Let it be said that I believe Christians should strive to do more than we currently do. In fact, I believe many of us have made an idol out of wealth and we are living in bondage to it. There are many who have resisted God’s call to give up everything out of fear. Nevertheless, Anderson gives this rejoinder:

“The heroes of the radical movement are martyrs and missionaries whose stories truly inspire, along with families who make sacrifices to adopt children. Yet the radicals’ repeated portrait of faith underemphasizes the less spectacular, frequently boring, and overwhelmingly anonymous elements that make up much of the Christian life.”

Then he compares the radical movement to the Keswick movement.

“Today’s radical movement does not descend directly from Keswick. But there are genuine similarities. As David Bebbington has demonstrated, Keswick theology has shaped evangelical piety for the past century. The language of “total surrender” and “complete abandonment” certainly echoes the Keswick rhetoric. And both movements strive to overcome the gap between professed belief and behavior. Keswick’s two-tier solution tried to solve the lurking question about whether nominal believers are genuinely saved. While Platt goes a different route, questioning whether our conversions are real, the fundamental problem is the same.”

Then Anderson lists a three easy-going critiques of the movement. The last one really stuck out to me.

“The final paradox of emphasizing a radical faith is that the language of commitment and really risks allowing the very secularism they decry in through the back door. By emphasizing the interior aspect of faith over the formal and distinctive elements of Christian worship—Communion, baptism, corporate singing—they risk missing just how secularized our communal life as Christians has become. It is easy to see signs of secularism in how Christians live from Monday to Saturday. But what about on Sunday morning?”

“Of course, such critiques of formalist Christianity—”going through the motions”—have a long and estimable history, voiced by everyone from Søren Kierkegaard, who railed against institutional Christianity, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lamented cheap grace. But they weren’t critiquing the church in the context of an anti-institutional, highly individualistic culture. When the call to individual radicalness is disconnected from a counterbalancing concern for the public form our Christian worship takes, we stand in danger of assuming the messages of the surrounding culture as we mimic their methods.”