Losing Our Virtue

by David F. Wells

Book Overview

Available now for the first time in paperback, Losing Our Virtue offers a bold critique of the moral disintegration taking place in contemporary society and its reflection in today's evangelical church. Continuing the series begun with David Wells's No Place for Truth and God in the Wasteland, this acclaimed volume urges the church to regain its moral weight and become a missionary of truth once more to our relativistic postmodern world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802846726
• ISBN13: 9780802846723
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Virtue or values?

David Wells is my current favorite b/c he confronts with kind, intelligent, insightful, and helpful language the problems facing the church today. In this volume he discusses how we have gone from the language of virtue (i,e, courage, perseverance, integrity, etc.) to values (fun, amazing, exciting, etc.) in the course of a century. This loss of a moral center has cost not only our culture but the church as we move away from a biblical way of seeing and interacting with our world. The church has become worldly and ineffective. How did we get to this place? How do we get out of it? How do we remain faithful to God and communicate to a world that has does not understand the vocabulary of redemption? Read this most helpful book to help you answer these and other questions raised by the loss of virtue?

Very perceptive - Great book

This was my first exposure to David Wells, and I'm extremely impressed. His analysis of the cultural situation of our time is extremely perceptive, and his description of the consumer-driven church is very good - slices and dices. He certainly covers his bases in terms of research. This book could rightly be called a Jeremiad for our time, and I highly recommend it.

The remnant will maintain the faith

In his final volume of the three, Wells moves from diagnosis to prescription for healing. Here he admonishes the church to recover. Sum his advice up by this quotation: "Does the Church have the courage to become relevant by becoming biblical?" Great read; thorough and provoking.

A true prophet and critic of our times!

Wells is right on with his analysis and diagnostics. While the postmodern, contemporary church will not particularly like his suggestion for change, certainly it has God's mark of approval. Wells sums it up on page 207: "The Church's problem today is simply that it does not believe that, without tinkering, the Gospel will be all that interesting to modern people." Let modern people do whatever, I'm with Wells and the Gospel.

Essential

This book is a great place to start looking at the issues raised today by post-modernism. An eye-opening read!