Learning from the Sharpest Modern-Day Commentator

Confronting the evangelical collapse

If Francis Schaeffer had had the audience Billy Graham received, America and the West would be a vastly different place. Graham had millions of people praying in front of their TV, convincing them that doing so made them saved Christians. Easy believism abounded. Nominal Christianity won the day.

Meanwhile, Schaeffer was sounding every alarm he could that a cultural tide had turned and if Christians did not start standing by for truth and pushing back on the humanism that had already taken over society, it would soon be too late.

Lately I’ve been reading Schaeffer’s The Great Evangelical Disaster, published in 1984. In it he diagnosed the insidiousness of theological compromise and how it has grown more and more nuanced as time has gone by.

It started with liberal theologians denying the inspiration of Scripture. Obviously that marked a pretty clear watershed, and so the next wave of compromise was far less stark.

People started insisting they believed in the Bible’s inspiration but carefully couched their language to say the Bible wasn’t claiming inspiration over all its claims. So, it is inspired, but it’s not inerrant on matters like science and history, they would say. Some things were only recorded as they were understood culturally at the time. You can surely see where this leads—if Genesis 1 was just a reflection of Hebrew cultural beliefs, maybe the Bible’s teachings about something like marriage were, too.

The latest step in the compromise is the most nuanced and subversive yet: we are inundated with evangelical leaders who confess the Bible’s inspiration and inerrancy and yet use the Bible to say exactly what it doesn’t mean. They don’t need to deny the Bible anymore.

They instead find a way to use it to their own purpose, which is most often some form of cultural appeasement. “The Bible is made to say only that which echoes the surrounding culture at our moment of history. The Bible is bent to the culture instead of the Bible judging our society and culture” (Schaeffer 60).

We have become incredibly adept at taking an idea we already want to believe and finding a way to get the Bible to support that idea.

I read a Twitter thread the other day in which the person re-wrote the Prodigal Son parable to be about a trans child coming home and receiving acceptance as “who they are” from a loving father, who corrects the disapproving brother. That’s exactly the kind of twisting I’m talking about. People can make the Bible say the exact opposite of what it actually says and deceive themselves and any who will listen into thinking they have God’s approval.

However, that’s a relatively extreme case. Usually the twisting of Scripture happens far more subversively. More than anything, what happens is that we accept the world’s framing of an issue and adapt our teaching to be more compatible with that framing.

Dr. Voddie Baucham nailed it when he drew the parallel between how we preach on homosexuality vs. how we preach on adultery. Nobody starts a sermon on adultery with “I’m friends with many adulterers! God wants us to love adulterers!” Rather, we call a sin a sin. But for the culturally celebrated sexual sin, we qualify and water down the message.

This doesn’t just go for negative prescriptions, either. The good works we’re called to do are also run through the filter of what’s culturally acceptable. Just look at the way “love your neighbor” has been co-opted as a rubber stamp for any political agenda somebody wants to push.

There are those who insisted Christians had a duty to either support (or at least not take issue with) the thousands of people who gathered to burn down homes and businesses in 2020 while literally at the same time insisting churches who gathered to worship were being unloving, all guided by the twisting of “love your neighbor.”

The prevailing spirit in evangelicalism, which extends deeply into the churches of Christ, is that of accommodation and comfort for a culture that needs to be roused from that comfort.

You have to realize that this is not just the realm of the Osteens and Furticks of the world. This kind of thing is happening, right now, in our own fellowship. But rarely is outright endorsement of sin practiced. Rather, it takes the form of softening the kinds of Biblical teachings that step on the toes of the worldly-minded.

For a real-world case study, just look at this panel discussion on the Roe v. Wade overturn from The Christian Chronicle. 8 editors interviewed, and not a single one could give an unqualified endorsement of the decision. They mention Jesus, compassion, charity, and unity, but all at the expense of praising the defeat of nationwide, legalized infanticide. I would like to say it’s unbelievable, but it isn’t. It’s the epitome of what Schaeffer warned us about 40 years ago.

Schaeffer’s litmus test, much like the Scriptures, is to check the fruit. “It is the obeying of Scripture which is the watershed—obeying the Bible equally in doctrine and in the way we live in the full spectrum of life” (64). Look at the end results of these interpretations being made and you will see that they have not produced, are not producing, and will not produce holy fruit.

Two takeaways

What to watch out for

Once we know this tactic, we know what to watch out for. Just because someone backs an argument with book, chapter, and verse, it does not mean they are speaking truth.

As the old illustration goes, the best way to detect a counterfeit dollar is to be intimately acquainted with the real deal. When we aim to base our understanding of every issue with the Scriptures and know not just the words but the feel of God’s Word, we know when His teaching is being either softened or made unnecessarily harsh. We’ll know what will produce His fruit, and what won’t.

Take stands, unflinchingly

The other need of our day is for God’s people to handle Scripture accurately, without subjecting it to cultural pressure, so we can speak truth into a humanistic world.

We take so many evangelistic lessons from Jesus’ discussion with the woman at the well in John 4, but the one that always seems to get missed is that He went straight to her most sensitive sin issue within the first minute. He did not wait for permission or the rapport we often think we have to build.

Schaeffer goes on:

“Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless. If our reflex action is always accommodation regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong” (64).

It’s time to speak truth, regardless of whose feathers get ruffled. We absolutely, positively must speak the truth in love. Never forget that. But we also have to abandon this idea that speaking the truth in love means qualifying it into oblivion. Be clear, be precise, and meet people with the truth where they have most abandoned it.

To that end, I’m aiming to shake things up a bit with this site. The weekly articles on church and leadership will continue, yet behind the premium subscription paywall. And, I’ll be adding free articles on tearing down cultural strongholds, coming each Thursday. Being that the next one falls on day 1 of “Pride Month,” you can guess where we’re headed first.

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Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster, Westchester: Crossway Books, 1984.