Francis Schaeffer’s “line of despair” model of our civilisation’s intellectual history:

We can adapt Francis Schaeffer’s themes, looking back to the Christian Synthesis of the heritage of Jerusalem, Greece and Rome, and the onward flow of ideas and cultural agendas since Paul of Tarsus:

Extending (and correcting) Schaeffer’s vision of the course of western thought, worldviews and culture, C1 – 21

Schaeffer thought that once there was an upper/lower storey approach that in effect gave up on solving the problem of the one and the many, the lower storey would eat up the upper one, unity and coherence would disintegrate:

Dichotomising nature and grace leads to disjointedness in western man’s worldview

Schaeffer and others also thought in terms of the seven mountains picture of the span of culture, how the dominant view sets the agenda and how cultures therefore change. This has been championed by Wallnau and others in recent years. I adapt:

We may carry this onward to the challenge to speak into the culture prophetically, from a gospel based, worldviews informed sound perspective rooted in “The God who is there and who is not silent”:

In our time, all of this is complicated by complex geostrategic issues:

Food for thought. END

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