Evangelicals Reject God’s Holiness
From "No Place for Truth: Or whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology" (Eerdmans, 1993), p. 300.
By Dr. David F. Wells
"...the shallowness of modern life derives not from its banality but from its having lost its moral bearings. ... Christ seems to offer little of what this world is asking for. It wants whatever is new; it looks for the next step in the journey of the human spirit...."
"It is this holiness of God, then, without which the Cross of Christ is incomprehensible, that provides the light that exposes modernity's darkness for what it is....
Evangelicals turned from focusing on God's transcendence to focusing on his immanence [pervading all creation] -- and then they took the further step of interpreting his immanence as friendliness with modernity....
"The loss of the traditional vision of God as holy is now manifested everywhere in the evangelical world. It is the key to understanding why sin and grace have become such empty terms.... Divorced from the holiness of God -
sin is merely self-defeating behavior or a breach in etiquette...
grace is merely empty rhetoric, pious window dressing for the modern technique by which sinners work out their own salvation....
our gospel becomes indistinguishable from any of a host of alternative self-help doctrines....
our public morality is reduced to little more than an accumulation of trade-offs between competing private interests.
our worship becomes mere entertainment.
"The holiness of God is the very cornerstone of Christian faith, for it is the foundation of reality....
"...this God, majestic and holy in his being... has disappeared from the modern evangelical world. He has been replaced in many quarters by a God... whose Word is a plaything for those who wish merely to listen to themselves, whose Church is a mall in which the religious, their pockets filled with the coin of need, do their business. We seek happiness, not righteousness."
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