"God in the Wasteland" continued.......

I continue to be challenged by David Wells as he writes concerning the effects of modernity on our society and our churches. I wanted to share some more excerpts from the book that were particularly striking and current.
In these excerpts, Wells takes up the issue of the modern consciousness, or lack thereof, of God. He titled the chapter, "The Weightlessness of God", he deals with our modern distractions and our self-absorption which have had a dramatic impact on, not only on the unchurched, but also on professing believers.


"It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God's existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his command less authoritative than their appetites for afluence and influence, his judgement no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life. His truth is no longer welcome in our public discourse. The engine of modernity rumbles on, and he is but a speck in its path.

Few would deny that this is the case in our modernized society; it is less clear to many that it may also be the case, albeit in less blatant and obvious ways, in the church. Why is this so? One of the reasons is that it is always more difficult to perceive a pattern of which we ourselves are a part. We need the advantage of a little distance to grasp the meaning of complex events. We experience our own time as such a rich and intense confusion that it is not always easy to distinguish vices from virtues. The untrue appears true, the bad passes itself off as good, and often the trivial masquerades as important. This perennial difficulty is only compounded by the effects of modernity. The faster pace of life and the relentless roar of the media only heighten the confusion, and the unprecedented wealth of goods, conveniences, and opportunities with which modernity has showered us constitute a powerful incentive not to look to closely at its liabilities and biases.

God has not disappeared in the sense that he has been abducted or overwhelmed. He is not like a child snatched away while its parents were momentarily distracted. No, God is more like a child that has been abandoned within a family, still accorded a place in the house, but not in the home. Because the doctrine is professed, perhaps even routinely in creed or confession, it seems as if all is well. But it is like a house that gives no outward signs of decay even though termites have rendered it structurally unsound.

The growing weightlessness of God is an affliction that is neither peculiarly Protestant nor peculiarly Catholic but is the common form in which modernity rearranges all belief in God. It is an illness that has entered the bones of religious liberals and conservatives alike. Weightlessness is a condition, a cognitive and psychological dispostion. It can sweep through all doctrinal defenses because it is not itself perceived to be a doctrine. It can evade the best ecclesiastical defenses, sidestep the best intentions, and survive the most efficacious spiritual techniques because it is not recognized as a kind of belief. Although this weightlessness is not itself a doctrine, it has the power to hobble all doctrines; although it is not an ecclesiology, it can render all ecclesiologies impotent; although it is not itself a spirituality, all spiritualities are withered by its presence. Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality."