Thursday, July 24, 2008
True Spirituality, Francis A. Schaeffer, Tyndale House Publishers, 1972, 192 pages, $13 (paperback)
What is True Spirituality? The mechanism that detects liberal theology is immediately set a-flashing. That was my initial reaction to the question raised by Francis Schaeffer in his book, True Spirituality. Forsooth, I needn’t have feared his intellectual-philosophical approach, which contrasts with liberal theology. One does not need to ignore rationality to be truly, embracingly spiritual. The liberal theologians believe that Christianity is indeed irrational, and so all sorts of compromises and compensations are made. Schaeffer is uncompromising, and True Spirituality is the fruit. He conceded that this book, “should have been my first,” and many others agree that the concepts he expresses are foundational to his other works. Skepticism was knocked unconscious by curiosity upon his introductory statement: “For the sake of honesty I had to go all the way back to my agnosticism and think through the whole matter,” that is, True Spirituality.
Schaeffer’s authorial purpose was simply to display his outworking of the “problem of reality.” What does the Bible say about reality as a Christian? He has left the crumbs of his journey from agnosticism to Christianity for us to follow. It is really a book of IF, THEN statements, so the reader has to make dozens of decisions. For example, I was a bit tired of the first few chapters trying to convince me that God exists. I know this, let’s move on! But Schaeffer points out that this PERSONAL, infinite, creator-God exists. This personal aspect is the apologetic and philosophic basis of the book. If the PERSONAL God exists, then . . .
The basic precepts of humanism are false
Rationally, I can believe this because I am personal
This means that God must be my “integration point”
The personal relationships with myself and others take on a new depth and responsibility.
Responsibility to the truth is not ‘heavy’. I think the term responsibility throws us, and we pretend not to hear it. Even today I have to fight with every fiber in my being the impulse to run outside to sunshine and freedom when my mother says just one word: dishes. I could make all sorts of excuses, like the intonation in her voice made me feel threatened and so forth. But responsibility to truth is not like that. It is light because it is in agreement with who we are! We are responsible to exhibit God’s character and relate to one another in love and mercy because we ourselves need it. We are created by a personal God.
The theme of this book is ‘What True Spirituality looks like and why the Christian answer make sense,’ while the thesis asserts ‘True Spirituality is based on the reality of the Creator-creature “temporal-spatial” relationship that answers the basic problems of man.’
The book is organized into two sections: Freedom from the Bonds of Sin, and Freedom from the Results of the Bonds of Sin. I confess that at first I thought Schaeffer rather tedious for addressing these elementary issues. As I read I was reminded that it was Francis Schaeffer doing the thinking. I was surprised, yes, and am now convinced that this book is the chicken soup for the intellectually agitated Christian.
Schaeffer argues that True Spirituality and the Christian life should be synonymous. Christianity is not merely a set of “do-nots.” Regrettably, it is to some, which illustrates that the “inward area is the first place of the loss of true spirituality,” (4). Stripping away the “do-nots” we Christians have the Law of Love and the 10 Commandments. Both of these place the centrality of Christian practice outside of ourselves. Schaeffer argues that the last commandment, “Do not covet,” is the summation of the others and points True Spirituality inward. One must fight covetousness by two tests: “I am to love God enough to be contented,” (9) and “we should love man enough not to envy,” (13). Schaeffer was helpful in defining envy as “a mentality that would give us secret satisfaction at man’s misfortune.” Another weapon against covetousness is thankfulness, for ALL things. If we do not do this, or any other commands of God, we deny what we say we believe by our incriminating practice.
To admit True Spirituality, acknowledging its inward centrality, we must say “no to the world in rebellion with its Creator,” (24). This means death in our lives, the “centrality of death” actually. Schaeffer exhorts that Christ’s death is not only our redemption, but our pattern. Christ taught “rejection in the matters of daily life. This is where we must die,” (28). Schaeffer contrasts this with the prevailing humanistic worldview: “Absolutes of any kind, ethical principles, everything must give in to affluence and selfish personal peace,” (20). He goes further and challenges: “How much thought does the necessity of death by choice provoke, how much conversation?” (26).
The merit of this concept is that it is a sort of breaking the glass cup at the end of the marriage ceremony. Wake up! to what it means to be a Christian. How then, as Christian Hedonists, do we perform daily death rituals? We obey, knowing that as we align ourselves in the will of God through reading His word, prayer, discipleship, we are receiving the best in exchange for the counterfeit. Consider the persecuted church. They suffer daily – secret baptisms in the creek by night, beatings by family for skimming the Bible, imprisonment in a shipping container for years with broken legs. The persecuted church deems imprisonment as safety. It is daily rejection and slaying. And it is happening now. Perhaps it should come to us.
To follow the pattern of Christ, Schaeffer submits that we must also live as if we have been resurrected. This is not so far-fetched. What do we say about baptism? A picture of death to sin, life to Christ. Resurrection is “not just a psychological hope,” but reality. Here Schaeffer points to the Transfiguration of Christ as a glimpse of his post-resurrected glory occurring in time and space. His argument is that we believers have seen heaven and have been resurrected, how could we be resurrected on earth and have the same perspective on earth? What if we could wipe our perspective slate clean (Schaeffer asserts, to my discomfort, even being rid of concepts of good and bad), and replace it with God’s. What if we could remove, as Schaeffer suggests (and to our discomfort), even our concepts of good and bad. What if we could enter a church building – wait, even that is perspective, ahem – what if we could gather with believers and do what God wants – not expecting the Pentecostals to gyrate, or the Quakers to frown, or the Emergents to not bring their Bibles. Communicating with God and “being alive to God,” (45). What if we could kill every instinct to avoid the obnoxious kid whose mentality is ravaged by puberty and disciple him? We would act like new creatures.
Here Schaeffer rescued these thoughts with fresh skepticism: “How are we going to live this way, if we are to think of this (selfless, resurrection business) not merely as some sort of abstract ‘religious experience’, a combination of mood and moment, a vague, contentless, meaningless, existential experience?” (53). He offers “two factors of reality” from 2 Corinthians 5.4-5: I will be with Christ when I die, and I am now indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We are to live as ones resurrected not in our own strength, by the agency of the Holy Spirit, and by active-passivity (Mary-like, constant faith). Thank you, Dr. Schaeffer, for demanding the answer to a question I ask myself every time someone tries to arouse our piety by playing on emotion - lightly playing music during prayer, or giving sermons of a promise without the exhortation to persevere. How far can I go – and still be exercising faith – in asking for daily practical guides for my thinking and my actions? The danger in taking practicality out of spirituality is that it ceases to be True Spirituality. I think this is the point Schaeffer is making: The Christian life is spiritual now. We must live as spiritual beings. True spirituality is not a mood, or even a preference. It is reality now and the reality of what is to come. These things are what Schaeffer calls “basic considerations of the Christian Life and True Spirituality” (55).
Schaeffer insists on the reality of bearing fruit as a Christian. This is the last item I will bring to attention under the “basic considerations.” I love it when authors bring my attention to items of subconscious – that is, things that have been covered with the colored glass of perspective that normally receive no attention. Schaeffer aborted a misconception from my subconscious with this statement: “It is possible as a Christian to be bringing forth the same kind of fruit now as we did before we were Christians,” (81). Doctrine does no good unless it is “doctrine appropriated,” (84). He calls the fact that we are finite creatures that can “bring forth into the external world” “sublime.” The fact that even after regeneration, I can be a “death producing machine” “sobering,” (120).
“The basis is not your faith; it is the finished work of Christ. Faith is the instrument to receive this thing from God that Christ has purchased for us,” (79). I had a flashback to childhood visits to the hairdresser. She would always tilt my head at 37.5 degrees and expect me to hold it for at least two hours – and she always noticed when I drooped half a degree. How grateful I am that the Lord has gifted teachers like Schaeffer to jerk my head back to the finished work of Christ, to what I owe restored and continuing communion with God. It would not be a bad idea to continually ask ourselves, ‘(how, why) do I appreciate “Christ’s finished mediatorial work”?’ Later Schaeffer will argue that this focused understanding of what Christ’s finished work means to me at present will be key to healthy assurance, repentance, and sanctification.
In the second section of True Spirituality, Schaeffer discusses freedom now from the results of the bonds of sin. Two of these freedoms are in conscience and in our “thought world”. In conscience, we are free from perfectionism, and free from thinking of sin abstractly. In the “thought world,” we are delivered, as much as we can be in this life, from “separation from ourselves in the internal world of thought,” (106). Paul addressed this with the phrases “ vain in . . . reasoning,” and “mind void of judgment.” Schaeffer consummates one of his main points in this chapter: Internal is central. It precedes the external (acts, emotion, etc), it is causal to the external, and it is central in morality. “Man . . . is distinguished as man by the fact that in a very real way he lives inside his head,” (112). He points out that our actions, or the fruit of our thought, are not our essence, “but they exhibit what we are,” (116). He draws the conclusions that:
1. Communion with God must take place in our inward self
2. The real battle is in ideas
3. True Spirituality begins in “thought world”
I think a lot of people picture some sort of ‘Angels in the Outfield’ struggle against obstacles of our own ambition. But when we consider, as Schaeffer reminds us, that every action is the direct result of a thought, it is obvious that “thought world” is where the real battle is. I do not think this is some super-hyped conscience ready to check-mate a thought pregnant with sin. I do not think it is exclusively reprimanding our thoughts as they appear. How pitifully obsequious the early saints, or wannabees, were to try and bring their thought world under God’s submission by asceticism. If the internal is central, reform must begin there.
The other concepts that fall under “Freedom from the Results of the Bonds of Sin” include four “substantial” healings. Schaeffer clarifies that substantial means there is the possibility of healing, it is adequate and does not mean perfection
The substantial healing of psychological problems answers the two questions of man. The question of being (which is inescapable), and the question of what man is in the circle of his existence. The only logical position for the non-believer is the self-centered cocoon of humanism. But, “God has made him rational. He cannot move from this cocoon and yet he must – and so he is crushed by what he is.” He is, in a sense, doubly damned: by God’s justice and the denial of his whole being. Neither can man deny that he needs love, and therefore cannot be machine or animal. Schaeffer illustrates how Sigmund Frued condemns himself in this manner. We are personal creatures who need love. Freud argued the purpose of life was procreation. Schaeffer calls this plea of Freud to his fiancée “a shuddering standstill”: “When you come to me, little Princess, love me irrationally.” To stay in the “circle of rationality,” which man is compelled to do, we have two options: Return to our place as a creation of God, or go lower – treat man as animal and machine.
Concerning substantial healing of the total person, man must make God his “final integration point”. That is, God must be where we find our validity and status as creatures in a personal relationship with him. Any other false integration points – relationships, music, entertainment, sex, art – constitute a loss in the future world at the judgment seat, God’s chastisement in the present world, and in the “thought world” inside ourselves.
Finally, Schaeffer deals with healing in relation to other humans. We must beware of the humanistic danger of self-centrality that will transform us into hideous Minotaurs. He cautions that if we turn inward as our integration point, “there is no one to communicate with,” (151). With God as our integration point, we can have healthy relationships.
When I am a creature in the presence of God, and I see that the last relationship is with an infinite God, and these human relationships are among equals, I can take from a human relationship what God meant it to provide . . . enjoy(ing) what that which is beautiful without expecting it to be perfect. (152).We recognize four things:
No human relationship will be sufficient; sufficiency is met in God
Our human relationships can be valid without being finally sufficient
We are not perfect and do not need to cast away relationships
On Christ’s finished work, I can know relationships can be healed.
As Christians, our personal, loving relationships should demonstrate the existence of God. “Love is the interplay of the whole personality,” which is the unit of body and soul (162). We communicate through our bodies. To cheapen this through promiscuity, adultery, or even premature infatuation would be dishonest to ourselves.
Our final responsibility is to exhibit God through his gift of a “supernaturally restored relationship,” (165). Christians are to teach faith (by example), the present meaning of the work of Christ, and practice. This is the final IF, THEN statement: Our calling as Christians “is the only thing that is right on the basis of what Christ did for us in history, on the cross,” (180).
Schaeffer, in being honest with himself and God, has also produced a magnificent apologetic logic. Personal rationality, dear Lepisto, personal rationality . . . is from God. “The Holy Spirit makes us increasingly honest with ourselves,” (13). Fulfillment of the personality begins with accepting Christ as Savior. Why? We discover our personal gifts, how we fit with other people, how to guard ourselves. We are constantly undergoing self-evaluation, as the Holy Spirit exposes the malignancies in our inner-man. God brings a beautiful dynamic to life – we are commanded to be conformed to His Son by the “Divine Guest” who mortifies and cures with divine chemotherapy. I can say with Schaeffer, unapologetically and in the haughty face of humanism, that Christianity is the best because of the personal God who is there, and consequently the rational answers to man’s questions of being.
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2 comments:
beautiful prose
It's on my list!
I purchased this book recently, per this review. Thanks.
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