Francis A. Schaeffer (1912–1984) was a pastor, theologian, and speaker with an international ministry who became one of the most influential figures in American evangelicalism during his lifetime. With his wife, Edith, he founded the L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland. He was the author of many books, including Escape from Reason and How Should We Then Live?, which have sold millions of copies worldwide.

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Escape from Reason - Francis A. Schaeffer

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Preface

If a man goes overseas for any length of time we would expect him to learn the language of the country to which he is going. More than this is needed, however, if he is really to communicate with the people among whom he is living. He must learn another language—that of the thought-forms of the people to whom he speaks. Only so will he have real communication with them and to them. So it is with the Christian church. Its responsibility is not only to hold to the basic, scriptural principles of the Christian faith, but to communicate these unchanging truths into the generation in which it is living.

Every generation of Christians has this problem of learning how to speak meaningfully to its own age. It cannot be solved without an understanding of the changing existential situation which it faces. If we are to communicate the Christian faith effectively, therefore, we must know and understand the thought-forms of our own generation. These will differ slightly from place to place, and more so from nation to nation. Nevertheless there are characteristics of an age such as ours which are the same wherever we happen to be. It is these that I am especially considering in this book. And the object of this is far from being merely to satisfy intellectual curiosity. As we go along it will become clear how far-reaching are the practical consequences of a proper understanding of these movements of thought.

Some may be surprised that in analyzing the trends in modern thought I should begin with Aquinas and work my way forward from there. But I am convinced that our study must be concerned at one and the same time with both history and philosophy. If we are to understand present-day trends in thought we must see how the situation has come about historically and also look in some detail at the development of philosophic thought-forms. Only when this has been done are we ready to go on to the practical aspects of how to communicate unchanging truth in a changing world.

NATURE AND GRACE

The origin of modern man could be traced back to several periods. But I would begin with the teaching of a man who changed the world in a very real way. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) opened the way for the discussion of what is usually called nature and grace. They may be set out diagrammatically like this:

This diagram may be amplified as follows, to show what is included on the two different levels:

Up to this time, man’s thought-forms had been Byzantine. The heavenly things were all-important and were so holy that they were not pictured realistically. For instance, Mary and Christ were never portrayed realistically. Only symbols were portrayed. So if you look up at one of the later Byzantine mosaics in the baptistery at Florence, for example, it is not a picture of Mary that you see, but a symbol representing Mary.

On the other hand, simple nature—trees and mountains—held no interest for the artist, except as part of the world to be lived in. Mountain climbing, for instance, simply had no appeal as something to be done for its own sake. As we shall see, mountain climbing as such really began with the new interest in nature. So prior to Thomas Aquinas there was an overwhelming emphasis on the heavenly things, very far off and very holy, pictured only as symbols, with little interest in nature itself. With the coming of Aquinas we have the real birth of the humanistic Renaissance.

Aquinas’s view of nature and grace did not involve a complete discontinuity between the two, for he did have a concept of unity between them. From Aquinas’s day on, for many years, there was a constant struggle for a unity of nature and grace and a hope that rationality would say something about both.

There were some very good things that resulted from the birth of Renaissance thought. In particular, nature received a more proper place. From a biblical viewpoint nature is important because it has been created by God and is not to be despised. The things of the body are not to be despised when compared with the soul. The things of beauty are important. Sexual things are not evil of themselves. All these things are involved in the fact that in nature God has given us a good gift, and the man who regards them with contempt is really despising God’s creation. As such he is despising, in a sense, God himself, for he has contempt for what God has made.

AQUINAS AND THE AUTONOMOUS

At the same time, we are now able to see the significance of the diagram of nature and grace in a different way. While there were some good results from giving nature a better place, it also opened the way for much that was destructive, as we shall see. In Aquinas’s view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous. In one realm man was now independent, autonomous.

This sphere of the autonomous in Aquinas takes on various forms. One result, for example, was the development of natural theology. In this view, natural theology is a theology that could be pursued independently from the Scriptures. Though it was an autonomous study, he hoped for unity and said that there was a correlation between natural theology and the Scriptures. But the important point in what followed was that a really autonomous area was set up.

From the basis of this autonomous principle, philosophy also became free and was separated from revelation. Therefore philosophy began to take wings, as it were, and fly off wherever it wished, without relationship to the Scriptures. This does not mean that this tendency was never previously apparent, but it appears in a more total way from this time on.

Nor did it remain isolated in Thomas Aquinas’s philosophic theology. Soon it began to enter the arts.

Today we have a weakness in our educational process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines. We tend to study all our disciplines in unrelated parallel lines. This tends to be true in both Christian and secular education. This is one of the reasons why evangelical Christians have been taken by surprise at the tremendous shift that has come in our generation. We have studied our exegesis as exegesis, our theology as theology, our philosophy as philosophy; we study something about art as art; we study music as music, without understanding that these are things of man, and the things of man are not unrelated parallel lines.

There are several ways in which this association between theology, philosophy and the arts emerged following Aquinas.

PAINTERS AND WRITERS

The first artist to be influenced was Cimabue (1240-1302), teacher of Giotto (1267-1337). Aquinas lived from 1225 to

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Schaffer does a nice job of tracing thinking (reasoning) from the time of Aquinas to the start of post-modernism. When Aquinas incorrectly interpreted the fall of man, he set in motion a chain of reasoning that finds its logical conclusion in post-modernism, wherein there is no God, there is no truth, there are no morals, and man has no value. This is not my favorite subject and the reading is deep, but I still enjoyed this short book.

This book has been described as "a penetrating analysis of trends in modern thought", and it certainly is!Written in 1968 by Francis Schaeffer, this is a deep and fascinating look at how the concept of reason has changed over the centuries, to the point where people not only think differently, but claim that truth cannot be known, there are no absolutes. It took me several days to work though the ideas inside this small book, but it was worth it, and gave me much to meditate upon. I think I'll reread it, soon, too.

Schaeffer takes the late Renaissance/ early Reformation period of the 15th and 16th century in Europe as a watershed of human history. The Renaissance emphasized human reason and the achievements of man. The Reformation emphasized the "will of God" and the authority of Scripture.

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