Trade Off

The following is a quote from David F. Wells' book "Above All Earthly Pow'rs": Christ in a Postmodern World

Speaking about an effort to find a synthesis between Christianity and Modernity, Wells said this:

"The eventual outcome to this kind of project was a form of faith that, as Greshman Machen argued in his Christianity and Liberalism, was unrecognizable as Christian faith, yet the irony of it was that these liberals set out to save Christianity and not to destroy it, to preserve the possibility of some kind of belief when the enlightenment was making traditional Christian believing quite impossible. The parallels between the liberal project and what is now being attempted in evangelical churches are quite striking in several ways, though there are differences too.

It should be said immediately that, for the liberals, this was a deliberate, self-consciously accepted tradeoff between the necessary loss of historical, orthodox belief and acceptance within a culture dominated by Enlightenment humanism and rationalism. This loss of the orthodoxy was the price that liberals felt had to be paid for a seat at the table. For evangelicals today, this new strategy is also one of survival but there is no sense at all that their orthodox views are in jeopardy."