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.
