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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: IVP Classics
- Sprache: Englisch
Truth used to be based on reason. No more. What we feel is now the truest source of reality. Despite our obsession with the emotive and the experiential, we still face anxiety, despair, and purposelessness.How did we get here? And where do we find a remedy?In this modern classic, Francis A. Schaeffer traces trends in twentieth-century thought and unpacks how key ideas have shaped our society. Wide-ranging in his analysis, Schaeffer examines philosophy, science, art and popular culture to identify dualism, fragmentation and the decline of reason.Schaeffer's work takes on a newfound relevance today in his prescient anticipation of the contemporary postmodern ethos. His critique demonstrates Christianity's promise for a new century, one in as much need as ever of purpose and hope.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Escape from Reason
A Penetrating Analysis ofTrends in Modern Thought
FOREWORD BY J. P. MORELAND
Foreword
The leaves were beginning to fall on the campus of the University of Vermont. It was the autumn of 1972. I had come to faith in Jesus Christ in 1968 through the ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ at the University of Missouri, and upon graduation in 1970, I joined Crusade staff and spent my first two years in Colorado. In the summer of 1972 I went to Vermont to open the Crusade work at the university.
I was an intellectually curious young man before my conversion and that continued to be important to my newfound faith. It was the 60s, the culture was in turmoil, movements multiplied faster than rabbits, and Timothy Leary was rumored to be dead. The winds of a multitude of ideologies swirled around college campuses, and all sorts of activists vied for student allegiance. It was critical to have intellectual leadership for the Jesus Movement, and the works of such luminaries as Josh McDowell, C. S. Lewis and F.F. Bruce helped to fill this void.
Earlier that autumn day at the University of Vermont, I had engaged in a lengthy debate with Marxist radicals at their book table in the square outside the student union. I was new at all this, and I realized my need for more ammunition, more reflection from a Christian worldview and more exposure to deep Christian thought. And I was painfully aware of the need for such material for the new converts who were popping up all over the country.
Suddenly, I came across a group of about ten students sitting on the lawn. From a distance it was apparent that they were having a deep, sometimes heated discussion. As I neared them, it became obvious that they were Christians. And they were all holding copies of the same book that was clearly the intellectual source of their conversation. What was the book? It was Francis Schaeffer’s Escape from Reason.
I immediately went to a Christian bookstore, bought and read the book, and became hooked on everything Schaeffer wrote. Schaeffer’s thought, and in particular this little mental time bomb Escape from Reason, formed the core of the reflection and marching orders for an entire generation of young Christian radicals. I was no exception. Along with Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? Lewis’s Mere Christianity and Schaeffer’s other revolutionary manifesto The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason shaped, matured, informed, inflamed, inspired and empowered a movement whose impact is still being felt the world over.
To be sure, Escape from Reason has had its critics. Some claim it is too simplistic. After all, they argue, how can one cover Kant and Rousseau in three and a half pages? Others argue, sometimes correctly, that Schaeffer paints with too broad a brush and, as a result, somewhat misrepresents certain thinkers. I, for one, do not think his treatment of Thomas Aquinas is entirely fair or accurate. However, at the end of the day these criticisms miss the genius of this book. Escape from Reason brings together a staggering array of academic disciplines, cultural trends and influential thinkers, and provides an integrative, mature analysis and critique of their ideas from within an historic Christian worldview. No one else was even close to doing that in those days, and Schaeffer did it well. This is why, if currently asked, the overwhelming majority of Christian philosophers, theologians and thinkers in their thirties or older will say that Schaeffer was their intellectual father and that they were nurtured at his knee by Escape from Reason.
I am overcome with emotion at the rerelease of this classic. I am also filled with hope. Today’s evangelical culture is in a struggle with the worldviews of naturalism and postmodernism, and Schaeffer’s discussion of the upper and lower stories is as relevant today as ever. Today’s evangelicals also need to connect with their history, especially their recent past, and the long shadow of Francis Schaeffer covers much of that past. May the rerelease of Escape from Reason spark a revolutionary movement for this generation as it did for mine.
J. P. MorelandDistinguished Professor of PhilosophyTalbot School of Theology, Biola University
Preface
If a man goes overseas for any length of time we would expect him to learn the language of the country to which he is going. More than this is needed, however, if he is really to communicate with the people among whom he is living. He must learn another language—that of the thought-forms of the people to whom he speaks. Only so will he have real communication with them and to them. So it is with the Christian church. Its responsibility is not only to hold to the basic, scriptural principles of the Christian faith, but to communicate these unchanging truths “into” the generation in which it is living.
Every generation of Christians has this problem of learning how to speak meaningfully to its own age. It cannot be solved without an understanding of the changing existential situation which it faces. If we are to communicate the Christian faith effectively, therefore, we must know and understand the thought-forms of our own generation. These will differ slightly from place to place, and more so from nation to nation. Nevertheless there are characteristics of an age such as ours which are the same wherever we happen to be. It is these that I am especially considering in this book. And the object of this is far from being merely to satisfy intellectual curiosity. As we go along it will become clear how far-reaching are the practical consequences of a proper understanding of these movements of thought.
Some may be surprised that in analyzing the trends in modern thought I should begin with Aquinas and work my way forward from there. But I am convinced that our study must be concerned at one and the same time with both history and philosophy. If we are to understand present-day trends in thought we must see how the situation has come about historically and also look in some detail at the development of philosophic thought-forms. Only when this has been done are we ready to go on to the practical aspects of how to communicate unchanging truth in a changing world.
1
NATUREANDGRACE
The origin of modern man could be traced back to several periods. But I would begin with the teaching of a man who changed the world in a very real way. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) opened the way for the discussion of what is usually called “nature and grace.” They may be set out diagrammatically like this:
GRACE
NATURE
This diagram may be amplified as follows, to show what is included on the two different levels:
GRACE, THE HIGHER:
GOD THE CREATOR; HEAVEN AND HEAVENLY THINGS; THE UNSEEN AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE EARTH; MAN’S SOUL; UNITY
NATURE, THE LOWER:
THE CREATED; EARTH AND EARTHLY THINGS; THE VISIBLE AND WHAT NATURE AND MAN DO ON EARTH; MAN’S BODY; DIVERSITY
Up to this time, man’s thought-forms had been Byzantine. The heavenly things were all-important and were so holy that they were not pictured realistically. For instance, Mary and Christ were never portrayed realistically. Only symbols were portrayed. So if you look up at one of the later Byzantine mosaics in the baptistery at Florence, for example, it is not a picture of Mary that you see, but a symbol representing Mary.
On the other hand, simple nature—trees and mountains—held no interest for the artist, except as part of the world to be lived in. Mountain climbing, for instance, simply had no appeal as something to be done for its own sake. As we shall see, mountain climbing as such really began with the new interest in nature. So prior to Thomas Aquinas there was an overwhelming emphasis on the heavenly things, very far off and very holy, pictured only as symbols, with little interest in nature itself. With the coming of Aquinas we have the real birth of the humanistic Renaissance.
Aquinas’s view of nature and grace did not involve a complete discontinuity between the two, for he did have a concept of unity between them. From Aquinas’s day on, for many years, there was a constant struggle for a unity of nature and grace and a hope that rationality would say something about both.
There were some very good things that resulted from the birth of Renaissance thought. In particular, nature received a more proper place. From a biblical viewpoint nature is important because it has been created by God and is not to be despised. The things of the body are not to be despised when compared with the soul. The things of beauty are important. Sexual things are not evil of themselves. All these things are involved in the fact that in nature God has given us a good gift, and the man who regards them with contempt is really despising God’s creation. As such he is despising, in a sense, God himself, for he has contempt for what God has made.
AQUINASANDTHEAUTONOMOUS
At the same time, we are now able to see the significance of the diagram of nature and grace in a different way. While there were some good results from giving nature a better place, it also opened the way for much that was destructive, as we shall see. In Aquinas’s view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous. In one realm man was now independent, autonomous.
This sphere of the autonomous in Aquinas takes on various forms. One result, for example, was the development of natural theology. In this view, natural theology is a theology that could be pursued independently from the Scriptures. Though it was an autonomous study, he hoped for unity and said that there was a correlation between natural theology and the Scriptures. But the important point in what followed was that a really autonomous area was set up.
From the basis of this autonomous principle, philosophy also became free and was separated from revelation. Therefore philosophy began to take wings, as it were, and fly off wherever it wished, without relationship to the Scriptures. This does not mean that this tendency was never previously apparent, but it appears in a more total way from this time on.
Nor did it remain isolated in Thomas Aquinas’s philosophic theology. Soon it began to enter the arts.
Today we have a weakness in our educational process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines. We tend to study all our disciplines in unrelated parallel lines. This tends to be true in both Christian and secular education. This is one of the reasons why evangelical Christians have been taken by surprise at the tremendous shift that has come in our generation. We have studied our exegesis as exegesis, our theology as theology, our philosophy as philosophy; we study something about art as art; we study music as music, without understanding that these are things of man, and the things of man are not unrelated parallel lines.
There are several ways in which this association between theology, philosophy and the arts emerged following Aquinas.
PAINTERSANDWRITERS
The first artist to be influenced was Cimabue (1240-1302), teacher of Giotto (1267-1337). Aquinas lived from 1225 to 1274, thus these influences were clearly felt quickly in the field of art. Instead of all the subjects of art being above the dividing line between nature and grace in the symbolic manner of the Byzantine, Cimabue and Giotto began to paint the things of nature as nature. In this transition period the change did not come all at once. Hence there was a tendency at first to paint the lesser things in the picture naturalistically, but to continue to portray Mary, for example, as a symbol.
Then Dante (1265-1321) began to write in the way that these men painted. Suddenly, everything starts to shift on the basis that nature began to be important. The same development can be seen in the writers Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (1313-1375). Petrarch was the first man we hear of who ever climbed a mountain just for the sake of climbing a mountain. This interest in nature as God made it is, as we have seen, good and proper. But Aquinas had opened the way to an autonomous Humanism, an autonomous philosophy, and once the movement gained momentum, there was soon a flood.
NATUREVERSUSGRACE
The vital principle to notice is that, as nature was made autonomous, nature began to “eat up” grace. Through the Renaissance, from the time of Dante to Michelangelo, nature became gradually more totally autonomous. It was set free from God as the humanistic philosophers began to operate ever more freely. By the time the Renaissance reached its climax, nature had eaten up grace.
This can be demonstrated in various ways. We will begin with a miniature entitled Grandes Heures de Rohan
