Written by Bruce A. Little |
Monday, August 22, 2022
The new life in Christ does not add onto or build upon the old foundation, it builds on the new foundation of regeneration. The new birth is associated with being crucified with Christ. The reality of the new birth and the indwelling of the Holy Spirits do not mean that one’s life is automatically guided or domineered by the Holy Spirit. However, there is evidence that something real happened internally to the person who confesses Christ

In my last blog, I wrote about what I believe to be an urgency upon American Evangelicalism to recover the truth about which Schaeffer wrote in True Spirituality. History reveals evangelicalism has experienced a shift in focus beginning sometime in the 1980s. Part of that shift was the new emphasis on “relevancy to culture”. It is also important to point out that at this time evangelicals began talking about “culture” instead of “the world”. The importance of this shift is that the idea of culture is rather ambiguous as can be seen by all the books today trying to explain culture (this is another part of the story to be addressed later). It is not that Christians should not talk about culture, but it should always be in the context of “the world” and the spirit of the age.
Undoubtedly there is an element of wisdom in being relevant if one means speaking meaningfully into the ears of the world. It is a matter of wisdom, not a command. Furthermore, relevancy is not the emphasis in either the Old or New Testaments. Unfortunately, relevancy has become the interpretive lens through which many evangelicals now read the Scriptures (more on this in a forthcoming post).
Consequently, the relationship between the Christian life and the life of self-denial has been leaking out of the Christian message as it does not sound very relevant to the ears of today. In the next blog, I will give an account of how this happened, but for this blog, it is important to consider the New Testament teaching on the Christian life as a life involving self-denial.
Chapter two of True Spirituality is titled “The Centrality of Death” where Schaeffer examines the Scripture regarding the role of death in understanding the message of walking in the newness of life. Of course, that sounds odd to our ears today as the evangelical speaks only of the newness of life which of course is definitely true to the Christian message, but there is the other side.
The Apostle Paul testifies: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God” (Gal 2:20). In the context of “walking in newness of life” we read: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions” (Ro 6:12) which is a call to self-denial. However, it is common today to hear the message that self-denial is an ugly form of legalism and therefore, it must be rejected. This has led many evangelicals to reject or only selectively apply the idea of self-denial as part of the spiritual life.
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Thursday, August 18, 2022
Over the last 20 years, there have been a number of insane turns within evangelicalism. These turns were not away from theology, but as David Wells said it has been a turn to a different theology. Most disheartening in all of this is that Christians in the pew have been cheated from the treasure of their birthright in Christ. With the passing of time, Christian leaders became more occupied with being relevant to the modern world than true to the God of the Book.

In the Preface to True Spirituality Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984) confessed that in 1951-52 while living in Champery, Switzerland he experienced something of an existential crisis in his Christian life. The book is the conclusion of that struggle. He explained the struggle with the “problem of reality” of Christian truth in his own life. He was troubled by the realization that the “reality [of his faith] was less than it had been in the early days after [he] had become a Christian” (195). I think many Christians, if honest, would confess something of this struggle themselves if they ever stop to think about it.  However, for Schaeffer this would not do, either Christianity meant something about living each day in the Truth of God’s reality and the reality of Christian salvation, or it did not. Although Schaeffer was convinced of the truth of historic Christianity, he was concerned with the growing weightlessness he experienced of the reality of Christ in his own life (Christ in me), a reality he had known in the early days of becoming a Christian.  Unsettled by this lack of reality, Schaeffer determined to go back to the beginning of his confession of Christ to see where things had gone wrong for him. The crisis ended when the liberating truth that Christians have been freed from the bonds of sin because of the new birth. He explained that without this truth arresting him, the work like L’Abri would not have been possible”( 196). In fact, he says, “This book was published after a number of others, but in a certain sense it should have been the first” (195).
Over the course of the next several months, I intend to link this book with Schaeffer’s last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster.
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Monday, July 18, 2022
The Christian’s apologetic task, according to Schaeffer, is to show man where the point of tension existed between his false presuppositions and the way the world really is. Of course, this was not a game for Schaeffer and he urged the Christian always to give the answer as understood in light of historic Christianity and to do so in a loving and compassionate tone.

Three books serve as the foundation for all Schaeffer’s other books, forming a trilogy: The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason, and He Is There and He Is Not Silent. Towards the end of his life, he claimed that his message had remained the same throughout his ministry, however, his emphasis did shift. In 1982, the works of Francis Schaeffer were edited by Schaeffer and published in a five-volume set in which the trilogy is in the order in which it was written. This order reveals the development and foundation of his thinking apologetically and is essential to understanding Schaeffer and his apologetic method which I think it is fair to say he would not call it a method. Historic Christianity, according to Schaeffer, was creation centered and central to the fact that God created man in His image. The first apologetic implication of creation was that man had intrinsic worth which meant he was to be treated with respect and love even in his fallen state, that even in his fallenness man had worth, even nobility.
This truth moved Schaeffer to take all men seriously and to answer the honest questions from fallen man. He would say that when confronted with another member of the human race, we should first see a human being—not first a Christian or non-Christian. This made all the difference in the world in Schaeffer’s apologetics. He had a love for humanity and deep sympathy for the brokenness of humanity because of sin.
The Christian’s apologetic task, according to Schaeffer, is to show man where the point of tension existed between his false presuppositions and the way the world really is. Of course, this was not a game for Schaeffer and he urged the Christian always to give the answer as understood in light of historic Christianity and to do so in a loving and compassionate tone. For Schaeffer, the real point of contact with the modern (and the postmodern mind) was reality. Regardless of what presuppositions a man claims as grounds for his worldview, Schaeffer argued that they can be tested for truthfulness when pressed against the reality in which every person must live. In this, Schaeffer shared a view often expressed by C. S. Lewis.
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Monday, April 18, 2022
When individual Christians do involve themselves in cultural matters, they end up merely following the world and add nothing distinctively Christian to the issue except maybe on an obvious moral issue. So, in every way the Christian voice, if not lost, is very diluted, limp and the witness of Christ is muted. When or if Christians speak to the cultural corruption around them, there ought to be something that clashes with what the world is doing. The clash is in the difference between what informs the Christian’s mind and what informs the voice of the world.

Recently I was reading a brief essay by Sir Roger Scruton titled “The Pestilence of Pulpit Politics”. He speaks to the matter of the politics of religious leaders. The context of Sir Roger’s remarks focuses on a meeting of Roman Catholic bishops in the UK during the early 1980s. At that time, bishops were encouraged to get more involved in cultural affairs. Although Scruton’s remarks are directed to this group of RC bishops, his comments apply equally to the evangelical leaders in the Protestant tradition. He writes:
“We must remember that a certain kind of politics is, for a priest, an easy way out. It is far more agreeable to exalt oneself through compassion for what is anonymous and abstract–the working class, the victims of capitalist oppression, the Third World—than to work humbly in the ways of charity, which obliges us to help those concrete, knowable and often unlovable individuals whom Providence has placed in our paths. Not only is it more agreeable, it is also more gratifying to the ego. The attention of the world is more readily captured by the man with a cause than by the man who merely attends to his duty. There lies the origin of the modern heresy, which sees true religion in large-scale worldly enterprises and which exhorts us to fight oppression in Chile, racism in South Africa or nuclear weapons at home—in short, to perfect the unfinished work of Providence—rather than to save our own souls.”
Any evangelical watching with a modicum of insight witnesses this very same mischief-making in leaders in the evangelical world where having a cause overtakes the pursuit of godliness. In fact, in many cases, leaders think that having a cause is doing one’s duty. There is a convoluted notion that the church must be engaged in cultural causes as the way to demonstrate their Christian duty. This can be seen in how many church leaders allow causes such as the Social Justice Warrior Movement to shape their ministry and message.
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Monday, January 3, 2022
To be relevant Christians must re-package the message by being creative, reimagining the message. For years, Christian churches and organizations resisted the temptation to make the message of Christ sound up to date. However, beginning in the middle of the 20th century that all began to change. At first, the message was not changed, it was how it was package for the world’s consumption or remaking the environment in which the Gospel was proclaimed. A new face or atmosphere was given to Christianity.

Culture in the United States shows definite signs of decay and decline. The cultural artifacts lack humanity-affirming values as they erase the lines of reality and its moral structure. Unfortunately, a growing number of Christians are contributing to the decay as they have fallen into the trap of trying to be relevant where being creative overrides the good, the true and the beautiful. The defense is they are just trying to connect with modern man to give him the Gospel—being relevant, I think is the term. Who is this modern man but the one who despises truth?
Christian books flood the market touting some new creative way to do church, use technology, promote evangelism, or calls to jump on the Woke bus, reimagining Christianity to join the social justice warrior’s vision.
Many of the new voices trade on “creativity” or “reimagining” the Christian message. Meanwhile, the Christian community is to accept all of this as being right with Christianity simply because nice Christians are saying it. After all, they are our leaders, and they are the elites so to speak. Of course, we all know that is a fallacy. This is not saying, however, there is no sincerity or real interest in reaching the world for Christ. However, sincerity is not the measure of what is right, Truth is. It is true Christians should find ways to make the Truth applicable to the audience at hand. However, that is not the same thing as re-packaging the Christian message to make it attractive to the world. The message of Christ is grounded in history, which is to say it is attached time and place, it is a part of history. It is a fixed message, and one must be very careful indeed when attempting to reach the world by a clever re-packaging of the message. It was the Enlightenment that consigned the past to irrelevance. It was the new that was to be embraced while the past was criticized as outdated, immature, and without relevance for the present. This is one of the objections by the moderns regarding the Christian message. Believing what the world says, there are those who say that the old way of speaking about the Christian message is not relevant to the modern man.
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Thursday, November 25, 2021
Though some may argue strenuously against any connection between virtue and freedom, all of history is against them. When personal responsibility is divorced from virtue, it is deprived of its guiding principles and moral foundation. Without moral foundations, the freedom to choose will present an opportunity for the selfish one to pursue personal ambition in disregard for the freedoms of others. Where virtue is ignored, rejected, or redefined in pragmatic terms selfish pursuits of power and gain prevail, leaving little to stand between anarchy and totalitarianism.

The concept of freedom is not something that is learned; rather it is bound up in the essence of humanity itself. Although it may not always prevail in every human situation, it is the condition humanity desires from the core of its being. The sense of choice and the desire to choose flow from our being very early on in life. It is why man prefers to be free as opposed to being chained. It is why we think that restricting one’s freedom is severe punishment. This reflects the fact that freedom is not to be understood as a privilege of a few, but is the innate impulse of all humanity. One might say that freedom is a yearning of the soul as hunger and thirst are a longing of the body. One can live with less than desired, but one cannot survive on less than is needed. Freedom is to humanity as breath is to life. When freedom prevails, humanity rejoices.
Freedom, however, is not freestanding or self-sustaining. It requires moral responsibility from all who enjoy the benefits of freedom. Unless men act morally responsible in freedom, freedom will be the occasion for license which will in turn destroy freedom. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in an interview in July 1989 with Time, captured the relationship between freedom and responsibility when he said: “During these 300 years of Western civilization, there has been a sweeping away of duties and expansion of rights. But we have two lungs. You can’t breathe with just one lung and not the other. We must avail ourselves of rights and duties in equal measure. And if this is not established by the law, if the law does not oblige us to do that, then we have to control ourselves.” That is, external law increases where personal responsibility decreases.
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Monday, November 15, 2021
The assumption is that if good outweighs wrong, then there should be no criticism. However, the economy of God’s Kingdom does not operate by weighing the amount of right against the amount of wrong as a way of justifying the wrong. It is not as if the right counterweighs the wrong then all is well.  The economy of God’s Kingdom operates on the foundation of absolutes—His Truth.

It is interesting how many Christens and/or Christian organizations think God forms approval judgments based on relative righteousness.
Notice how often it happens when a Christian group is cited for bad judgment either theologically or culturally. That is, when criticized for supporting questionable cultural fads or theological aberrations, rather than answer the charge the discussion is deflected. The response points to how many people were baptized last year, how much good has been done for the Kingdom, or the response is ambiguous at best and untruthful at worst.
For example, consider those who jump on the cultural bandwagon promoting Critical Race Theory, or join the chorus of those pronouncing systemic racism or white privilege as the social evils of all evils. When confronted, there is little to no discussion of the facts, an examination of terminology or a consideration of the implications for Christian theology and witness. In fact, too often the truth issue fades into the background as if it is not the key issue.
The default position is to boast of the commitment to missions, evangelistic efforts, or how keen they to change the world. To the last point, it is absurd. It is as if God has called His people to change the world. Jesus said the world is our enemy, it is against both God and His people. This is not to suggest that all that is being done, at least in the name of Christ if not always in the nature of Christ, is of no value. It is commendable and should not and must not be denied or minimized.
However, that is not the problem. The problem is that the typical response is off point with the criticism.
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Monday, September 27, 2021
While evangelical Christians nervously were wringing their hands, most did little to rise to the spiritual challenge. In fact, their naivete fueled intellectual laziness and biblical illiteracy. Pulpits continued to preach weightless sermons, musicians started writing meaningless feel-good choruses, while business model programs were developed in an attempt to breathe life back into the church. However, little to no time was dedicated to developing the Christian mind in the lives of the faithful to prepare them for the onslaught against truth that was to come.

There was a time in America when Christianity had the presumption, that is to say, Christianity was considered true, and all other religions were measured against it. During that time Christians were happy with religious freedom because they were majority voice. It was assumed that Christianity was the unofficial religion of America and so it would ever be. Arguments for that conclusion were made by claiming those who came to the new country were Christians seeking freedom to practice their religion. It is true that a case can be made that that was at least in part right.
Furthermore, it is also true that America’s primary political documents were heavily influenced by Christian principles. Undoubtedly this explains the presence of the Decalogue on the Supreme Court building.
Furthermore, in reading primary documents of the Founding Fathers the truth of Christianity was clearly on their minds even if all did not subscribe to a personal faith in Christ. So, I think it fair to give the argument that Christianity had a strong presence in the life of America its due.
The question is, however, how did that give Christianity a permanent status as more people immigrated to this country or how could it guarantee that children born of Christian parents would necessarily choose the Christian way?
Unfortunately, over the last 70 years, there has been a thinning out of the Christian voice in American culture and today many young people growing up in the church are choosing to walk away when they become of age. This has led to frantic attempts by evangelicals to court the younger generation by making the church worldly friendly, that is to make the church look and sound much like the world. This is done in spite of courting theological treason. I suppose many Christians who belonged to the greatest generation (Tom Brokaw’s term) evangelical Christians in America thought it would always be religiously as it had been. Even in face of seismic cultural changes signaling the loss of many traditional beliefs, evangelicals held out hope that it was only a cultural ‘phase.’
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