Whatever your initial emotional reaction to Radical, the guilt of not living up to its vision of “what it means to be radically abandoned to Christ” may be what haunts most readers now…[Platt’s] vision of discipleship is unsustainable for the average person and minimizes the fact that God normatively uses very ordinary means to grow his people into maturity. By contrast, Horton’s Ordinary provides a more helpful, full-orbed vision of Christian discipleship that…champions a big vision of how ordinary life is shot through with God’s glory.

The German atheistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the center of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.”^[1] That is to say, so much of the history of ideas is a pendulum swinging back and forth, where one movement seeks to counter a previous movement, and sometimes the new movement itself overcorrects and needs countering by yet another movement. But according to Schopenhauer, these movements and counter-movements can eventually find “rest”—that is, a moderate, balanced, middle-ground proposal.

David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (2010) is one such counter-reaction in the history of ideas. Impacting a generation of young people throughout the 2010s, Radical vigorously counters the comfortable, consumer-driven Christianity of many American churches with a vision of Christian discipleship that entails a total abandonment to Jesus Christ modeled after Luke 9:57–62. As can be seen from Radical’s sensational rise to the New York Times Bestsellers list and million-plus copies sold, Platt counters the problem of comfortable, cultural Christianity in a provocative way that captured the attention of a generation of American Christians.

However, for as helpful a correction as Radical is to a real problem in American Christianity, Platt nevertheless overcorrects and creates an unhealthy and unwarranted expectation. Radical leaves the impression that in order for one’s life to count, one needs to give away most of your income/wealth, be completely devoted to international missions, and have experienced extraordinary things on short term trips abroad or on periodic excursions to your city’s worst neighborhoods.

To re-center this overcorrection, Michael Horton’s Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World (2014) attempts to bring the pendulum closer to Schopenhauer’s place of “rest.” He sketches a middle way between complacency and frenetic restlessness, arguing that the quest for ever-higher peaks of spiritual experience inevitably results in burnout, selfish ambition, and an insatiable craving for novelty.

In this article, I’m going to focus on three areas where I think Horton offers a helpful counter-correction to Platt. For each area, I will explain what negative aspects of Christian culture Platt seems to be rightly reacting against, provide an example of how Platt effectively counters it, demonstrate that aspects of his response are an overreaction, and then show how Horton helpfully re-centers Platt. After doing this for each area, I’ll offer one concluding reflection.

Three Pendulums Swinging

1. The American Dream

If you combine a biblical understanding of vocation, a strong work ethic, and providentially given opportunities in a (free) market compatible with Christian principles, prosperity normally follows. That is how God designed his world to work, and it is still how the world generally operates after the Fall. However, the apostle Paul says that such prosperous people often encounter significant spiritual dangers too: “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction” (1 Tim. 6:9).

Tragically, most of American culture has given itself over to the desire to be rich and has incorporated this desire into our social imaginary. We call it the American Dream. In its most pervasive forms, the American Dream sees comfort, wealth, and ease as the highest good of existence. We are here to “promote our brand,” “climb the corporate ladder,” be “the millionaire next door,” and most importantly, to be happy—always happy. It is a dream that assumes bigger is always better, ignores the spiritual dangers of the desire for wealth, prioritizes immediate gratification, and is out of touch with how selfish it actually is in practice.

Enter Platt. Writing on the heels of the Great Recession (2007–2009), Platt’s Radical fights this type of selfish, self-centered, “build bigger barns” mentality that has no regard for global human suffering or the cause of Christ among the nations while being obsessed with personal safety and creature comforts. Platt forcefully contends that American Christians have by-and-large been more in step with the materialism of the American Dream than with the values of the kingdom of Christ. He says,

So, what is the difference between someone who willfully indulges in sexual pleasures while ignoring the Bible on moral purity and someone who willfully indulges in the selfish pursuit of more and more material possessions while ignoring [both] the Bible and caring for the poor? The difference is that one involves social taboo in the church and the other involves the social norm in the church.^[2]

Platt calls the American church to “wake up” from the daze of sports and consumerism and personal advancement and 401(k) obsession to the real spiritual warfare that is ongoing around the world.^[3] Corporately, Platt says that our multi-million-dollar church buildings, expensive production-level services, and paltry amounts of money being given to the materially poor are examples of how the American Dream has infected the priorities of the church. To help make Platt’s vision of discipleship concrete, he repeatedly highlights examples of believers who sold all their possessions to give to the poor and/or have moved to the poorest places in the world to minister to the least materially advantaged people.

While Radical is a genuinely helpful wake-up call (as most counter pendulum swings are), it is nevertheless an overcorrection. I could not personally find a sentence where Platt has a positive word to say about wealth apart from its potential use for funding global missions. It is as though texts such as 1 Timothy 6:17, where Paul explicitly says that they rich have what they do, in part, for their enjoyment, are not considered. This is not to mention the rather positive view that the Old Testament has towards having ones needs met (e.g. Lev. 26:3–5; Num. 13:27; Psalm 37:25; Proverbs 6:6–11; 10:3–4, 22; 28:20; 30:8). Further, providing for one’s family—which requires a certainly amount of wealth being allocated exclusively for them—is explicitly commanded by Paul in 1 Timothy 5:8. If a believer does not do so, he is worse than a nonbeliever!

On this topic Horton helpfully re-centers us. He acknowledges the tension, “If you’re wondering whether your life counts if it consists of so many ordinary things every day, you are in good company.” ^[4] Yet, he understands that like Paul, we must learn how to abound (Phil. 1:21) and he brings us a more balanced view of the relationship between labor and wealth. He says,

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