Welcome to Douglas Wilson's Blog and May Blog, presented by Canon Press.

The Great Gospel-centered crack-up, Monday, January 9, 2023.

Introduction

One of the besetting sins of contemporary evangelicals is that our intellectual and theological

lives are cluttered.

As Francis Schaefer once summarized the problem, we tend to think in bits and pieces

and non-wholes.

All the things of Earth are there right in front of us, but they are not sorted out.

There is a reason for this jumble, and my summary of that reason is that we have trained

ourselves through a misguided pietism to thwart the intelligent workings of the grace of

God.

Instead of pursuing Augustine's great observation about virtue being a matter of rightly

ordered loves, we have taken all our loves and just dumped them into a jump drawer.

When the volume of our cluttered loves grows too big for that, we move them all to the

right room.

Let's change the image in order to highlight the pietist attempt at a solution.

Instead of a drawer, closet, or room, imagine a set of shelves.

All the details of our lives are crammed onto the shelves, our politics, our job, our

family hassles, the state of the lawn, the office politics at work, and so on.

But then some pious Christians see all that clutter and react against it, which is understandable,

Mark 419.

But they do this in an odd way.

...