The God Who Is There

Francis A. Schaeffer

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830850808
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

- Over 400, 000 SoldFor 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.

SECTION I

THE
INTELLECTUAL
& CULTURAL
CLIMATE OF
THE SECOND HALF
OF THE
TWENTIETH
CENTURY

Thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.

REVELATION 4:11

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

GENESIS 1:27

The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in a Monte Carlo game.

JACQUES MONOD

To man qua man we readily say good riddance.

B. F. SKINNER

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.”

ISAIAH 43:1-3

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.

So if a man got up to preach the gospel and said, “Believe this, it is true,” those who heard would have said, “Well, if that is so, then its opposite is false.” The presupposition of antithesis pervaded men’s entire mental outlook. We must not forget that historic Christianity stands on a basis of antithesis. Without it historic Christianity is meaningless. The basic antithesis is that God objectively exists in contrast (in antithesis) to his not existing. Which of these two are the reality, changes everything in the area of knowledge and morals and in the whole of life.

THE LINE OF DESPAIR

Thus we have a date line like this:

Notice that I call the line, the line of despair. Above this line we find men living with their romantic notions of absolutes (though with no sufficient logical basis). This side of the line, all is changed. Man thinks differently concerning truth.

In order to understand this line of despair more clearly, think of it not as a simple horizontal line but as a staircase:

Each of the steps represents a certain stage in time. The higher is earlier, the lower later. It was in this order that the shift in truth affected men’s lives.

The shift spread gradually, and in three different ways. People did not suddenly wake up one morning and find that it had permeated everywhere at once.

First of all it spread geographically. The ideas began in Germany and spread outward. They affected the Continent first, then crossed the Channel to England, and then the Atlantic to America. Second, it spread through society, from the real intellectual to the more educated, down to the workers, reaching the middle class last of all. Third, it spread as represented in the diagram, from one discipline to another, beginning with the philosophers and ending with the theologians. Theology has been last for a long time. It is curious to me, in studying this whole cultural drift, that so many pick up the latest theological fashion and hail it as something new. But in fact, what the new theology is now saying has already been said previously in each of the other disciplines.

It is important to grasp the fundamental nature of this line. If Christians try to talk to people as though they were above the line when in reality they are this side of it, we will only beat the air. This goes as much for dockers as for intellectuals. The same holds true for the concept of spirituality. This side of the line, “spirituality” becomes exactly opposite to Christian spirituality.

UNITY AND DISUNITY IN RATIONALISM

There is a real unity in non-Christian thought, as well as differences within that unity. The shift to moving below the line of despair is one of the differences within the unity of non-Christian thought. The unifying factor can be called rationalism, or if you prefer, humanism—though if we use the latter term, we must be careful to distinguish its meaning in this context from the more limited sense of the word humanism in such a book as The Humanist Frame,2 edited by Sir Julian Huxley. This latter kind of humanism has become a technical term within the larger meaning of the word. Humanism in the larger, more inclusive sense is 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. We must also ensure that the word rationalism, which means the same thing as humanism in the wider sense, is not confused with the word rational. Rational means that the things which are about us are not contrary to reason; or, to put it another way, man’s aspiration of reason is valid. And so the Judeo-Christian position is rational, but it is the very antithesis of rationalism.

So rationalism or humanism is the unity within non-Christian thought. Yet if Christians are going to be able to understand and talk to people in their generation, they must take account of the form rationalism is currently taking. In one way it is always the same—people trying to build from themselves alone. In another sense it is constantly shifting, with different emphases with which a Christian must be acquainted if he is not equipping himself to work in a period which no longer exists.

The line of despair indicates a titanic shift at this present time within the unity of rationalism. Above the line, people were rationali...