I'm having a hard time understanding the last sentence. The two items do not seem like enough; they don't seem that much more than doing nothing.

I would leap to agree with you that these two things are not enough. By no stretch of the imagination are they enough. But of all that requires doing, this is the necessary beginning. Nothing good can result if these two realities don’t change, and so far as I can see there is only resistance to that happening.

I would agree that it is not doing enough, but I would not agree that it is not much more than doing nothing. Digging the first two shovelfuls of dirt is not much more than nothing when constructing a building, but nothing that follows makes any sense without it.

I recently heard a sermon/lecture which purported to defend fundamentalist separatism. It began with a ringing declaration of the necessity of separation from heresy, continued with less compelling defense of secondary separation, and ended with a kind of whining admission that even among fundamentalists there is no shared view of the grounds for separation.

For someone like myself who thinks the bare minimum for reform of our current situation is a Johannine rejection of worldliness (the very worldliness evangelicals and emergents/missionals are requiring); the separation we have experienced is not adequate to the task. Vindicating our failure and excusing the resulting factionalism is not just irrelevant, it is obstructive.

One might argue that looking to fundamentalism is a waste of time (and there is some justification for that hostility) but what other separatism is there? What separatism has neo-evangelicalism preserved for us?

Insofar as separatism is a necessity, we have no useful experience of separatism. Our children do not know the now-idealized separatism of fundamentalism—that one so resoundingly rejected by Machen et al.—it knows only the unproductive factionalism that still persists.

We are in the odd position of having a separatism that is useless to us and useful only as a whipping-boy for neo-philistines. Fundamentalism as become the sine qua non of emergence!

Here is what I don't understand: you need to be raising a generation which knows nothing but this piffle - doesn't sound like something you have to bother doing. What is there to do in that? Man, there's whole churches full of them growing like that on the vine, natural and without cultivation added. I'd think it would help to know something else.

And: you need to be raising a generation which only hears you solemnize the glories of a fading past - solemnity seems ironic.

Maybe you mean that these are circumstances to take into consideration and in despite of which a generation must be reared?

Hmmm. I think the confusion is all my fault.

Read the last paragraph this way:

It is not enough that you laugh at them; you need to be raising a generation which a) knowing nothing but this piffle, b) hears more than a solemnization the glories of a fading past.

By which I mean that this generation a) finds this piffle plausible in a way we never did, and it is our fault that they do this. That is the first thing we need to set straight. And b) we need to articulate a proper set of virtues which meet the present threat. What I would call an unmannered separatism.

Now it makes sense. Thank you.

Sorry.