I am a fan of David Wells. In the nineties, he wrote four books (No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, Losing Our Virtue, Above All Earthly Powers) which in combination provided as insightful and thorough an analysis of contemporary culture and contemporary evangelicalism as any I have come across. Last year, he wrote The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers and Emergents in a Post-Modern World.
What prompts this post is noticing a brief interview in Boston Globe with Wells this morning in connection with a conference at Gordon-Cromwell on evangelicals in the public square. (h/t Justin Taylor.) His quote people who act inconsistently with what they proclaim are far more damaging to the Christian faith than the attacks that atheists launch" struck me as particularly valid. Our morning devotions this morning were based on Ephesians 4:17-18 (we are using the devotional 365 Days with Calvin)in which the point was emphasized how our walk speaks louder than our talk.
Hypocrisy is not just a private matter in which we fail to live up to the standards we profess to believe in; it is a public matter in which the credibility of our confession is brought into disrepute as a result of our behaviour. An awareness of this reality gives us reason to take care regarding the claims we make in public, and double care that we do everything we can to live consistently with those claims. A sobering but valuable thought with which to start Monday morning.
Monday, October 19, 2009
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