Revisiting Schaeffer
Frankie Schaeffer published Sham Pearls for Real Swine back in 1990, and I remember being very excited when I first read it, laughing out loud at Schaeffer's scathing tone and brash language. His object was to fight for "Truth" especially as it related to the arts, taking the fundamentalist and evangelical church to task for adopting dualism and calling it piety, following Augustine following Plato separating life into spiritual and secular. Schaeffer rails against this, claiming all reality is one, and that it all belongs to God. ("There is no Christian math.")
What do you think of this: "There is nothing intrinsically more spiritual about saving a soul than filling a tooth. And there is nothing more spiritual about feeding the hungry than taking a walk with your children or working hard to earn some money." (Schaeffer, Frankie. Sham Pearls For Real Swine. p. 208)
Rarely do you see this stated with such force. Saving a soul isn't more spiritual than filling a tooth? At first glance, it looks offensive, doesn't it? But he doesn't say"saving a soul isn't more valuable than filling a tooth." (Though that's an implication we should come back to.) He says its no more "spiritual."
Agree? Disagree? Does he go too far? Yes, you're right...it will depend on what we mean by spiritual, which I think is the whole point. Do you see all of life as spiritual, all reality as one? Or are we unwitting Gnostics, degrading the physical reality in favor of the unseen?
Huge implications follow, namely freedom.
If I had time (maybe I'll find it later), I'd post the short Chapter 13 of this book. It's called "Freedom-Sanity." It is one of the most forceful statements of Christian freedom I've ever read. If you can find the book, read this chapter.
"The first freedom is the freedom to be normal...to the believer in Truth (postmoderns beware - my note), the normal everyday events of life are received as gifts from God, not in some odd spiritual sense, but directly, literally...His work, his obedience to Christ's teaching, his art, his family, his love of nature and science, his love of the historic and orthodox church, worship and the Eucharist, these are simple, straightforward, outward-looking realities that give joy to the believer in Truth."
One more: "The follower of the Truth is free to apply one standard to all things, to all reality: that is, to simply ask, "Is it true?" "Is it false?" "Is it good?" "Is it bad?" "Does it work?" "Is it excellent?" "Is it mediocre?"" (pp. 227-228)
He even says we are free to be sane.
Wish I'd known that sooner...
12:03:03 AM
