells’ clarion call to reclaim the historic, doctrinally serious Reformation faith in our fast-paced, technologically dominated, postmodern culture.

Contents

Top Highlights

“The biblical answer to why we have lost our center, then, is rather straightforward. The center has not been lost. What has been lost is our ability to see it, to recognize it, to bow before it, to reorder our lives in light of it, to do what we should do as people who live in the presence of this center, this Other, this triune, holy-loving God of the Bible.” (Page 69)

“As Dean Inge said, a century ago, those who are wedded to the spirit of the age today will find themselves a widower tomorrow.” (Page 11)

“The constant cultural bombardment of individualism, in the absence of a robust theology, meant that faith that had rightly been understood as personal earlier on was now becoming merely individualistic. It was self-focused and consumer-oriented. It was a faith in search of comfort and assurance in the midst of all the anxieties created by modern life. But this comfort and assurance were all about the private interior world. More than that, they were about therapy and rarely about truth.” (Page 9)

“But the largest factor in this internal change, I think, was that evangelicalism began to be infested by the culture in which it was living. The result was that Christianity became increasingly reduced simply to private, internal, therapeutic experience because now our culture only thinks in psychological ways.” (Page 15)

“The reality, of course, is that the truth of God’s Word is often in sharp antithesis to what is taken as being ‘normal’ in our culture. To hear this Word, then, is to see that the Christ of this Word is against the culture in quite a few important ways. It is this sense of antithesis that has been lost.” (Page 4)

Product Details

• Title: The Courage to Be Protestant: Reformation Faith in Today’s World (Second Edition)
• Author: David F. Wells
• Edition: Second Edition
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2017
• Logos Release Date: 2019
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Evangelicalism; Protestant churches › Doctrines; Postmodernism › Religious aspects--Christianity
• ISBNs: 9780802875242, 0802875246
• Resource ID: LLS:CRGBPRTSSCNDDTN
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T23:00:02Z

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.