Let’s all vote on whether we want the truth. Any dissenters? Good, got that settled.

But I’m puzzled: what exactly is THE POINT of telling all the bad stuff about your parents in public? Your own therapy? Spare us. What’s left? To protect us?

Along comes a son who writes multiple books characterizing his parents’ faith in mocking terms. “Crazy”. Not just “not quite iconic in private”, but “crazy”. I’m sorry, that’s serious language. The only function of all this is the implication that his fathers’ teaching is at the least NOT TRUE, and probably PATHOLOGICAL. Fine (I’m as far from a Calvinist myself as I can get) but engage the content, don’t throw ad hominem crap at your dead dad, liberal or conservative.

I can tell you the tone of the elder Scheaffer, in public, was to respect to excess those with whom he disagreed, those whose public work he thought harmful. I was in the audience in Chicago when he rebuked the crowd for laughing at John Cage’s “music”. Our tittering was not loving, he said. I remember nothing else about that day but something I’d never understood before: the power of Christian apologetics is in love for the adversary, not the brilliance of the arguments.

Of course, that was public, not backstage. Then again, public tone is all I have of both father and son with which to judge, and since the son is insisting, in print, that we choose between the two, I have to use the one character test I have first-hand experience of. The father had a tone and tenor in his polemics which was exemplary: the son didn’t catch it. What else did the son just not catch?

My bias is against the perpetual pout, the tell-all, the noble rebel who just happened to rebel when the target of his courageous fire died. I think if the truth is what we’re after, then let’s hear the perspective of the other people who grew up in the same household. My guess is that they’ve been suffering him in classy silence, but will have had enough at some point.