LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1998, Page 79

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CONVENTION ESSAYS AND BIBLE STUDIES

79

one person’s purchase will be different from another
person’s, because every person is different, with special needs. In the fevered quest for individual fulfillment, commonality of belief is brushed aside as an irrelevance, if not an impossibility. The common need for
religious experience of some sort is acknowledged, but
no restrictions are placed on the sort of experience that
will fill the bill for any given individual. Thus do we
welcome the personalized, designer religion of the
1990s” (God in the Wasteland, p. 100).

Boice, James Montgomery, and Benjamin E. Sasse. Here
We Stand, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996.

19. In their soon-to-be-released book, Relativism: Feet
Firmly Planted in Mid-air (Grand Rapids: Baker,
1998), Frank Beckwith and Greg Koukl ask the question: “What kind of world would it be if relativism were
true? It would be a world in which nothing is wrong—
nothing is considered evil or good, nothing is worthy of
praise or blame. It would be a world in which justice
and fairness are meaningless concepts, in which there
would be no accountability, no possibility of moral improvement, and no moral discourse.”

____. The Evangelical Left, Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 1997.

20. In a 1967 work, Peter Berger outlined the church’s two
alternatives in dealing with a pluralistic culture. He
wrote, “The pluralistic situation presents the religious
institutions with two ideal-typical options. They can either accommodate themselves to the situation, play the
pluralistic game of religious free enterprise, and come
to terms as best they can with the plausibility problem
by modifying their product in accordance with consumer demands. Or they can refuse to accommodate
themselves, entrench themselves behind whatever
socio-religious structures they can maintain or construct, and continue to confess the old objectives as
much as possible as if nothing had happened” (quoted
in Vanishing Boundaries, p. 206). There is a third option—positioning ourselves to counter the culture. The
“old objectives,” or the religion of the 50s, created an
uninformed laity, a historic liturgy devoid of meaning,
and doctrines removed from life. A counter-cultural response to postmodernism demands a renewed emphasis upon catechesis so that our people no longer define
truth as the possession of the church’s guardians of
doctrinal integrity but as living and relevant expressions of a relationship with a grace-giving God.
21. For an interesting article on the relationship between the church and the culture, see “Deathly
Evangelism” by ELCA pastor Ronald Marshall at
http://users.aol.com/SemperRef.

Bibliography
Beckwith, Frank, and Greg Koukl. Relativism: Feet Firmly
Planted in Mid-air, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House,
1998.
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind, New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Crane, Charles, and Stephen Crane. Ashamed of Joseph:
Mormon Foundations Crumble, Joplin, Missouri: College
Press, 1993.
Edgar, William. Reasons of the Heart, Grand Rapids: Baker
Book House, 1996.
Erickson, Millard. Postmodernizing the Faith, Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1998.

Guinness, Os. Dining with the Devil, Grand Rapids: Baker
Book House, 1993.
Guiness, Os and John Seel. No God but God, Chicago:
Moody Press, 1992.
Hoge, Dean R., Benton Johnson, and Donald A. Luidens.
Vanishing Boundaries: the Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby-boomers, Louisville: Westminster, John Knox
Press, 1994.
Horton, Michael S. Made in America, Grand Rapids: Baker
Book House, 1991.
Jone, Peter, Spirit Wars, Mukilteo, WA.: WinePress Publishing, 1997.
Kelley, Dean M. Why Conservative Churches Are Growing,
New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Knight, Henry H. III. A Future for Truth, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997.
McCallum, Dennis. The Death of Truth, Minneapolis:
Bethany House, 1996.
Myers, Kenneth A. All God’s Children and Blue Suede
Shoes, Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1989.
Nash, Robert N. Jr., An 8-Track Church in a CD World,
Macon, Georgia: Smyth & Helwys, 1997.
Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture, New York:
Harper and Row, 1951.
Oden, Thomas C. Requiem, Nashville, Abingdon Press,
1995.
Philips, Timothy R. and Dennis L. Okholm. Christian
Apologetics in the Postmodern World, Downers Grove,
IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995.
Schmidt, Alvin J. The Menace of Multiculturalism, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.
Veith, Gene Edward Jr. Postmodern Times, Wheaton:
Crossway Books, 1994.
Voelz, James W. What Does This Mean? St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1995
Wells, David F. God in the Wasteland, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.
____. Losing our Virtue, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
____. No Place for Truth, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993.