This is a brief book report for my evangelical Christian
friends that can also apply to those that are politically active.
What makes the following excerpts so significant is that
they were written nearly THIRTY years ago!
Today, there have been several comments about how the
Church/Bible/Christians have become irrelevant to today’s culture. There needs to flexibility to make room for
the changes in today’s society.
Unfortunately, the Church cannot bend the truths of God’s Word. He is unchangeable. His Word is unchangeable. His truth is unchangeable.
Certainly, the methods that Christians employ to share the
Gospel will have a great effect. The
problem in my short 40+ years of being a Christian has been the increasing
bending over backwards of Christians to be more like the world and less
Christlike. This is what Schaeffer
warned against.
So, I feel, the following passage is more relevant for
Christians today than ever before.
Accommodation, accommodation. How the mindset of accommodation grows and
expands. The last sixty years have given
birth to a moral disaster, and what have we done? Sadly we must say that the evangelical world
has been part of the disaster. More than
this, the evangelical response itself has been a disaster. Where is the clear voice speaking to the
crucial issues of the day with distinctively biblical, Christian answers? With tears we must say that largely it is not
there and that a large segment of the evangelical world has become seduced by
the world spirit of this present age.
And more than this, we can expect the future to be a further disaster if
the evangelical world does not take a stand for biblical truth and morality in
the full spectrum of life. For the
evangelical accommodation to the world of our age represents the removal of the
last barrier against the breakdown of our culture. And with the final removal of this
barrier will come social chaos and the rise of authoritarianism in some form to
restore social order. (p. 141)
But the accommodation we have been speaking of has
constantly taken the form of giving in to the humanistic, secular consensus
which is the dominant destructive force of our day. And if no change in this comes, our opportunity
will be past. Not only will the
compromising portion of evangelicalism go down in collapse, all of us will be
carried down with it. We cannot think
that all of this is unrelated to us. It
will all come crashing down unless you and I and each one of us who loves the
Lord and his church are willing to act.
And so I challenge you. I call
for Christian radicals, and especially young Christian radicals, to stand up in
loving confrontation…with all that is wrong and destructive in the church, our
culture, and the state. (p.151)
Francis A. Schaeffer
The Great Evangelical Disaster, 1984, Crossway
Books
Take some time to think this through and let me know what
you think. Now, more than ever,
Christians need to be engaged with the world without compromising the absolute
truths of God’s character.
