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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: The IVP Signature Collection
- Sprache: Englisch
- Over 400,000 Sold For over fifty years The God Who Is There has been a landmark work that has changed the way the church sees the world. Francis Schaeffer's first book presents a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual and cultural climate of the second half of the twentieth century, from philosophy to art to liberal theology. Arguing that Christians must constantly engage the questions being asked by their own—and the next—generation, he envisions an apologetics and spirituality both grounded in absolute truth and engaging the whole of reality. "If we are unexcited Christians, we should go back and see what is wrong," Schaeffer writes. "We are surrounded by a generation that can find 'no one home' in the universe. . . . In contrast to this, as a Christian I know who I am; and I know the personal God who is there." In every age, this God continues to provide the anchor of truth and the power of love to meet the world's deepest problems. Named by Christianity Today as one of the "Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals" (October 2006), this redesigned classic is now available as part of the IVP Signature Collection.
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TO EDITH MY WIFE
Who has walked hand in hand with me
for a very short forty-seven years
Contents
Are you going to L’Abri?”
I still remember standing on the side of a road outside of Geneva, Switzerland, thumb out with my backpack beside me, hoping for a ride. A small car stopped, and the driver asked me that question. Most of fifty years later it is fresh in my memory, even as strange as it seemed at the time—there I was, living into the life that was becoming mine, joining pilgrims who came from all over the world, each one of us with our own hopes for what might be in the mysterious, almost mystical place called L’Abri.
In the years of the 1960s and 1970s thousands of young men and women made their way to the little farming village of Huemoz, each one longing to be understood, willing to do just about anything to make sense of their lives, believing that being human mattered, but yearning to know why. With no internet and no brochures, the word on the street was that L’Abri was a place where people mattered—and the language of “honest questions and honest answers” was the heart of its life.
The working assumption was, of course, that one could ask a dishonest question, and yes, that one could give a dishonest answer. Both fall short of what makes for a good life, an honest life.
One snowy winter’s eve we all gathered in the chapel for an evening of no-holds-barred conversation; any and all questions were invited. With standing room only, question after question was asked. Someone over my left shoulder began to speak, and even to my young ears it seemed that he was more interested in talking, perhaps even in hearing himself talk. Given the intellectually stimulating environment, with questions running through all hours of the day—over meals, at work in the gardens and kitchens, walking along the lanes—there was always the temptation to have a very impressive question, with great meaning and substance. That night, I wondered whether those words would become a true question. They never did—but years later I remember being stilled by the response that came next.
“If you have a real question, I will take all night listening to you. But I will not play with the truth.”
Those words still echo through my heart. I had never before thought that truth mattered like that, that it was something to honor. I went to bed that night in one of the little chalets pondering what I had heard, and what it would mean for my life.
Like so many others, I had dropped out of school. Not because I was flunking out, but more because I had questions that needed to be addressed if I was going to keep on. My first year away I lived in a commune in the Bay Area of California, hitchhiking back and forth between Palo Alto and Berkeley, listening in on gurus of all kinds of worlds and worldviews. I began to understand that each of us asks and answers the same questions. Who are we? What is the world really all about? Does life mean anything? Do I? Do right and wrong exist? What about truth? and beauty? and justice? And finally and most profoundly, is there a God, and can we know anything about him?
Those questions are asked and asked again throughout history, in every century and every culture, as their answers matter for the way we live in the world. And they were the serious questions asked and answered within the community of L’Abri.
But as rich as the face-to-face conversations were there, as winsome and transforming as the community life could sometimes be, we would not know of L’Abri without the books that came forth from its life. The 1970s were very rich years for L’Abri and the wider world, its ideas rippling out to eager people everywhere.
If there is one book that is woven into the tapestry of L’Abri, so much so that we cannot understand the one without the other, it is The God Who Is There. A shot across the bow for Schaeffer and his work, the book set forth his core convictions about reality and truth, about the human heart, and yes, about the nature and character of God.
Like most of Schaeffer’s early writing, this was born of lectures birthed into being by the editorial graces of James Sire—long the senior editor of InterVarsity Press—who was sure that there was a world beyond Huemoz that wanted to learn from Schaeffer. And he was right. People the world over began reading the books that came from the little community—not only the ones that Francis and Edith wrote, but also Os Guinness’s The Dust of Death, Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, Donald Drew’s Images of Man: A Critique of the Contemporary Cinema, Ranald Macauley and Jerram Barrs’s Being Human: The Nature of Spiritual Experience, and Udo Middelman’s Pro-Existence—and the reputation of L’Abri grew in ways that were both blessing and curse for the Schaeffers.
The great gift of L’Abri was the integrity of its life, offered to all who came. With the daily prayer that “God would bring those of his choosing to our doorstep,” many showed up, wrestling with questions about God and what it means to live in God’s world. While words mattered for Schaeffer, and he talked and talked all day long and into the night for years, life mattered even more. To make the argument that there is a God in the world who can be known was the heart of L’Abri’s existence, but without a doubt it was the day-after-day life that gave reality to the ideas.
Mind and heart were melded together. Words were important, but words made flesh were crucial. Apologetics, yes, but a living apologetic even more so.
The fame that came from the writing was hard on L’Abri, though, as celebrity always is. The personal and familial was not possible in the same way, as their words began having a life beyond the reality of their community. From one conversation I had with Mrs. Schaeffer along the way, I think she saw that what had been was being lost, or at least in danger of being lost. This was her life, and she wanted to protect the life that brought her loves into being.
Having paid attention over the more than sixty years of L’Abri’s ministry, it has intrigued me to see “little L’Abris” form in other places with other people, many now under the umbrella of L’Abri Fellowship, alive and well in England, Holland, Canada, the United States, Brazil, South Korea, and Australia. And beyond that, the growing work of “study centers” the world over are always one more try at doing what L’Abri did, offering an intellectually rich spirituality born of the truest truths of the universe, incarnate in settings far from the mountains of Switzerland.
A generation later most twenty-somethings who long for more than they yet know do not even know of Francis Schaeffer and L’Abri. The weight of the words “Well, Schaeffer says” no longer wins every argument. And as we have lived with his analysis and critique over the years, there are legitimate criticisms about some of his convictions and conclusions. He was not an oracle, even living on a mountain as he did.
But what he gave is a gift still worth the time and energy it takes to understand him. To believe that there is a God who is there, and who has not been silent, matters supremely. If we don’t get that right, we will get nothing else right. One might imagine that great arguments about metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics were the substance of L’Abri’s life, and in one sense they were never not important. But the ordinary student who came to L’Abri was often first directed to study the New Testament book of Romans. Yes, the very soul of the pedagogy was fixed on getting God right, and from that, getting ourselves right. The great questions of the twentieth century were relevant, but only to the extent that they were tethered to the biblical text, allowing the attentive reader to feel the tension between the Word of God and the world made by God.
Reading The God Who Is There through the years, often asking my students to read with me, I have been taught again and again that there are basic truths that form every life. The embodied apologetic that was L’Abri at its truest treated men and women as worthy of honor, taking each one seriously, as seriously as one made in the very image of God deserved. The way that food was prepared, meals were served, people were listened to, beauty mattered, work was important—taken together they were a way of living out the conviction that God is there, and that he cares about the way we live in his world. Simply said, that God is there makes it possible for us to be here, to be the human beings we were meant to be.
To believe that God exists, that he is “there,” is a line in the sand for human life under the sun—and everyone everywhere wonders about this, wanting answers that make sense of what we see and hear, of what we believe and the way we live. We are perennial people, after all, and the conversations I have had in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and Australia are the same conversations about the same things.
A generation later, I have become an attentive student of Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright who became a prisoner who became a president—and sometimes I have wondered what Schaeffer would have made of him. Havel argued, “If we lose God in the world, then we must be willing to give up on meaning and purpose, accountability and responsibility.” With a terribly stark insight, he only underscored the argument that became incarnate within L’Abri: There is a God who is there.
This was Schaeffer’s vision, seen through his own glass darkly. Theological and philosophical ideas were central to the work of L’Abri, but always held in tension with what they meant for ordinary people living in ordinary places. That has always been the best of L’Abri.
Even as I write these words, my daughter has gone “home” to Huemoz once again. In her early twenties, she spent a semester studying international health and development in Geneva. Mixing with diverse peers who had their own rooted reasons for caring about the world, and having seen sorrow personally in a bush clinic in Africa and studying its systemic causes and consequences in her program, she wanted to understand more of what she believed and why she believed it. That took her for a weekend up into the Swiss mountains to Huemoz, and then back again a few months later. Eventually she spent several years there, living within the community of L’Abri, taking its life as her life. She came to see it as her second home and has been back several times over the last twenty years; in her heart, she is never far away.
But now she is there only for a week, wanting to breathe the Swiss mountain air again, and she has brought her young daughter, who can only toddle her way through the village streets and mountain pastures.
For my daughter, unique in the world that she is, it was her questions about God and life that brought her to L’Abri, and the challenge of working them out kept her there. Now a woman with a full life, she can only go more fully into the reality of the world that is there, brought into being by the God who is there. And in so doing, she is slowly finding a truer way to be human in the world—which has been the long hope of L’Abri, its very reason for being.
It is hard to understand how an orthodox, evangelical, Bible-believing Christian can fail to be excited. The answers in the realm of the intellect should make us overwhelmingly excited. But more than this, we are returned to a personal relationship with the God who is there. If we are unexcited as Christians, we should go back and see what is wrong. (p. 188)
The God Who Is There was Francis Schaeffer’s first book, but it was not my first introduction to the man.1 Almost forty years ago, while in graduate school at the University of Missouri, I was puzzling out the relation between my faith and my academic study of English literature. I had found little either in theology or Christian philosophy to help me. Fortunately, I had discovered neoscholastic philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson, and the Russian intellectual Nikolai Berdyaev. But there was no one whose Christian tradition was close to my own mid-American evangelicalism.
Jay Adams, then a fellow graduate student in speech, said, “You now should read James Orr and Abraham Kuyper. And, most of all, you should get together with Francis Schaeffer. Orr and Kuyper are from a previous generation, but Schaeffer is doing now just what you’re interested in.” I immediately read Orr and Kuyper and was helped greatly. But Francis Schaeffer, then unpublished and living in Switzerland, was beyond my reach. I promptly forgot about him.
Five or six years later, when I became the editor of InterVarsity Press, two books by Francis Schaeffer were in the publishing pipeline. Escape from Reason would have been published first, but its delivery from the British printer was postponed by a strike on the St. Lawrence Seaway. The God Who Is There was being printed in the United States, the result being that both books were released in the fall of 1968, just a few days before Schaeffer gave the lectures at Wheaton College that became Death in the City.
I vividly remember my first exposure to Schaeffer’s ideas. It came the summer of 1968 as I read the British edition of Escape from Reason, first half on the train into Chicago from Downers Grove, second half on the return. And I was disappointed. Schaeffer did not understand the Renaissance, I thought. Seventeenth-century English literature was my field. I knew the Renaissance rather well, I thought. But Schaeffer saw a different reality. Then I read The God Who Is There and still was disappointed, even making occasional disparaging comments to my colleagues.
It was months later that I realized I had been wrong. I had simply misread Schaeffer. What made the difference was my first full-fledged editing task: Death in the City. This required transforming the transcripts of Schaeffer’s Wheaton lectures into prose that could be read without the presence of the speaker’s voice. Among the many things this project taught me is the marked differences between the idioms of spoken and written English. I had to immerse my mind in the mind of the speaker, think his thoughts after him and recast the sentences. By the time I had finished this process, I knew why my first readings of Schaeffer were so off target. Death in the City reshaped my own grasp not just of Jeremiah and Romans, its subjects, but my understanding of The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason as well.
For many people raised on Schaeffer in the 1960s and 1970s, this recasting was never necessary. Schaeffer spoke their language. They had not been schooled in the traditional language of cultural criticism; they did not know that rationalism was a word normally used to describe the philosophy of a limited number of early modern philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz) and that Locke, Berkeley and Hume were called empiricists. Schaeffer referred to all of these and a host of other philosophers as rationalists. But Schaeffer by his own explicit definition was not wrong.
Schaeffer defined rationalism as “the system whereby men and women, beginning absolutely by themselves, try rationally to build out from themselves, having only Man as their integration point, to find all knowledge, meaning and value” (p. 25). And he consistently used the word in this sense. If I had extended Schaeffer the right to be an original philosopher, I would not have made so many mistakes in my first reading.
So: a caveat to new readers of Schaeffer. Lay aside your presumption that you understand all the terms that he uses. Pay attention to Schaeffer’s definitions. I am convinced that you will find him an insightful and original philosopher. Conceptions like “the line of despair,” “upper story” and “lower story” are unique to Schaeffer and brilliantly apt. There are, as well, twists on terms like “antithesis” and “dialectical method.”
I recall a conversation with another publisher who said he hadn’t read Schaeffer himself but that his wife had The God Who Is There in one hand and a dictionary in the other. The dictionary would help with words Schaeffer was using in common with the tradition, but she would need to pay attention to Schaeffer’s own twist on many of them. Of course, she had one advantage over me: this was probably her first introduction to philosophical theology; her mind was yet to be shaped. My mind had to be reshaped; that’s harder.
THE GOD WHO IS THERE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
A new millennium is upon us. Has Schaeffer’s thought any relevance to the beginning of the twenty-first century?
Schaeffer has had a tremendous impact on evangelical thought during the last four decades of the twentieth century. It is little exaggeration to say that if Schaeffer had not lived, historians of the future looking back on these decades would have to invent him in order to explain what happened. Moreover, Schaeffer will long be read, studied, imitated and transcended. There is no question about that. But I would like to single out five notions whose impact will, I trust, continue to resonate. I will call them passions, for that is what they were to Schaeffer and what I would want them to be for my generation and generations of Christians to come. They are a passion for the God who is there, a passion for truth, a compassion for people, a passion for relevant and honest communication, and a passion for Scripture.
A passion for the God who is there. By this I do not, of course, mean the book. I mean passion for direct engagement with him who calls himself I AM. For Schaeffer, God is not the first thought or the first presupposition; he is the first “thing”—Being himself—infinite personal, triune, intelligent, good, loving, engaging. Everything rests on him. Schaeffer began where we all should begin—with God himself. We do not presume to say anything about God he has not revealed about himself. God is God and we are not.
I am convinced that if all our theologies began where Schaeffer’s does, we would be far more humble about both ourselves and our theologies. As firm as Schaeffer was in his theological pronouncements, he was humble about his own accomplishments and willing to say (I heard him do so) to both his friends and his critics, “Okay. You don’t like how I have put this. You think it can be done better. Please, go and do better.”
One of the glories of Schaeffer’s sermons, lectures and books is that they exude a sense of God. You feel as you read The God Who Is There that this man knows the God who is there, not as an abstraction but as one with whom personal encounter characterizes the relationship. Schaeffer did not like the word encounter in relation to God because he felt that it suggested an intellectually contentless relationship. But understood as filled with content, encounter is the right word. Schaeffer met God, one imagines, daily in devotion and always as the living background motif of all his thoughts and all his encounters with others.
A passion for truth. This doesn’t need my documentation. The first sentence of The God Who Is There reads: “The present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely by a change in the concept of truth” (p. 21). For the next two hundred pages, Schaeffer rings changes on this motif.
If his analysis was a surprise to evangelicals in the late 1960s, it is no surprise now. Our conception of what we can know has steadily been reduced. Early modernism held that we could know the truth about external reality. Late modernism allowed that we could know models and paradigms that at least assumed there is a determinate reality behind all scientific formulations. Postmodernism has reduced paradigms to language games in which truth becomes, in Richard Rorty’s words, “a property of linguistic entities, of sentences.”2 Schaeffer saw this coming. His analysis of the situation in the late sixties fits the nineties too. There has been no change in direction, just a growing sophistication in how life below and above the line of despair continues on its hectic pace.
The need to emphasize the unity of truth, the need to stand against the relativism that says, “Regardless of the content of our beliefs, I’m okay, you’re okay, and that’s okay”: these remain, though the illustrations would be drawn from a fresh body of names. Writing today, Schaeffer would cite Rorty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Václav Havel and Richard Dawkins. Their names would appear as frequently as the names of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Léopold Sédar Senghor, B. F. Skinner and Francis Crick. But his basic approach would not need to change. Fortunately, many who have been influenced by Schaeffer have continued at least part of the task he set for himself—to understand the culture so that Christians could speak the truth of historic Christianity into the twentieth and now the twenty-first century.
A compassion for people. I could have put this before Schaeffer’s passion for truth and just after his passion for God. I have probably been more influenced by this than by any single or group of ideas. Here Schaeffer has shaped my heart, or more accurately, he has modeled a heart for people and has, thereby, encouraged me to let God shape my heart.
Can there be anyone who has read his books or talked with him or heard lectures or observed him answering questions, sometimes from hostile critics, who cannot say, “Here is a man who loved not just humankind but Paul and Mary and John and Bill and every nameless person whom he touched”? Even in his books his compassion shows through both the illustrations he gives and the rhetoric he uses, not just to tell the stories but to explain his ideas. He pictures, for example, two lovers on the left bank of the Seine:
They fall in love and yet cry because they do not believe love exists. If I met any of these, I would put my hand gently on their shoulders and say, “You are separated from God if you do not accept Christ as your Savior, but at this moment you understand something real about the universe. Though your system may say love does not exist, your own experience shows that it does.” They have not touched the personal God who exists, but for a fleeting moment they have touched the existence of true personality in their love. (p. 40)
How many of us—evangelists, apologists, philosophers, cultural critics—would think to react like this? There was a deep pastoral touch in all that Schaeffer wrote and did.
Many Schaeffer readers will recognize this illustration, for Schaeffer used it frequently in his talks. I will use it to make two general observations. The first concerns compassion. At St. Andrews University in Scotland, Schaeffer was talking with a peculiarly difficult student.
After only two minutes of talking in his room, he [the student] said, “Sir, I don’t think we are communicating.” I started again. About two minutes later he repeated himself, “Sir, I don’t think we are communicating.” I began to think that the half-hour would be spent in a nonsense session! I looked down and saw that he had very thoughtfully prepared a lovely tea. There it all was, pot of tea, cups and so on. So I said rather gruffly to him, “Give me some tea!” He was taken aback, but he passed me a cup, full of tea. Then I said, “Sir, I think we are communicating.” From then on we had a very effective conversation. (pp. 121-22)
Notice the description (“very thoughtfully . . . lovely tea”): odd words for an intellectual apologist. Schaeffer was sensitive to the “mannishness” of the student: first, his sense of taste and (surprising) propriety (tea is almost a ceremony in Britain) and, second, his ability to communicate even if he denied it. Still, to make a point he shocked the student with his own feigned insensitivity. Here is a union of compassion and firmness, of love in the bounds of reason, respect in the bounds of truth.
My second observation about this interchange with the student is that it illustrates his passion for relevant and honest communication. Christian friends of the difficult student had not been able to get a hearing for the gospel. Schaeffer found a way to break through the barriers to communication. He caught the student at a point of tension. The student held communication not to be happening, but he experienced it as happening. Schaeffer cleverly demonstrated to the student that even he knew communication was taking place. So here was an opening for communication not just about communication but about the reality that underlies our experience of communication and about the God who makes communication possible.
I can contrast Schaeffer’s dialogue with a conversation I once had in a college lecture hall. Suddenly a student called out, “But communication is impossible.” I replied, with considerable wit, I thought, “What?” He said it again, “People can’t communicate.” I replied, “What?” Again he repeated himself and I did too. At that point he got angry and walked out.
Cleverness is one thing, but it is to be used with caution. Not only did I lose the “audience” with the student, but I discovered as well that others in the room did not understand what had happened. They were then lost to me as well. Schaeffer himself had an experience similar to mine, though it was prompted by a student, not himself.
Here is Schaeffer’s own cautionary words about pushing people to the logic of their presuppositions:
This is not a game I am playing. If I begin to enjoy it as a kind of intellectual exercise, then I am cruel and can expect no real spiritual results. As I push the man off his false balance, he must be able to feel that I care for him. Otherwise I will only end up destroying him, and the cruelty and ugliness of it all will destroy me as well. (p. 154)
If we at the beginning of the twenty-first century have only one thing to learn from Schaeffer, let it be compassion for people.
A passion for culture. Some people might choose this as the defining feature of Francis Schaeffer. Others have a passion for truth and a compassion for people. Schaeffer combined that with a passion for understanding the contemporary context in which both truth and people fit. To love people and speak the truth one has to know the culture.
My memory of working with Schaeffer played me false as I began the task of rereading The God Who Is There. Having heard many of his lectures, and having edited a dozen of his books, including How Should We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? I found less cultural commentary in The God Who Is There than I had remembered. Much of it consists of thumbnail sketches of high points in the life and works of various philosophers, intellectuals, painters, writers and composers. Readers not familiar with the figures he discusses may be confused.
Some who are familiar with the figures he discusses may say that Schaeffer has not understood them. I thought so on first reading. But when one holds off the criticism until one understands what Schaeffer is looking at and what he has focused attention on, and goes back to the figures themselves to confirm one’s views, Schaeffer’s analysis often strikes home. Certainly he had a wide exposure to Western art and must have haunted museums. In much of his writing, the insights of art historian Hans Rookmaaker, his close friend and colleague, provided ballast for Schaeffer’s comments. When he goes into detail, his remarks can be especially apt. Take for instance his treatment of John Cage (pp. 91-95).
The point of Schaeffer’s cultural critique is not, of course, to produce an academic analysis. It is rather to explain to those who were living through the sixties and seventies just what was influencing their thoughts and lifestyles, whether they knew it or not. On this score, his work is masterful.
The thumbnail sketches have inspired me to look differently at art works, to see what I hadn’t seen and to continue the process over the years. Schaeffer would have liked that, even if I came up with conclusions that would differ from his. Of course, with his emphasis on antithesis, if our views contradicted each other, at least one of them had to be false!
A passion for relevant and honest communication. Schaeffer had an uncanny and I think intuitive ability to communicate to both intellectuals and ordinary people of his day. In his books and lectures he emphasized that evangelical Christians needed to know how and what the world thinks, and then to address the world with a relevant message. He called this “speaking historic Christianity into the twentieth century.” The relevance of Christian rhetoric to the contemporary mind is crucial.
I taught English literature in college for over ten years. I thought I knew how to communicate with students concerning cultural issues. The day after the shooting of four students at Kent State University in May 1970, my college, Northern Illinois University, was in chaos. I found myself trying to explain to a class on John Milton what was going on. My own academically informed language was not getting through. Without telling the class what I was doing, I changed my analysis to the terminology of Schaeffer. Suddenly eyes began to light up. One student said, “If we had other classes like this, we wouldn’t be rioting.” Another asked, “Have you ever heard of Francis Schaeffer?” This student had learned of his work through the local Methodist Student Center. Schaeffer had done what he set out to do.
But Schaeffer was not only interested in relevant communication. He was interested in honest communication as well. Among the important contributions Schaeffer made to good thinking in general is to unmask the way language is used by modern intellectuals, theologians and cultural commentators.
Schaeffer would probably not like to be thought of as one of the hermeneuts of suspicion, but he performed for Christians a task much like theirs when he identified and gave examples of semantic mysticism. Words are often used to mask reality, to transform ideas about it into palatable form. Words like love, for instance, were then and still are being used for what is actually only raw physical sexual activity. “I love you” often means, more honestly, “I want to sleep with you,” or something even cruder.
Schaeffer’s unmasking of the word pantheism is especially apt:
Though it [pantheism] speaks of something absolutely and finally impersonal, yet the theism part of the word causes a reaction of acceptance, since theism carries overtones of personality. Now suppose you were to substitute the word pan-everythingism (which is what it really means). The whole reaction would be different. (p. 75)
Think about it. My first reaction was No, you’re wrong. A pantheist believes that all of nature is divine; that it is indeed god. But that’s exactly Schaeffer’s point. The word god functions as if personality were involved. In the sort of pantheism Schaeffer is talking about (Advaita-Vedanta Hinduism or Zen Buddhism, for example), there is no personality involved. That has been left behind. Even to say it has been transcended would be semantic mysticism because the word transcendent has in our culture a profoundly theistic sense. Better to say the Void (but then the capital on void functions as semantic mysticism) or that ultimately reality is pure energy without differentiation (but even energy has differentiation). Better yet to say, think or do nothing to address or describe ultimate reality.
With this kind of critique, the whole of language could be seen to mask reality, to conceal plays for power, in short, to be subject to total deconstruction. But Schaeffer’s critique is rooted in “the God who is there” who speaks a Word that is both personally and propositionally true. A God who in Scripture spoke words that name the world as the world really is.
A passion for Scripture. This passion shows through all of Schaeffer’s writings, lectures and sermons. In The God Who Is There this is both stated and operative as an underlying motif. God has spoken truly. The Scriptures are the propositional, verbalized revelation of God. All the presuppositions with which Schaeffer approaches his work are drawn from the Scriptures, so far as he understands them.
Nonetheless, with all his emphasis on the truthfulness of Scripture, with all the explicit use he makes of Scripture as the justification for his views, with all his concern for orthodoxy, he knew that the Scriptures were not the final thing.
The Bible, the historic Creeds and orthodoxy are important because God is there, and, finally, that is the only reason that they have their importance. (p. 175)
Given this and the intellectual satisfaction that comes when the mind is in tune with the God who is there, “it is hard to understand how an orthodox, evangelical, Bible-believing Christian can fail to be excited” (p. 188).
This book has precisely the right title. It is a penetrating, magnificent, wise book by a man who knew then, and now knows more fully, though perhaps not even yet exhaustively, “the God who is there.”
SECTION I
THE INTELLECTUAL& CULTURALCLIMATE OF THE SECOND HALFOF THETWENTIETHCENTURY
Thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in a Monte Carlo game.
To man qua man we readily say good riddance.
But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine; When you pass through the waters I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”
BEFORE THE CHASM
The present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely by a change in the concept of truth.
Wherever you look today, the new concept holds the field. The consensus about us is almost monolithic, whether you review the arts, literature or simply read the newspapers and magazines such as Time, Life, Newsweek, The Listener or The Observer. On every side you can feel the stranglehold of this new methodology—and by “methodology” we mean the way we approach truth and knowing. It is like suffocating in a particularly bad London fog. And just as fog cannot be kept out by walls or doors, so this consensus comes in around us, until the room we live in is no longer unpolluted, and yet we hardly realize what has happened.
The tragedy of our situation today is that men and women are being fundamentally affected by the new way of looking at truth, and yet they have never even analyzed the drift which has taken place. Young people from Christian homes are brought up in the old framework of truth. Then they are subjected to the modern framework. In time they become confused because they do not understand the alternatives with which they are being presented. Confusion becomes bewilderment, and before long they are overwhelmed. This is unhappily true not only of young people, but of many pastors, Christian educators, evangelists and missionaries as well.
So this change in the concept of the way we come to knowledge and truth is the most crucial problem, as I understand it, facing Christianity today.
If you had lived in Europe, let us say prior to about 1890, or in the United States before about 1935, you would not have had to spend much time, in practice, in thinking about your presuppositions. (These dates are arbitrary as the change came, in Europe at least, fairly gradually. In America the crucial years of change were from 1913 to 1940, and during these relatively few years the whole way of thinking underwent a revolution; 1913 was a most important year in the United States, not because it was the year before the First World War, but for another highly significant reason, as we shall see later.)
Before these dates everyone would have been working on much the same presuppositions, which in practice seemed to accord with the Christian’s own presuppositions. This was true both in the area of epistemology and methodology. Epistemology is the theory of how we know, or how we can be sure that what we think we know of the world about us is correct. Methodology is how we approach the question of truth and knowing.
Now it may be argued that the non-Christians had no right to act on the presuppositions they acted on. That is true. They were being romantic in accepting optimistic answers without a sufficient base. Nevertheless they went on thinking and acting as if these presuppositions were true.
What were these presuppositions? The basic one was that there really are such things as absolutes. They accepted the possibility of an absolute in the area of Being (or knowledge), and in the area of morals. Therefore, because they accepted the possibility of absolutes, though people might have disagreed as to what these were, nevertheless they could reason together on the classical basis of antithesis. They took it for granted that if anything was true, the opposite was false. In morality, if one thing was right, its opposite was wrong. This little formula, “A is A” and “If you have A, it is not non-A,” is the first move in classical logic. If you understand the extent to which this no longer holds sway, you will understand our present situation.
Absolutes imply antithesis. The non-Christian went on romantically operating on this basis without a sufficient cause, an adequate base, for doing so. Thus it was still possible to discuss what was right and wrong, what was true and false. One could tell a non-Christian to “be a good girl” and, while she might not have followed your advice, at least she would have understood what you were talking about. To say the same thing to a truly modern girl today would be to make a “nonsense” statement. The blank look you might receive would not mean that your standards had been rejected, but that your message was meaningless.
The shift has been tremendous. Thirty or more years ago you could have said such things as “This is true” or “This is right,” and you would have been on everybody’s wavelength. People may or may not have thought out their beliefs consistently, but everyone would have been talking to each other as though the idea of antithesis was correct. Thus in evangelism, in spiritual matters and in Christian education, you could have begun with the certainty that your audience understood you.
PRESUPPOSITIONAL APOLOGETICS WOULD HAVE STOPPED THE DECAY
It was indeed unfortunate that our Christian “thinkers,” in the time before the shift took place and the chasm was fixed, did not teach and preach with a clear grasp of presuppositions.1 Had they done this they would not have been taken by surprise, and they could have helped young people to face their difficulties. The really foolish thing is that even now, years after the shift is complete, many Christians still do not know what is happening. And this is because they are still not being taught the importance of thinking in terms of presuppositions, especially concerning truth.
The floodwaters of secular thought and liberal theology overwhelmed the church because the leaders did not understand the importance of combating a false set of presuppositions. They largely fought the battle on the wrong ground and so, instead of being ahead in both defense and communication, they lagged woefully behind. This was a real weakness which it is hard, even today, to rectify among evangelicals.
The use of classical apologetics before this shift took place was effective only because non-Christians were functioning, on the surface, on the same presuppositions, even if they had an inadequate base for them. In classical apologetics though, presuppositions were rarely analyzed, discussed or taken into account.
