Somebody Who Understands Schaeffer

Few people I speak to have read significantly from Francis Schaeffer. Many who have mistakenly critique him as a clone of his mentor Cornelius Van Til, or a populist who got too involved with conservative politics. In light of his son's disturbing attacks on him in his novels and most recent book, which I refuse to even name, I found the following article by Christopher Tinker and Melvin Tinker very refreshing. These guys actually understand what Schaeffer was trying to do and why it remains significant and relevant.

Fifty Years On: The Legacy of Francis Schaeffer - An Apologetic for Post-Moderns not only summarizes Schaeffer well, it points out why the collective provocations of Tony Jones, Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt are so distressing.

They state regarding Schaeffer's most basic point about modernism "‘Rationality and faith are totally out of contact with each other.’ This is where modern man was left, in a state of despair. He could understand nature (lower storey) as a closed system rationalistically, but meaning (upper storey), in terms of purpose and significance, were unattainable and continued to elude him. The only way in which meaning could be found was to look to the upper storey where all rationality must be abandoned."

In other words, modernism was left saying that we could have objective knowledge about the material world, but the spiritual world was beyond science and reason. So anything related to the spirit, such as meaning, purpose, love, significance, had to be completely separated from the category called "knowledge". God may exist, but we can know nothing of him. For all practical purposes, all spiritual truth is unattainable if it exists at all.



Schaeffer predicted this utter despair over finding any universal spiritual truth could not be tolerated. He predicted instead that men, through a blind "leap of faith" into mysticism, would embrace spiritual ideas through non-rational means: contentless mysticism. Such an attempt would also fail. The logical end result is skepticism about reason, not only in regard to the supernatural realm, but skepticism about reason in regard to the natural realm. All knowledge would be challenged.

The writers continue: 

"Post-modernism is in many ways the bastard child of modernism. The claim of the modern age was that reason was the answer to all things; that given the right premises and right methods true knowledge was attainable. Doubt was to be extended to anything that could not be verified or falsified. The post-modernist takes this a stage further and asks; why should ‘reason’ be given immunity from doubt? The result is either solipsism or epistemological anarchism. Post-modernism, then, is the fallout of the despair that Schaeffer pointed to in his analysis of Western thought."

I have argued many times on this blog that what we are seeing in the postmodern age is exactly what Schaeffer would have predicted - a rejection of the very notion of truth. An unfortunately, this is what many Emergents seem to wish to embrace as a good thing.

Schaeffer's answer was that it is the propositional revelation of scripture, understood by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, that enabled a connection to be made between the upper and lower storeys. We know truth about God, not because we started from scratch and reasoned our way to the heavens, but because God condescended to communicate to us in our own language, verifying his revelation with signs and a record of eyewitness testimony. Emergent and postconservative rejection of propositional truth is an embracing of the very despair Schaeffer sought to minister to.

The writers conclude: 

 "If Schaeffer were alive today, he would no doubt continue to argue that Evangelicals should not lose their nerve on the question of ‘true truth’. This is crucial if we are not to sell out to a form of relativist pluralism which sees ‘evangelical truth’ alongside a range of other ‘truths’."

This is why the "emergent conversation" is so suicidal to me. It assumes away the very uniqueness of scripture by imprisoning all language and thought in subjective categories of "culture" and "interpretation" and suggests that though truth may exist in "objective" things, the human mind can never know such truths with any significant level of confidence.

How we need someone to take up Francis Schaeffer's mantle again. I fear greatly for our culture. "Epistemological anarchism" is exactly where we seem to be headed.