Last week we cited the work of William Law. You really ought to read A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.

This one book produced a memorable impact on Dr. Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, William Wilberforce, Henry Venn, and me.

I can't speak at length to the impact it made on those great men, but I can tell you I found the book in the Tarheel library while looking for something else: having just witnessed five years of the evisceration and defamation of essential Christian virtues, finding this book was like getting smacked in the face with a life preserver while bobbing in the middle of the storm.

...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.

Renunciation of the world and poverty of spirit, or as some called it, "spirituality", took a merciless beating from fundamentalists. Evangelicals picked up a stick and beat it in places the fundamentalists forgot to look. Now, in a kind of monkey frenzy that makes us giggle, emergents have tried to put a philosophical face on "conforming to the folly of customs".

If you ask me, you can forget all the redefinitions of fundamentalism, evangelicalism and emergence; read them out of curiosity if they amuse you as much as they do me, but after you've laughed, read Law.

We have colleges and seminaries but we lack learned men, we have mission bureaucracies but we lack converts, we have rich churches but we lack worshipers. If you want to get some sense of what heavenly affection really is, read this book.

And I recommend you read the original version. There is an abridged version out there by Westminster Press, but I don't know why anyone would bother with it. You can get the original, far more powerful version here.

The hour cometh, and now is, when the cockeyed unbeliefs of McLaren and Corcoran and Hayward and Pagitt and Tickle and Burke will be dumpstered, and true worshipers will want to know something about the life of the Christian. And contrary to the cockeyed unbeliefs of McLaren and Corcoran and Hayward and Pagitt and Tickle and Burke, there is such a thing as a true Christian, a knowable truth and a heavenly affection.