Escape from Reason: A Penetrating Analysis of Trends in Modern Thought (IVP Classics)

by Francis A. Schaeffer

things of man are not unrelated parallel lines.

Giovanni Gentile, one of the greatest of Italian philosophers until his fairly recent death, said that Leonardo died in despondency because he would not let go of the hope of a rational unity between the particulars and the universal.2

To this problem of unity the Reformation gave an entirely opposite answer from that of the Renaissance.

There could have been no Reformation and no Reformation culture in Northern Europe without the realization that God had spoken to man in the Scriptures and that, therefore, we know something truly about God because God has revealed it to man.

though we do not have exhaustive truth, we have from the Bible what I term “true truth.”

We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin—who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that he created man in his image. So man is something wonderful.

the culture of Northern Europe knew that, while man is morally guilty before the God who exists, he is not nothing.

What the Reformation tells us, therefore, is that God has spoken in the Scriptures concerning both the “upstairs” and the “downstairs.” He spoke in a true revelation concerning himself—heavenly things—and he spoke in a true revelation concerning nature—the cosmos and man.

the biblical position is clear—man cannot be explained as totally determined and conditioned—a position that built the concept of the dignity of man.

Christ died for a man who had true moral guilt because he had made a real and true choice.

The gods of the East are infinite by definition, in the sense that they encompass all—the evil as well as the good—but they are not personal. The gods of the West were personal, but they were very limited. The Teutonic, the Roman and the Greek gods were all the same—personal but not infinite. The Christian God, the God of the Bible, is personal-infinite.

difference. Jacob Burckhardt’s work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in Basel in 1860, is still a standard work on these subjects. He points out that the women of the Renaissance in Italy were free,

There is nothing autonomous—nothing apart from the lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Scriptures.

Christianity was necessary for the beginning of modern science for the simple reason that Christianity created a climate of thought which put men in a position to investigate the form of the universe.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who said, in Novum Organum Scientiarum: “Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.” Therefore science as science (and art as art) was understood to be, in the best sense, a religious activity.

The sobering fact is that the only way one can reject thinking in terms of an antithesis and the rational is on the basis of the rational and the antithesis.

The early scientists believed in the uniformity of natural causes. What they did not believe in was the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.

In science the significant change came about therefore as a result of a shift in emphasis from the uniformity of natural causes to the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.

The result of seeking for a unity on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system is that freedom does not exist. In fact, love no longer exists; significance, in the old sense of man longing for significance, no longer exists.

if man is determined, then what is, is right. If all of life is only mechanism—if that is all there is—then morals really do not count. Morals become only a word for a sociological frame-work. Morals become a means of manipulation by society in the midst of the machine.

This leads to the second step—man is stronger than woman. Nature has made him so. Therefore, the male has the right to do what he wishes to the female.

Sadism is not only pleasure in hurting somebody. It implies that what is, is right and what nature decrees in strength is totally right.

Men like Sir Francis Crick today and even Freud, at his point of psychological determinism, are only saying what the Marquis de Sade has already told us—we are a part of the machine.

We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that, when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soo...

In other words, in the lower story, on the basis of all reason, man as man is dead. You have simply mathematics, particulars, mechanics. Man has no meaning, no purpose, no significance. There is only pessimism concerning man as man.

On the basis of all reason, man is meaningless. He has always been dead as far as rationality and logic are concerned. It was a vain hope that man thought he was not dead. This is what it means to say man is dead. It does not mean he was alive and died. He was always dead but did not know enough to know that he was dead.1

But the difficulty is that authentication has no rational or logical content—all directions of an act of the will are equal.

Wow

There is no way to prepare for the final experience. The final experience is in the upper category—it just comes.

you have what Heidegger called Angst. Angst is not just fear, for fear has an object. Angst is a vague feeling of dread—the uncomfortable feeling you have when you go into a house that might be haunted.

The Reformation and the Scriptures say that man cannot do anything to save himself, but he can, with his reason, search the Scriptures which touch not only “religious truth” but also history and the cosmos. He not only is able to search the Scriptures as the whole man, including his reason, but he has the responsibility to do so.

One hears the word “Jesus,” one acts upon it, but it is never defined. The use of such words is always in the area of the irrational, the non-logical.

Man made in the image of God cannot live as though he is nothing, and thus he places in the upper story all sorts of desperate things.

The basic reason that drugs are seriously taken today is not for escape or kicks but because man is desperate.

Man is therefore trying to find an answer in “first-order experiences.” This is what lies behind the modern drug mania. It is related to a thousand years of pantheism, for Eastern mystics have taken hashish for centuries to achieve religious experience.

Julian Huxley is looking to a religious leap, even though to him it is a lie—that there is no god.

The mere use of religious words in contrast to non-religious words changes nothing after the dichotomy and leap are accepted.

The significant thing is that rationalistic, humanistic man began by saying that Christianity was not rational enough. Now he has come around in a wide circle and ended as a mystic—though a mystic of a special kind. He is a mystic with nobody there.

Modern man is committed to finding his answer upstairs, by a leap, away from rationality and away from reason.

Industrial design, like science, is also bound up with the form of the universe and therefore is often more beautiful than “Art” (with a capital “A”), which expresses man’s rebellion, ugliness and despair.

Sir Herbert Read is in the same category. In The Philosophy of Modern Art3 he shows he understands when he says about Gauguin: “Gauguin substituted his love for beauty (as a painter) for man’s love for his Creator.”

it is instructive to see what happened when Picasso fell in love. He began writing across his canvas “J’aime Eva.” Suddenly there was now a communication between the people looking at the picture and Picasso.

the heirs of the Enlightenment had promised that they would provide a unified answer on the basis of the rational. Foucault maintains correctly that it has not fulfilled its promise.

Marghanita Laski speaks of the new kinds of mysticisms which she sees developing and says, “in any case how could they be shown to be true or false?” The sum of her point is that men are removing religious things out of the world of the discussable and putting them into the non-discussable, where you can say anything without fear of proof or disproof.

The evangelical Christian needs to be careful because some evangelicals have recently been asserting that what matters is not setting out to prove or disprove propositions; what matters is an encounter with Jesus. When a Christian has made such a statement he has, in an analyzed or unanalyzed form, moved upstairs.

We have come then to this fearsome place where the word “Jesus” has become the enemy of the Person Jesus and the enemy of what Jesus taught. We must fear this contentless banner of the word “Jesus” not because we do not love Jesus but because we do love him. We must fight this contentless banner, with its deep motivations, rooted into the memories of the race, which is being used for the purpose of sociological form and control. We must teach our spiritual children to do the same.

Increasingly over the last few years the word “Jesus,” separated from the content of the Scriptures, has become the enemy of the Jesus of history, the Jesus who died and rose and who is coming again and who is the eternal Son of God.

For Reformation man there was a basis for law. Modern man has not only thrown away Christian theology, he has thrown away the possibility of what our forefathers had as a basis for morality and law.

Christianity has the opportunity, therefore, to speak clearly of the fact that its answer has the very thing that modern man has despaired of—the unity of thought.

In order to confront modern man truly you must not have the dichotomy. You must have the Scriptures speaking true truth both about God himself and about the area where the Bible touches history and the cosmos. This is what our forefathers in the Reformation grasped so well.