Malcolm Muggeridge Meets Francis Schaeffer

In my travels tripped over this little stone...The Collision of Two Minds By David Virtue"To simply preach “Jesus saves” without first giving content as to who Jesus was and then addressing the cultural context into which the good news of the gospel was being preached was not to do justice to the gospel.""Muggeridge simply could not conceive of facts being either necessarily relevant or always truthful. He had learned, over the course of half a century of knockabout journalism, that the facts of a case did not always tally with the truth. Facts and truth were not necessarily the same. Truth, he said, transcended facts. It was simply not important to him that the Jesus of history was the Christ of faith. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection transcended all such categories. He did not deny the facts, but saw them as largely irrelevant to the truth of what Christianity was about."

Dear Mike and readers,This is a very valuable piece.The Collision of Two MindsMalcolm Muggeridge Meets Francis Schaeffer By David Virtue

Hi MikeAs a token 'britisher' in this conversation...Malcolm Muggeridge was a life long athiest who became a convinced Christian in old age. He was a very able 'knockabout' journalist with a great facility for ideas and an excellent communicator. As a Christian he was a 'babe'. Christians did what they so often do they zoomed in on this brilliant apologist and communicator and used him as a big gun in their battle against atheism. I don't mean to be unkind, but to the Christian world he was a 'great catch'... to the public at large he was a joke. An old man who, one of his critics commented, was only 'against it because he was now past it'.He was in the school of C S Lewis, another brilliant communicator, whose biblical understanding was gravely flawed. Of course, the media love this kind of thing. They take a world class football star and ask him his opinion on post-modernism. :-? These men were craftsmen at communication, not theology... and certainly not biblical theology. Schaeffer would have the background to see that Muggeridge was walking where others had walked before him. Albert Schweitzer and others drove a wedge in between the 'Jesus of Experience' and the 'Jesus of History'. They said we don't mind you believing in the Jesus of your experience, but the Jesus of History was not at all what the Bible makes him out to be. Theologians like James Denney saw that to erode the historical foundation was to leave the Jesus of Experience floating on a cloud; such castles must inevitabley come crashing down. Denney's classic was 'The Death of Christ' and though dated is something Muggeridge would have done well to read. But Muggeridge was not into biblical theology but into the mental banter of university debates.Schaeffer would have seen this and also seen the deadly danger of Christians following the reasoning of Muggeridge, the ageing 'rock star' of demolition journalism. It was Schaeffer who said of the famous Lausanne Conference... inerrancy is the watershed of evangelicalism. In my view, he was right then, and in his 'collision' with Muggeridge. Ultimately to follow Muggeridge is to become a fellow travellor with our old friend Jake. :-D Truth, then is confirmed by experience rather than biblical revelation. My sign-off has been addressing this for a little while now.Traditionally Christians have believed in propositional revelation as found in the inerrant scripture. Move from here into 'I believe my experience' and we are adrift...

I'm not sure how many Christians today actually read Malcolm Muggeridge and Francis Schaeffer! (Perhaps I should add the Bible in the list too).

Dear friends,Please, consider Francis A. Schaeffer a must read.I, for one, still reads his many books and find edification, deep edification in them all.Lars

Hi SamMuggerige was only relevant because of who he had been. Schaeffer still has a definite contribution to make.