05.26.09
My Comments on Crazy for God Part 1
I hope everyone had an enjoyable Memorial Day weekend. I took the opportunity to catch up on the net on all the bantering regarding the water-boarding issue. There were some very insightful comments, and some “amusing” comments as well, heheheh. I also managed to finish off Frank Schaeffer’s book, Crazy for God, How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All ) of it Back. I know I don’t have a lot of time to blog at the moment, but thought I’d start commenting since I think Frank writes about so many things that I may have to stretch my comments out in a couple posts. So for now I’d say that overall, Frank’s book was easy to read, very informative, and at times, quite entertaining. My original interest in reading his book was to find out why he converted to Eastern Orthodox. Upon reading his book, I got a lot “more” than just why he may have converted, and thus why I have a lot of comments to make. I also read other people’s comments including Os Guinness’s commentary. It was interesting to read his point of view since he knew Frank and his family personally. My comments will be strictly from the view of an outsider since I really knew very little of the family. I can certainly understand a lot of what Frank wrote about because some of the issues he brings up, I could personally relate to, such as the problems within the Christian community, and particularly problems with how the Bible is interpreted. While I do agree with a lot of what Frank writes regarding the Christian community, I also think that there is a wider range of Christians that he does not acknowledge. Not all of us are nut cases as he seems to make us out to be. In that respect, I think his book Crazy for God, seems to lump us all together (for the most part) in one broad stroke.
Okay, so where to begin? Frank starts off with his childhood. And oh boy, he sure was given the appropriate name because Frank is very frank, ha! Embarrassingly so! I only hope my kids don’t write about me like this some day! Of course the Bible does tell us that one day everything in secret will be made known. It will be shouted from the roof-tops! Ack! I guess there’s no getting around that anyway, so okay, I’ll look at it as “such is life.” But back to the book. Almost from the beginning one could sense problems on the horizon. Now I don’t want to be unfairly judgmental of Frank’s parents, Francis and Edith, since after all, we all make mistakes. None of us are perfect. And even though God was the perfect father, Adam and Eve still rebelled. I wasn’t at all familiar with Edith’s writings (that was news to me, and only goes to show how little I really knew of the Schaeffers), but I was familiar with Francis’s writings, which I thought was very enlightening. So I really found Frank’s book very, very interesting and as a result gave me a need to reflect more on the true value of Francis’s writings. And to Francis and Edith’s credit, at least they were “trying” to live by their religious convictions, not just preaching it. However, from Frank’s description, I felt there was a similarity of how they lived their lives and how Gandhi lived his life in relation to the family. That is, in their family the children were second priority (in the Schaeffer family as in Gandhi’s), and as a result their family suffered. Actually, I think this is a common theme in many Christian families, particularly those in the ministry such as missionaries because so often Christian “parents” are so busy evangelizing to the world that they don’t have enough time for their own kids. As a result many missionary kids are dumped off into boarding schools while their “missionary” parents jet set off to distant lands to help the “unsaved.” This was problem #1 that jumped out at me from Crazy for God. The reason why I think this was a major problem is because in 1 Tim 3 Paul explains what the qualifications are for bishops and deacons (this would be the equivalent to the requirements for our “leaders” or “overseers” in the Christian community). For both bishops and deacons the requirement is that his own house is to be in order “because” if a man does not know how to rule his own house (this includes his children), then how can he take care of the church of God? That’s Paul’s instruction, not mine. Frank had written that often his parents didn’t even know where he was, much less what he was doing. And boy oh boy, he was mischievious! Knowing that it’s a common practice for missionary families to send their kids off to boarding school, I think this is an epidemic problem in the Christian community regarding leadership qualifications. How can one rule over their children, when they are not even living with them? Instead, the boarding teachers are ruling over the children indoctrinating them in whatever heresies they might be dabbling with. If the parents can’t teach or rule their own kids (because they’re not even with them), then according to Paul, they are not qualified to be leaders. This may also be very telling regarding the currently accepted approach to missionary work in general if the families are commonly split apart and not enough time is devoted to the physical “and” spiritual well being of their children.
Okay, my time’s up. Must dash for now. More later.
Marlakins
