Tried With Fire

These excerpts from Rosaria Butterfield and Francis Schaeffer are rather uncanny given the latest round of Christian scandals. I have no intention of discussing the scandals themselves. Neither do I intend to gloat over anyone's moral downfall. But I think it is worth taking a very hard look at the movements in the Christian subculture that all but guarantee the perfect Christian family. There are conferences and books galore which play off of fear, especially the fear that our kids will fall into sexual immorality. This is a legitimate concern for parents, which I do not want to make light of, but the solutions are often long on rules and short on gospel. Success is achieved and measured by external behavior, and shame is used to enforce the methodology. When a person falls, he/she needs to own that sin without shifting the blame. But I can't help but wonder if these systems set up their adherents for failure. Moralism never kept anyone from sinning. From Rosaria Butterfield...

Imago dei has been rather life changing for me especially in terms of my identity. In his sermon No Little People , I appreciated Francis Schaeffer's brief discourse on this doctrine's importance in how we relate to humanity as a whole and to fellow believers. I am also reading Ordinary   by Michael Horton   with my small group. One of the problems Ordinary addresses is celebrity Christianity, so I found it interesting how Schaeffer relates a right understanding of imago dei to leadership and warns what may happen when we forget this common ground: Our attitude toward all men should be that of equality because we are common creatures. We are of one blood and kind. As I look across all the world, I must see every man as a fellow creature and I must be careful to have a sense of our equality on the basis of this common status. We must be careful in our thinking not to try to stand in the place of God to other men. We are fellow creatures. And when I step from the creat...

But if a Christian is consecrated, does this mean he will be in a big place instead of a little place? The answer, the next step, is very important: As there are no little people in God’s sight, so there are no little places. To be wholly committed to God in the place where God wants him—this is the creature glorified. In my writing and lecturing I put much emphasis on God’s being the infinite reference point which integrates the intellectual problems of life. He is to be this, but he must be the reference point not only in our thinking but in our living. This means being what he wants me to be, where he wants me to be. Nowhere more than in America are Christians caught in the twentieth-century syndrome of size. Size will show success. If I am consecrated, there will necessarily be large quantities of people, dollars, etc. This is not so. Not only does God not say that size and spiritual power go together, but he even reverses this (especially in the teaching of Jesus) and tells us t...

Let us never forget that we who stand in the historic stream of Christianity really believe that false doctrine, at those crucial points where false doctrine is heresy, is not a small thing.   If we do not make clear by word and practice our position for truth as truth and against false doctrine, we are building a wall between the next generation and the gospel.  And twenty years from now, men will point their finger back at us, this is the result of the flow of history... Evangelism which does not lead to purity of life and purity of doctrine is just as faulty and incomplete as an orthodoxy which does not lead to a concern for, and a communication with, the lost.  ~ Francis Schaeffer The context of this quote was Schaeffer's concern over Billy Graham's desire to join forces with liberal theologians and Catholics under the umbrella of a supposedly common gospel.  According to Iain Murray, Schaeffer's warning went unheeded. From  Evangelicalism Divided by Iai...