“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.
Related Posts
Schaeffer, Francis The Church Before the Watching World “The World is Watching the Church
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.)
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