via Letters from the Earth

Frank Schaeffer: From Helping Found the Religious Right to Embracing Uncertainty and Finding Community

“I think that a lot of times people start with their worldview answers in a big stroke, but the first thing to look at in my own life is that where I am right now has a lot less to do with the ideas that I was raised on and much more to do with passing on the love that did not fade.”

“The first reason I failed [as an evangelical leader] was that I was raised in an actual evangelical Christian mission – old school, it wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about power. I look back on that theology and I don’t believe much of it at all, if any, but these were sincere, genuine people. And so even if you look at my dad’s books for the first years of his life as an author, or my mom’s books, they were all sincere and there wasn’t any politics in them; they weren’t telling people how to live, there was nothing anti-gay in their agenda, it wasn’t anti-feminist. It was all about coming to know Jesus as your personal savior or philosophies that pointed in the same direction or apologetic arguments. . . . So, essentially it’s my father’s fault because he showed me what Christianity with integrity looked like, and I have rejected that philosophically and theologically, but these were not flakes. And so being a Christian in the green room with Pat Roberson and my father, looking from one to the other, my dad was a very authentic person. He read, he traveled, he made art, he liked it, he had an open home, he had never been greedy, he put all of his money back into the ministry, genuinely speaking. Pat Robertson would wind up opening a diamond mine and a billion dollar empire run by his imminent, nepotistic family.”

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Caught between the beauty of his grandchildren and grief over a friend’s death, Frank Schaeffer finds himself simultaneously believing and not believing in God—an atheist who prays. Schaeffer wrestles with faith and disbelief, sharing his innermost thoughts with a lyricism that only great writers of literary nonfiction achieve. Schaeffer writes as an imperfect son, husband and grandfather whose love for his family, art and life trumps the ugly theologies of an angry God and the atheist vision of a cold, meaningless universe. Schaeffer writes that only when we abandon our hunt for certainty do we become free to create beauty, give love and find peace. Available now at Amazon.
 

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