In this atmosphere, where everything is believed and anything is believable, at least to someone, nothing can act as a norm. All that is left is power. And, in a fallen world, we do well to be cautious when all there is, is power.
Topics: Power Source: The Courage to Be Protestant
[The Reformers] granted that personal experience is powerful because it is intense, but they insisted that we should not allow this power to delude us into thinking that experience is always right.
The new evangelicalism is not driven by the same passion for truth as the older form, and that is why it is often empty of theological interest. We now have less biblical fidelity, less interest in the truth, less seriousness, less depth and less capacity to speak the Word of God to our own generation in a way that offers an alternative to what it already thinks.
Many of those whose task it is to broker the truth of God to the people of God in the churches have now redefined the pastoral task such that theology has become an embarrassing encumbrance or a matter of which they have little knowledge; and many in the Church have now turned in upon themselves and substituted for the knowledge of God a search for the knowledge of self.
Truth is now simply a matter of etiquette: it has no authority, no sense of rightness, because it is no longer anchored in anything absolute. If it persuades, it does so only because our experience has given it its persuasive power, but tomorrow our experience might be different.
In this atmosphere, where everything is believed and anything is believable, at least to someone, nothing can act as a norm. All that is left is power. And, in a fallen world, we do well to be cautious when all there is, is power.