I've generally liked the comments of John Fischer, who has generally been solid, calm and reasonable. This week he remembers Francis Schaeffer, the American who singlehandedly preserved my faith and my sanity for much of my adult life with his writings, and inspired me to think more than any other. Fischer writes about Schaeffer's compassion. His key point, Francis was not a man who only railed about political issues as a few portray him today. He was a man who wept over a culture that was disintegrating. His political involvement was borne of compassion, not a quest for power.
Schaeffer was a man who had a temper, and descriptions of that temper have leaked out of L’Abri, partly through equally fiery son Franky. He could be unbending and hard, I’m told, from at least one source I would tend to respect. Yet he could weep with compassion - like Jesus wept with compassion over Jerusalem.
And why did Francis weep? Because, like Christ, he saw people as sheep without a shepherd, as individuals adrift in a sea of moral chaos. At the heart of Schaeffer’s theological and cultural analysis was his proverbial "line of despair", a line he defined as that place where human beings give up on finding real answers to the central questions of life.
He laid the initial blame, rightly or wrongly, at the foot of Aquinas, who following Aristotle, rooted his theology in a philosophical exercise of reasoning from particulars to universals. Schaeffer felt that Aquinas put too much weight on the capacity of human reason, reason that was fallen, finite, and in rebellion against God. The result of too much dependence on human reason was an unwarranted optimism in generations after Aquinas about the ability of human reason alone to find final knowledge - universal truths. That optimism gradually eliminated the need philosophers and theologians felt to depend on God’s revelation for knowledge of that which is beyond the natural realm.
History since Aquinas, for Schaeffer, was a step by step process of philosophers and theologians attempting to build, using reason alone, a system of thought that could unite all truth, including metaphysical and spiritual truth. Each successive attempt failed, leading eventually to that line of despair – the belief that in the realm of “upper story” truth, confidence about the existence of God, moral absolutes, and even ultimate meaning to existence, there could be no final answers. Universals, absolutes, meaning, all these eventually were seen as beyond the reach of reason and thus either did not exist or could not be discussed in rational terms using rational categories.
The result in culture – relativism, uncertainty, fear, despair. He pointed out the absurdity of the 60s generation seeking spiritual truth by taking drugs to leap beyond reason into something transcendent. As the famous title of one of his seminal booklets states, men in the late 20th century were engaged in a hopeless “escape from reason”. Having abandoned divine revelation and elevating reason to the place of prominence, they had in the end come to a place where reason itself had failed to provide answers, and had collapsed into despair, anarchy, chaos, hopelessness.
But what is not often discussed in relation to Schaeffer, was his prediction of what would come next. Some who critique him place him in the camp of the modernist/fundamentalists, others refer to him as the first postmodern apologist. He was neither.
Schaeffer predicted that because human beings are created in God’s image, they cannot live in a universe that is purely mechanistic, naturalistic, without transcendent values and truths. He predicted that having abandoned a biblical view where reason is merely a tool to apprehend revealed truth rather than the all-sufficient ladder on which to autonomously ascend to the heavens, men would seek other ways to find meaning – ways that were irrational, dependent entirely on mysticism with no rational content.
What those who focus on Schaeffer’s later political involvement fail to understand is that his prediction has come true in stunning detail. The culture he critiqued, one that was built on autonomous rationalism, has been replaced by a culture that is still autonomous, but now decidedly non-rational. Truth is still defined by the autonomous I, or at best the isolated we. Reason is looked on with suspicion, if not outright despised, not because it was autonomous, but simply because it was reason. All mention of the word "reason" is now associated with the enlightenment. Absolutes are seen as totalizing metanarratives – constructs of human arrogance, even fascist propaganda.
And real meaning now must be found not be apprehending God’s revelation humbly through the divine gift of reason, but by groping outside of reason in the realm of mysticism, feeling, intuition, mystery. The cardinal virtues of the day are now “openness”, “acceptance” and “tolerance” of all views. The mortal sins of the day are asserting truth as something transcendent, asserting knowledge as beyond reasonable doubt, asserting that anyone can actually know with any degree of confidence that his understanding is more than just his own viewpoint.
Hence we live in a world where the text of scripture, which Schaeffer cherished, is conceived of as an indistinct object seen only through the lens of subjective perception, and transcendent truths can only be known through non-rational and experiential means, through mystical experience, filtered through the common experiences of a particular cultural or group. No truths transcend all cultures. No values are firm and universal. Culture is truth. And Scripture means what culture says it means.
For this reason, I weep with Francis Schaeffer. For the church, once the “pillar and foundation of the truth” can no longer provide firm footing to those whose feet are slipping, whose souls are adrift at sea. The church, according to the gurus of the current theological generation, including many in Catholic, mainline and evangelical circles, can offer only guarded, enculturated opinions. And instead of speaking the prophetic truth of the ages, we are told we must listen to the voices of other cultures for the spark of the divine in their religious viewpoints.
Schaeffer would be aghast- but not surprised. And he would still be weeping.
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