James E Hartley

Schaeffer and the Modern Evangelical

“We live in a post-Christian world. What should be our perspective as individuals, as institutions, as orthodox Christians, as those who claim to be Bible-believing? How should we look at this post-Christian world and function as Christians in it?…The church in our generation needs reformation, revival, and constructive revolution.” (italics in original)

That is the opening paragraph of a book. In what year was this book written?

It seems like something that could have been written in 2024, but the actual date is 1969. Death in the City by Francis Schaeffer.

One of the huge advantages of reading older books is that they get us out of the mindset that what we see around us is somehow new and different. There are endless laments these days about the post-Christian society, the crisis in the church, the horrors to come if our course is not corrected. But, then we turn to Schaeffer, writing a half-century ago, and his language is every bit as Apocalyptic as anything you will find today:

[T]he whole culture has shifted from Christian to post-Christian.
Do not take this lightly! It is a horrible thing for a man like myself to look back and see my country and my culture go down the drain in my own lifetime. It is a horrible thing that sixty years ago you could move across this country and almost everyone, even non-Christians, would have known what the gospel was. A horrible thing that forty to fifty years ago our culture was built on the Christian consensus, and now we are in an absolute minority….
There is only one perspective we can have of the post-Christian world of our generation: an understanding that our culture and our country is under the wrath of God. Our country is under the wrath of God!

Again, exclamations like that are now proclaimed daily by speakers who think they are saying something new. Schaeffer was there long before those modern unrelenting critics of the society. Schaeffer really does believe that there is death in the city. This books spends much time recrafting the language of Jeremiah and Lamentations, repeatedly arguing that we too should be denouncing the world with the same fury Jeremiah used.

First, we may say there is a time, and ours is such a time, when a negative message is needed before anything positive can begin. There must first be the message of judgment, the tearing down. There are times—and Jeremiah’s day and hours are such times—when we cannot expect a constructive revolution if we begin by over emphasizing the positive message. People often say to me, What would you do if you really met a modern man on a train and you had just an hour to talk to him about the gospel? And I’ve said over and over, I would spend forty-five or fifty minutes on the negative, to really show him his dilemma—to show him that he is more dead than even he thinks he is; that he is not just dead in the twentieth-century meaning of dead (not having significance in this life), but that he is morally dead because he is separated from the God who exists. Then I’d take ten or fifteen minutes to preach the gospel. And I believe this is usually the right way for the truly modern man, for often it takes a long time to bring a man to the place where he understands the negative.

There is many a speaker today who seems to be taking Schaeffer’s advice. Is it good advice? I have no idea what it was like in 1969, but there is something a bit strange in this advice in 2024. Schaeffer’s man on a train in 2024 already knows that he is condemned by Christians. He already knows that Christians think he is a terrible person living under the wrath of God. If you spend 45 minutes telling him that, then is he hearing anything he has not already heard many times? If the goal of the Church is to tell society that it is wicked and horrible and under the wrath of God, then I think we can all agree it has met its goal.

But is that the goal of the Church? Why is Francis Schaeffer advocating sending so much time on the negative? Would Schaeffer really be at home in the modern church?

Not at all. Just as you settle in to thinking Schaffer would fit right in among the Christians engaged in fear mongering about the horrors of modern society, a strange note creeps in. “I am convinced that one of the great weaknesses in evangelical preaching in the last years is that we have lost sight of the biblical fact that man is wonderful.” Wonderful? These people living in this really wicked post-Christian world are wonderful?

If people are wonderful, why is the world in such horrible shape? Why is there death in the city?

First of all, man is separated from God; second, he is separated from himself (thus the psychological problems of life); third he is separated from other men (thus the sociological problems of life); fourth he is separated from nature (thus the problems of living in the world—for example the ecological problems). All these need healing.

That man on the train with whom Schaeffer will spend 45 minutes talking about the negative, talking about the wrath of God, Schaeffer cares about that man.

[W]e must comprehend and speak of the lostness of the lost, including the man without the Bible. And like Paul we must not be cold in our orthodoxy, but deeply compassionate for our own kind even when it is costly.
If we are Christians and do not have upon us the calling to respond to the lostness of the lost and a compassion for those of our kind for this life and eternity, our orthodoxy is ugly. And it is ugly in the presence of anybody who is an honest person. And more than that, orthodoxy without compassion is ugly to God.

Orthodoxy without compassion is ugly. That is the important lesson for these days. If you are condemning the lostness of the word, if you are screaming about the wrath of God, but you do not have love, then your message is ugly, not just to those whom you are condemning, but to God. If you believe that there are people out there who are leading sinful lives and are leading others astray, and you do not have compassion for them, then you are missing the entire point of the gospel.

Death in the City is a book written over a half century ago, but it is a book that many people today need to read. The next time you hear someone denouncing their opponents, calling down the wrath of God, if you do not also hear compassion, then this is the book you should give that person. It is book perfectly crafted for the modern age; it starts out all fire and brimstone, and then slowly reminds us that God’s love is there even for those under God’s wrath. When we forget about the love, when we fail to communicate our compassion to those outside the church, then our message is ugly not just to them, but to any honest person and, most importantly, to God.

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Chesterton, G. K. The Ballad of the White Horse “Yea, Faith Without a Hope”

(We can thank Crossway that this book is still in print. They sent me a copy so I could l review it here. I had no idea when I got it that this message from the 1960s would have such importance for today.)

The Coming Crack-Up of the Left

There is a specter haunting America, but it is no longer Marxism. Widely dubbed “Woke,” this ideology “is likely to make us stray from, not guide us toward, the kind of society to which we all have reason to aspire.” It is “likely to create a society composed of warring tribes rather than cooperating compatriots.” It is a “trap,” on both political and personal levels.

The most striking thing about those quotations from The Identity Trap: A Story of Power and Ideas in Our Time is the author. You might have assumed the author was a conservative, rehearsing well-worn arguments. But Yascha Mounk is a Man of the Left. His last two books were examinations of, in his words, right-wing illiberalism that “presents an acute danger to the survival of our political system” and is “an existential threat to democracies.” But, in his newest book, Mounk explores how the threat to liberalism also comes from the Left.

Read the rest at AIER

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SMITH’S MAN OF SYSTEM IN ROMEO AND JULIET

The biggest threats to liberty always come from people who look at the world and become firmly convinced that their plan to overhaul the whole system will bring great joy. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith argues that such people will inevitably bring harm to society.

In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare has provided a marvelous example of such a person, exploring both the motivation and the devastation which ensues. Friar Laurence may rank with Iago and Edmund in the roll call of Great Shakespearean Villains.

Read the rest at AdamSmithWorks

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Identity: Christian

Wander onto a college campus these days, and you cannot miss the zeitgeist. The single most important thing to know about any person you meet, any speaker you hear, or any author you read is that person’s identity. “I identify as…” has become a ritualistic phrase, rattled off in the same bored tone that characterizes formal expressions of gratitude in mass-market fundraising letters. (“Thank you for all you do for our cause. Please send us a check.”)

Imagine the question on a form: “How do you identify yourself?” The first reaction could well be that there is not enough space on the form to list all the aspects of your person that make up your identity. “When I was young, I owned a plastic model of a pteranodon.” (The one in this picture! Google is amazing—it took me two minutes to find a picture of something I owned 45 years ago and have not seen since.) I am not sure anyone will think that is an important part of my identity, but it truly is something that distinguishes me from others who might be a lot like me but were not so blessed.

So, instead, imagine you can list only six aspects of your identity. Which do you choose? Now, imagine you have to pick one, the one thing that is the most important part of your identity.

According to Kevin Emmert in The Water and the Blood: How the Sacraments Shape Christian Identity, if you are a Christian, then not only should you have listed that as the single most important part of your identity, but you should have listed it as the only thing even when you were allowed to have a list of multiple overlapping identities. Another way of putting it: if you are a Christian, intersectionality is out, and unisectionality is in.

Emmert drives toward this conclusion via an exploration of baptism and communion, the water and the blood of the title of his book. These sacraments of the Christian church are not merely pro forma rituals of the Church; they are the “means of grace,” the “instruments through which God makes himself known and communicates his goodness to us.”

“Baptism reinforces the truth that our identity is not self-generated or determined ultimately by our own personal narratives and achievements or by our failures, mistakes, and unmet expectations. Nor is our identity reduced to the basic elements that distinguish us from others, as significant as those may be. Rather, our identity as persons in Christ, no less our very existence, is a gift from God, determined ultimately by Christ’s life story and his accomplishments.”

As Emmert explains, both baptism and communion shape the Christian identity because they are the means by which God joins with us in putting to death our old identity and giving birth to our new identity. “The baptismal font, therefore, is not just a tomb in which our old selves are buried and left to rot but also a womb from which our new selves emerge.” Baptism marks the birth of a new identity; one is born again (to use the well-worn phrase) into a new family, the Church. The old self, and whatever identities it had, are put to death, and the new self is born with a new identity.

Communion is the continual repetition of baptism. Once again in the presence of one’s family, the Church, Christ’s death and resurrection are reenacted in bodily form. Christians consume Christ’s flesh and blood, literally reenacting your grandmother’s phrase “You are what you eat.” Death to the old self; resurrected in Christ. That is the message of both baptism and communion.

The Water and the Blood often wanders from a focus on the sacraments into a broader discussion of Christianity. The final chapter, for example, reads like a sermon on 1 Peter 2:9: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (ESV).

From these wanderings, it becomes obvious as the book goes on that Emmert’s concern is only in part explaining “how the sacraments shape Christian identity.” His real concern is Christian Identity itself. This is most obvious when he explains what it means to become part of the church:

“To be an ecclesial being is to be committed to the church, to participate in the life and work of the body, and to live in communion with other persons united to Christ. Fundamentally, this entails making the church the primary people group with which we associate.”

Unfortunately, it is easy to misunderstand what Emmert is saying there. I am a Christian and I am a college professor, so I spend time associating with Christians and with my colleagues and students. Which should be the primary people with whom I associate? There are many Christians who assert that in order to be a faithful Christian, one must spend more time with Christians than non-Christians. Even if there is some concession to the need for employment, obviously one’s social life should primarily be at church activities. Churches fill the week with “opportunities” for Christians, where “opportunities” really means “things you need to attend unless you want everyone questioning the depths of your faith.” This is a rather superficial approach to the Christian life.

But when Emmert emphasizes “make the church the primary people group with which we associate,” he is not talking about it being the place we spend the most time. He means something deeper.

“When a man and woman bind themselves in marriage, they vow to forsake all others, meaning that their spouse is their first commitment and that all other relationships are measured by their marital union. So it is with our union and communion with Christ and his body. The world offers us endless counterfeits of the communion we were created for. Political parties, false religions, activist groups, social clubs—the list could go on—promise a sense of belonging and thus self-understanding, but they promise more than they can deliver and thus, in the end, offer us nothing at all.”

Again, it is unfortunately easy to misunderstand what Emmert is saying. Is joining a social club really akin to committing adultery? Is feeling like one belongs in a political party or activist group the same thing as breaking one’s marriage vows to forsake all others? If I say that I belong at my job, does that mean I have abandoned Christ?

I don’t think that is what Emmert is saying. (And, I think I am reading him accurately and not just charitably.) Think about the question this way. Compare the following two accurate statements I could make about myself:
1. I am a Christian who works as a college professor.
2. I am a college professor who is a member of the church.
Both true, but the change in emphasis is notable. If I am reading Emmert correctly, then the primary message of his book is that if the first statement is true, then the second statement should feel like it is an error.

The statement “I am a Christian who works as a college professor” is a way of shaping my identity as a college professor. I am not a college professor who is merely incidentally a Christian. On the other side, when I participate in the life of a church, does the statement “I am a college professor who is receiving communion” seem like the focus is a bit off? Being a Christian shapes the way I do my job as a professor. Being a college professor is incidental to the way I take communion.

This is what the Identity Game gets wrong. Everyone recognizes that all the aspects of my identity are not equally important. But when we think about what is the most important part of our identity, we should realize that if we profess to be Christians, there really isn’t any other aspect of our identity that is on the same level. I am a Christian Former Owner of a Plastic Dinosaur. That seems like a strange way to assert my identity. I am a Christian College Professor should seem equally strange. One of these things is vastly more important than the other. Much better is “I am a Christian who works as a College Professor.” That gets the emphasis right. My identity is Christian; everything else is something incidental about me.

Extending Emmert’s argument into society writ large has enormous implications. When you look at the church in America today, you see many people proudly proclaiming their Christian Identity, but often with an equal partner in the Identity. Christian Nationalist. American Christian. Progressive Christian. Open and Affirming Christian. Far too many people are in desperate need of grasping the importance of Emmert’s book. The Water and the Blood are what shape our identity. What unites all those who have joined the church in baptism and participate in the church in communion is more important than what divides them. Indeed, compared to that thing that unites the church, what other incidentals matter at all?

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(Legal codes have rituals too. One of which is to say: I received a copy of this book from Crossway so that I could write this review. Some rituals truly are empty and devoid of any importance.)

The Complaint of Peace

“As Peace, am I not praised by both men and gods as the very source and defender of all good things?…Though nothing is more odious to God and harmful to man, yet it is incredible to see the tremendous expenditure of work and effort that intelligent beings put forth in an effort to exchange me for a heap of ruinous evils.” (Erasmus, The Complaint of Peace, 1517, Dolan translation)

A few years after Erasmus personified Folly in his most famous work, The Praise of Folly, he went back to Olympus and brought forth The Complaint of Peace. The goddess Peace has a lot about which to complain.

Peace begins by noting how obvious it is that people should prefer peace to war. Nature itself shows that peace is preferable to the destruction of war. Yet war is seemingly omnipresent. Looking around for allies, Peace hears the words of Christ, who bears the title “Prince of Peace.” She rushes to Christ’s followers, expecting to find opponents of war. “Yet I find that Christians are actually worse than the heathen.” The people, princes, theologians, and clergy in early 16th-century Europe were constantly at war with one another.

Peace is dismayed that Christians, from the Pope on down, have decided that war is the natural state of affairs. It would be one thing if the wars were for just causes. “Of course, I am speaking of those wars that Christians conduct among themselves. It is not our intention to condemn those who undertake legitimate war to repel barbarous invasions or defend the common good.” But that is not the most common excuse for war in the time Erasmus was writing. “It shames me to recall the vain and superficial reasons whereby Christian princes provoke the world to war.”

Read the rest at the Online Library of Liberty

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Is Socrates Being Ironic in The Republic?

“Unless…the philosophers rule as kings or those now called kings and chiefs genuinely and adequately philosophize, and political power and philosophy coincide in the same place, while the many natures now making their way to either apart from the other are by necessity excluded, there is no rest from ills for the cities my dear Glaucon, nor I think for humankind, nor will the regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible, and see the light of the sun.”

(Plato, The Republic, Bloom translation)

The Republic is a sprawling book. It starts off focused on the idea of Justice, but before long, Socrates is off leading his interlocutors on a wandering journey, crafting the perfect state. Well, not exactly perfect. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to live in Socrates’ republic. But in his mechanical way, Socrates knocks down objection after objection.

Should the philosophers be kings? Well obviously, right? You do want wise people running the state, right? And someone who loves (philo) the study of wisdom (sophos) is by definition a philosopher. So, one of the steps of a great republic is to have it ruled by philosophers. How are you going to argue with that?

The whole book is like that. Just one reasonable thing after another. But yet, there is that nagging sense that there is a mistake in there somewhere, because Plato’s Republic really does seem like it is describing a very odd place.

For a number of years, I have heard that many (well, probably most) of those who make the study of Plato a source of their income were convinced that Socrates was not being serious in The Republic, that he did not mean what he said. I have always found that argument strange—there is no place in the entire book where Socrates gives a wink and a nudge to suggest he is just kidding. He seems to be seriously advancing this argument with great determination.

I’ve asked people who are skeptical that Socrates is being serious where they got the idea. The most detailed answer I ever heard was something along the lines of “Socrates talks about using a microscope and microscopes distort.” In rereading The Republic recently, I think this might be referring to the part in Book II where Socrates talks about studying justice in the city and in the individual, but it is not at all clear how that section indicates that Socrates is not seriously advocating what he says.

But as I continued along in that recent rereading and talking about it with a former student (Izzy Baird, who always insists on getting acknowledged for being involved in an interesting discussion), an idea started small in the back of my mind and then expanded the further I went along.

In Book IV, Socrates discusses the Noble Lie. The idea is that all the lower classes, the non-philosophers, will need to be convinced that the society in which they live is the best society. So, the idea of a Noble Lie is proposed, a wonderful story which is not true but will make all those farmers believe that they really do live in a great society.

What if The Republic is a Noble Lie of this sort? Then the people who argue that Socrates is being ironic are right! I think it is a coherent argument to say that Socrates knew the Republic would fail, he expected philosophers would discover the errors, but there is some virtue in telling the non-philosophers that this would be the ideal state.

This would explain why Socrates keeps steering the conversation into even more outrageous places. There is no hint in the book that he is not being serious because that very much is part of the game. Naked coed gymnastics? Sure, what’s the problem with that? What makes this way of thinking about the book really interesting to me is how it changes the way the reader has to respond to the book. If Socrates really believed this was the best state, it is easy to dismiss the argument because it is just crazy. But if he didn’t believe it is the best state, then the challenge is to come up with the counterargument that you think Socrates could not easily handle by just becoming more outrageous and yet staying perfectly logical. That is a lot harder to do—which means you have to think even more about why it is objectionable.

What fascinates me about this way of reading The Republic is that this is a parlor trick I pull all the time in teaching. All. The. Time. Stake out an absurd position and then defend it against all the inevitable counter-arguments. It really makes students think hard. They know what I am saying is absurd. But why is it absurd?

Take the philosopher-king idea. Part of what intrigues me about the idea is Socrates’ contrast between true philosophers and those who are not philosophers but claim the title of philosopher. Socrates would surely be disgusted with modern philosophy departments. If that is right, then what he means by a philosopher king is most surely not modern doctors of philosophy becoming rulers.

Which then raises the question, is it possible for anyone to be the type of philosopher Socrates asserts are the good rulers? If nobody could ever be that type of philosopher, then there is no possible philosopher-king. That fits with the idea I now cannot evade that the point of this exercise is not describing a real blueprint for a society. We all fail to be pure philosophers.

Now that I am convinced Socrates is using this as a thought experiment rather than a blueprint, the discussion of the reluctant philosopher-king part makes way more sense. There can never be a philosopher-king because the philosopher will be thinking about things far above the mundane details of being a king. That is why philosophers have to be compelled to be kings, which means they can’t really be philosophers anymore. You can’t spend all day studying Truth, which is by definition the highest calling of a philosopher, and spend all day ruling the city. So, the philosopher-king must only get a small bit of wisdom before being hauled back to city management. It can’t work. As Glaucon notes, it is an injustice to make a philosopher abandon philosophy—and Socrates does not disagree that this is not just to the philosopher. Socrates says that the injustice to the philosopher is necessary to have justice for the city, but then the city is not just for one of the classes in the city. This is so incredibly interesting—how had I never noticed this before? Socrates is very clever at laying traps for the unwary. It is an even better book than I thought.

On a different note, like everyone, I really enjoy The Cave ™. But, what I most like about it is that it perfectly agrees with Christian notions of Revelation. Man is trapped in his sin and cannot see the light. Someone comes into the cave saying that there is more to this world than what can be seen, but the people in the cave reject it. So, they have to be led into the light, and only then they can understand.

What intrigues me most about this is figuring out the causality. Does this sort of description of Christian theology resemble Plato’s cave because a) Plato was inspired or b) the merger of Athens and Jerusalem is the reason I think about revelation in this way. I think it is a), but I don’t know how to be sure because I cannot imagine a non-Platonic Christian theology to see how it would be different. Obviously, since God is sovereign, then it is not accidental that Christianity is born into the Greco-Roman world, so the counterfactual is not really relevant…but it still intrigues me a lot.

And that is why The Republic is worth reading and rereading. As anyone who has read the whole thing will tell you, it is a slog to get through it. But, scattered throughout are things that will make you pause and think deeply. Every time you read it, you’ll pause at different points. You’ll learn a lot, not from accepting the argument in the book, but rather from trying to figure out why the argument in the book is wrong. Sometimes Great Books are Great because they are so very wrong.

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