Is it not therefore exceeding strange that people should place so much piety in the attendance upon public worship, concerning which there is not one precept of our Lord's to be found, and yet neglect these common duties of our ordinary life, which are commanded in every page of the Gospel? I call these duties the devotion of our common life, because if they are to be practised, they must be made parts of our common life; they can have no place anywhere else.

[...]

Thus it is in all the virtues and holy tempers of Christianity; they are not ours unless they be the virtues and tempers of our ordinary life. So that Christianity is so far from leaving us to live in the common ways of life, conforming to the folly of customs, and gratifying the passions and tempers which the spirit of the world delights in, it is so far from indulging us in any of these things, that all its virtues which it makes necessary to salvation are only so many ways of living above and contrary to the world, in all the common actions of our life. If our common life is not a common course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.

But yet though it is thus plain that this, and this alone, is Christianity, a uniform, open, and visible practice of all these virtues, yet it is as plain, that there is little or nothing of this to be found, even amongst the better sort of people. You see them often at Church, and pleased with fine preachers: but look into their lives, and you see them just the same sort of people as others are, that make no pretences to devotion. The difference that you find betwixt them, is only the difference of their natural tempers. They have the same taste of the world, the same worldly cares, and fears, and joys; they have the same turn of mind, equally vain in their desires. You see the same fondness for state and equipage, the same pride and vanity of dress, the same self-love and indulgence, the same foolish friendships, and groundless hatreds, the same levity of mind, and trifling spirit, the same fondness for diversions, the same idle dispositions, and vain ways of spending their time in visiting and conversation, as the rest of the world, that make no pretences to devotion.

---William Law, A Serious Call

I suspect, given the recent examples we've cited, that it would be fair—even generous—to call this the Age of Incoherence. It's not that we haven't previously seen some very silly apostasies, it's not that we haven't seen crippling denials of the truth, and it's not that these apostasies and denials are more ruinous than ours. But it seems to me that the sheer goofiness of today's leaders and this peloton of the deranged that trails them represent a special problem for us.

There have always been kooky heresies, but I didn't read too many people saying in public that "‘God' does not exist, and this is his choice", or "Jesus had a male body but a very feminine soul". And I don't find too many theologians suggesting that our digestive systems represent a "major dimension" in the meaning of Christ's resurrection. One comes away with the impression that these doctrines could only have been professed by St. Vecordius of the Reformed Church of Bedlam.

(It's enough to make one wonder if Cabela's doesn't carry a line of sturdy butterfly nets.)

But I fear that in our attempt to parry this nonsense and in an effort to make the Gospel relevant to the modern loon we will forget Law's point. Our first problem, our most conspicuous problem, is not that we live among nitwits, it is that we've forgotten how a Christian ought to live.

Tozer wrote of the Incredible Christian, but I wonder when our church will rediscover first things and restore a sane attitude toward the common life of the devoted Christian.

And if you will here stop, and ask yourselves, why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.