Disruptive Witness Book Review

Disruptive Witness is one of those rare books that forced me to read it slowly and often repeatedly. Though not original (the author from the beginning refers to the previous works by writers Charles Taylor and James KA Smith), his thesis is new to me and helps me better understand our society and culture.

First of all, this insightful book is about evangelism. The author tries to explain the kind of “soil” we are faced with and how to prepare it better to receive the good news of Christ. We live in a secular age where man is autonomous, God and faith are optional enhancements to life, the “buffered self” living in an “immanent frame” is all there is, truth is relative and man defines what gives him meaning, which usually is limited to the physical and not to the transcendent. But the problem is, even if society tries to suppress the transcendent (I.e., God), it cannot shake off the inherent transcendent feelings common to all people.

These moments of awe (e.g., when a baby is born, grieving a death of a loved one, watching a beautiful sunset) are essential to being human, but are contradictory to the general belief of evolution that tries to explain all of life solely through science. So, the modern man lives in this conflict between what he thinks he knows and what he feels and experiences. This is the man we are faced today to evangelize. Knowing the grand influence secularity has on him, I have a clearer picture of how society thinks and how to better present the gospel to it.

The first part challenges me to both examine my heart and the ever-present technology’s effects on it. We live in a distracted world and sadly we are not even aware of this problem. As Christians, we have also been affected by distraction and secularism. Our good works become performance art. We church-shop to fit our eclectic preferences. Worship is approached with a consumerist attitude.

So then, how do we as a church reach people who are glued to their screens, have short attention spans, and do not engage in deep thinking, for the gospel, especially when we as a church struggle with the same? The author proposes the answer is for the believers to live as a disruptive witness among unbelievers. We need to shake their world with truth and practices that will at least, “put a pebble” in their shoe of unbelief, to make them question what they know and be curious about our faith.

His three-fold solution to become disruptive witnesses is summarized as follows:

1. Acknowledge the beauty around us and turn it toward God. He calls this “Double movement” or the merging of the immanent with the transcendent. We need to direct people’s thoughts and feelings of awe to something bigger than this world, to the transcendent God.

2. Engage the culture through participating in and promoting the arts, literature, film and other media.

3. Celebrate liturgy and what makes our faith distinct.

This second part of the book is why I don’t give this book 5 stars. Though these solutions are not wrong, they are either simplistic or incomplete, especially the last two. How far do we go to engage the culture with their filthy forms of entertainment? I’ve heard arguments from church people why Game of Thrones is justifiable to watch because of its great story-telling, yet they ignore the fact that its violent and gratuitous sex are demeaning to women and contradicts our mandate for purity. (You can read Mr Noble's review of the books HERE).

And why did the author focus on liturgy and sabbath-keeping as ways to disrupt our culture, but doesn’t mention more obvious and biblical methods, like the faithful preaching of the Word and doing the one-another’s to a watching world? Is the author’s being a Presbyterian the reason for this emphasis on liturgy and liberal use of Christian freedom?

I am glad to have read this book and I recommend the church to read and discuss it. Though Mr. Noble’s proposed applications are lacking, his assessment on our problem is excellent. I’m currently reading Our Secular Age. I find the chapter in preaching by John Starke offers better solutions on how to reach the distracted world.

Book Review: How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer

How Should We Then Live? is the second Francis Schaeffer book I’ve read. I loved the first one, The God Who is There, and How Shall We Then Live is just as excellent. It’s such a great book that I read it twice back to back - it’s that good! I highly recommend it to everyone, especially young people who are about to go out into the world and be inevitably educated with the prevalent secularism by the anti-Christian Intelligentsia.

Schaeffer wove through the history of western thought in the book and its influence in the culture, art, science, literature, music, film, and even church life and theology. He expertly documented, from Ancient Rome to the tumultuous 1970’s, how the slow departure from Christian values and absolute truth has resulted in a devastating descent of humanity.

Humanism’s focus that man’s logic is the basis of truth has resulted in making man a mere matter and without dignity. Modern man has replaced allegiance to absolute truth with the values of “personal peace and affluence.” In the process, modern man has willingly and stupidly given up innate human dignity and freedom for the sake of false peace and wealth.

Schaeffer foresaw the rise of postmodernism as the new “absolute” and its ruinous consequences that we now see, from redefining “life” as something dependent on the mother’s feelings to fluid gender and sexual identities independent of the individual’s physical and genetic attributes. The irony is glaring that Humanism (“man is everything”) has removed our innate human dignity, simply because we are all image-bearers of the living God, and reduced man to a group of molecules (“man is nothing”).

He prophetically declared, “When we see a political figure on TV, we are not seeing the person as he necessarily is; we are seeing, rather, the image someone has decided we should see.”

“Finally we must not forget the manipulative capacity of the high-speed computer. As a tool it is useful but neutral. It can be used for good purposes or equally for harm...The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for any privacy.

“Similarly alarming are the indications that terrorist organizations from all over the world have in some way coordinated their efforts. We have already seen indications of how people give up liberties when they are faced with the threat of terrorism.”

Faced with the dim outlook of our culture and humanity, we are left to ask the book’s title, “How Should We Then Live?” Schaeffer answered this by encouraging his readers to go back to the truth of God’s Word and use its absolute truths as the foundation of our life. Without absolute truths there can be no morality. Without absolutes, life has no meaning. This book’s message is as relevant and urgently needed to the current generation as much as it was in the 1970’s when it was written.

After reading HSWTL, I see how Schaeffer’s writings have greatly influenced Christian leaders and thinkers like Nancy Pearcey, another favorite author. I must have highlighted 10% of this book. In every page are truth and ideas that accurately convey my thoughts and sentiments about the cultural trends we are facing now. This is remarkable because the book was written over forty years ago.

Here are some favorite quotes from it:

Man’s needs not only a God who exists, but a God who has spoken in a way that can be understood.

...if one begins with the Bible’s position that a person is created by God and created in the image of God, there is a basis for that person’s dignity. People, the Bible teaches, are made in the image of God—they are nonprogrammed. Each is thus Man with dignity.

The vocation of honest merchant or housewife had as much dignity as king.

The rise of modern science did not conflict with what the Bible teaches; indeed, at a crucial point the Scientific Revolution rested upon what the Bible teaches...modern science was born out of the Christian world view.

Because of the rationality of God, the early scientists had an “inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labors of scientists would be without hope.”

The Christian world view gives us a real world which is there to study objectively. Another result of the Christian base was that the world was worth finding out about, for in doing so one was investigating God’s creation.

By the ruling of the Supreme Court, the unborn baby is not counted as a person. In our day, quite rightly, there has been a hue and cry against some of our ancestors’ cruel viewing of the black slave as a non-person. This was horrible indeed—an act of hypocrisy as well as cruelty. But now, by an arbitrary absolute brought in on the humanist flow, millions of unborn babies of every color of skin are equally by law declared non-persons. Surely this, too, must be seen as an act of hypocrisy.

If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

With such values (personal Peace and affluence), will men stand for their liberties? Will they not give up their liberties step by step, inch by inch, as long as their own personal peace and prosperity is sustained and not challenged, and as long as the goods are delivered?

The majority of the silent majority, young and old, will sustain the loss of liberties without raising their voices as long as their own life-styles are not threatened. And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things. Politics has largely become not a matter of ideals—increasingly men and women are not stirred by the values of liberty and truth—but of supplying a constituency with a frosting of personal peace and affluence. They know that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least an illusion of them.

The problem is clear: Without the absolute line which Christianity gives for the distinctiveness of people, even things which can be good in themselves lead to humanness being increasingly lost.

Moral “oughts” are only what is sociologically accepted at the moment. In this setting will today’s unthinkable still be unthinkable in ten years? Man no longer sees himself as qualitatively different from non-man. The Christian consensus gave a basis for people being unique, as made in the image of God, but this has largely been thrown away.

The biblical message is truth and it demands a commitment to truth. It means that everything is not the result of the impersonal plus time plus chance, but that there is an infinite-personal God who is the Creator of the universe, the space-time continuum...it is the truth that gives a unity to all of knowledge and all of life.