Christianity,  Nonfiction

Escape from Reason

Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting. (Francis Schaeffer)

Perhaps ten years ago, a major evangelist came to my city. For at least a year beforehand, all the local churches had been trained in how to respond and continue the work God would do through the crusade. When the big week came, there were several events associated with it, the apex being the evangelist’s presentation of the gospel. I live in the “post-Christian Northeast,” but the evangelist spoke in the familiar terms of a revival preacher, his southern accent rolling over the crowd. I remember looking around and wondering, “Is this reaching anyone?”

In a much deeper and more far-reaching way, Francis Schaeffer noticed a disconnect between the language and thought of evangelicalism, and those of the mid-20th century world around. Much of his ministry through L’Abri, as well as through his writings, happens through his willingness to confront this disconnect in an effort to express Christianity in terms that were meaningful to his age, and to equip the church to do the same.

Escape from Reason is part of a trilogy of books explaining the course of philosophical and spiritual history in (mostly) western culture. He flies over history from 30,000 feet, zeroing in on pivotal shifts in humanity’s conceptualization of truth, as well as of nature, reason, and other key ideas. His method is to describe this history as a series of changing splits, originally starting with grace in the upper story, supernatural dimension, and nature in the lower story, physical dimension. Ultimately, he argues, humanity is living in the age of Kierkegaard’s “leap”: God, humanity, nature, meaning are all trapped in the lower story, deterministic machine, and the words placed in the upper story have no meaning because they are perceived as unknowable: faith, grace, Jesus. At the time Schaeffer is writing (1968), he explains that these “upper story” words carry connotative meaning from cultural memory, but other than that, they are empty.

The book is slim, and its overview quality makes it difficult at times. Some of Schaeffer’s definitions and distinctions were hard for me to get my mind around, for he does not get bogged down in excessive explanation. I like that he writes for lay readers, actually. I appreciated the scope of the book, in which science, art, music, literature and popular culture are all discussed as evidence of the “thought-forms” of various periods. (Strangely, he never once mentions Darwin.) A key distinction is between “rationalism,” by which Schaeffer means, essentially, an inductive approach to truth (“man begins absolutely and totally from himself, gathers the information concerning the particulars, and formulates the universals”), and “rationality,” a reliance on reason, which is characterized by antithesis (“the basis of classical logic is that A is not not-A.”). Modern humanity has abandoned the rational in favor of the rationalistic, he points out, leaving them in a scheme where the only basis for faith is an irrational leap in the hope that it will make us feel better.

This still seems to apply to our present “thought-forms,” in which deterministic naturalism dominates. We see it in the Marxist ideologies so prevalent in academia, whether in the social sciences, the study of literature, and the interpretation of history and present day politics. (For that matter, though as a homeschooler I’m not positive of this, but hasn’t the teaching of “history” morphed into “social studies”? It’s possible a present-day reader would question the assumption on which Schaeffer’s whole study is based. It takes a classical approach, working chronologically through history and assuming a universal human nature.) We also see a “leap” mentality in liberal biblical scholarship, which regards the Bible as filled with errors yet recommends reading it, giving up on whether its propositions are true and substituting tradition as a good enough motivation. Determinism characterizes the scientific imperialism of evolutionary theory as a lens for reading nature, and the “we are all there is” mentality of the climate change debate. The popular mind seems to be that we are adrift in a meaningless cosmos, a vast machine that is indifferent to us.

Add to this the determinism of technology, through which we are actively building the machine that’s used so often as a metaphor. Rarely if ever do we hear discussion of whether AI, for example, should be pursued, or whether the routine activities of big tech (data collection, invasion of privacy, planned obsolescence, monopolistic business practices) should be allowed. These things are regarded as inevitable characteristics of “progress,” products of forces that the masses must simply surrender to.

However, as Schaeffer points out, Christianity offers an alternative reading of reality. It eliminates the divide between faith and reason, freeing us from imprisonment in rationalism. He points to the Reformation as a period in which people “got it,” recognizing that Christianity is a rational faith, and this unifies the field of knowledge. For example, it places the truth of God in human history, communicated in the Scriptures, embodied in Jesus Christ at a specific place and point in time. It proposes a reunification of the natural and the supernatural through faith in Jesus’s historic work on the cross. We are free to choose whether to believe or not, but Christianity is not a faith without any rational basis. It is not based on a mystical experience, but on a body of knowledge that we consider and judge to be true or false. (Antithesis again.)

What is the value of a book like this? It forces us to look at the big picture, for one thing. There are countless books out there about present-day evangelicalism, but Escape from Reason insists that we take a giant step back and consider where it comes from. This book also asks us to think about what constitutes the essentials of our faith by examining it in the light of many competing systems of thought. Finally, it affirms what all of us know: the world is changing rapidly, and this applies not just to things like politics, trade, standard of living, or extent of connection globally; it involves intellectual shifts as well, and the language terms we use to describe our beliefs must be examined to be sure they are expressing what we intend.

I’ll let Schaeffer have the final word, as he proposes two priorities for Christians seeking to communicate the gospel:

The first is that there are certain unchangeable facts which are true. These have no relationship to the shifting tides. They make the Christian system what it is, and if they are altered, Christianity becomes something else. . .

But we cannot present a balanced picture if we stop here. We must realize that we are facing a rapidly changing historical situation, and if we are going to talk about the gospel we need to know what is the present ebb-and-flow of thought-forms. Unless we do the unchangeable principles of Christianity will fall on deaf ears.

2 Comments

  • Michele Morin

    I’ve read several of Schaeffer’s books but not this one!
    Thanks for the overview. This post makes me think I need to dust off and re-read some of his work.

  • Carol

    I haven’t read any of Schaeffer’s work for a long time but when I was a new Christian both his books and his wife’s were so helpful to me. Thanks for the review on this title. I have it but it’s one I haven’t yet read.