Francis Schaeffer, (unintentionally) providing evangelicals with a diagnostic tool for assessing their political engagement (let the reader understand):

In this war [i.e., the spiritual battle between God/Satan, good/evil], if Christians win a battle by using worldly means, they have really lost. On the other hand, when we seem to lose a battle while waiting on God, in reality we have won. The world may mistakenly say, “They have lost.” But if God’s people seem to be beaten in a specific battle, not because of sin or lack of commitment or lack of prayer or lack of paying a price but because they have waited on God and refused to resort to the flesh, then they have won.

Francis Schaeffer, on the central problem facing the church in every age:

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus that surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

Obviously, Schaeffer’s list of “-isms” appears rather dated to our eyes, but that only serves to throw his point into sharper relief: the external threats are never as important as the manner in which the church responds to them. Alan Jacobs made a similar point on his blog a while back: “In any given community, there will be a profound divide between those who believe that the most dangerous lies are the ones told by our enemies and those who believe that the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.” I believe that (in many cases) you can tell fairly quickly if a person would agree with Schaeffer (and Jacobs) on this question—or not. The implications are far-reaching indeed.

Francis Schaeffer:

A Christian can never say, “I knew the power of the Holy Spirit yesterday, so today I can be at rest.” It is one of the existential realities of the Christian life to stand before God consciously recognizing our need. […]

Christians must humble themselves to know the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit. To the extent that we do not humble ourselves, there will be no power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Lord’s work in the Lord’s way is the Lord’s work in the power of the Holy Spirit and not in the power of the flesh.

Currently reading: The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way and No Little People by Francis A. Schaeffer 📚

Finished reading: Uprooted by Grace Olmstead 📚

Enjoyed celebrating with my mom on Thursday at the opening for the ACC Faculty Exhibition

Tim Keller:

Traditional evangelical churches tend to emphasize personal piety and rarely help believers understand how to maintain and apply their Christian beliefs and practice in the worlds of the arts, business, scholarship, and government. Many churches do not know how to disciple members without essentially pulling them out of their vocations and inviting them to become heavily involved in church activities. In other words, Christian discipleship is interpreted as consisting largely of activities done in the evening or on the weekend.

Tim Keller:

Most American evangelical churches are middle class in their corporate culture. That is, they value privacy, safety, homogeneity, sentimentality, space, order, and control. In contrast, the city is filled with ironic, edgy, diversity-loving people who have a high tolerance for ambiguity and disorder. On the whole, they value intensity and access more than comfort and control.

Brad East, on the detrimental effects of the current online writing ecosystem to the actual craft of writing:

Substack is an ecosystem, and one of the ways it forms both writers and readers is to make every writer a digital entrepreneur hawking a product. Further, it encourages a relationship between writer and readership on the model of celebrity fandom. (After all, you gotta give the people what they want.) […]

[W]e are fooling ourselves if we don’t step back and see clearly what is happening, what the nature of the dynamic is. Writers are being co-opted by the affordances of newsletters, social media, and audio/visual recording and streaming in ways that corrode the essence of good writing as well as the vocation of the writer itself.

A writer is not an influencer. To the extent that participating in any of these dynamics is necessary for a writer to get started or to get published, then by definition it can’t be avoided. But if it is necessary, we should see it as a necessary evil. Evil in the sense that it is a threat to the very thing one is seeking to serve, to indwell, celebrate, and dilate: the life of the mind, the reading life, the life of putting words on the page that are apt to reality and true to human nature and beautiful in their form and honoring to God. Exhaustively maintaining an online platform inhibits and enervates the attention, the focus, the literacy, the patience, the quietness, and the prayers that make the Christian writing life not only possible, but good.

Brad can be strident when commenting on such matters. But his conclusion seems difficult to gainsay.