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

by Francis A. Schaeffer

On the side of infinity, as we saw before, we are separated from God entirely, but on the side of personality we are made in the image of God. So God can speak and tell us about himself—not exhaustively, but truly. (We could not, after all, know anything exhaustively as finite creatures.) Then he has told us about things in the finite created realm, too. He has told us true things about the cosmos and history. Thus, we are not adrift.

Jesus himself did not make a distinction between his authority and the authority of the written Scriptures. He acted upon the unity of his authority and the content of the Scriptures.

We have seen that in every case in which the downstairs was made autonomous, no matter what name it was given, it was not long before the downstairs ate up the upstairs. Not only God disappeared but freedom and man as well.

Over and over again I have found my personal experience repeated. It is possible to take the system the Bible teaches, put it down in the market place of the ideas of men and let it stand there and speak for itself.

The Bible says, first of all, that in the beginning all things were created by a personal-infinite God, who had always existed. So what is, therefore, is intrinsically personal rather than impersonal. Then the Bible says that he created all things outside of himself.

Thus, because the universe begins with a truly personal beginning, love and communication (which are a burden of twentieth-century men’s hearts) are not contrary to that which intrinsically is. The universe began in a personal (as against an impersonal) beginning, and, as such, those longings of love and communication which man has are not contrary to that which intrinsically is.

What he has created is objectively real, thus there is true historic cause and effect. There is a true history and there is a true me.

If I do not understand that man’s basic relationship is upward, I must try to find it downward.

But the Bible says that my line of reference need not lead downward. It is upward because I have been made in God’s image. Man is not a machine.

But, when the Bible says that man is created in the image of a personal God, it gives us a starting point. No humanistic system has provided a justification for man to begin with himself. The Bible’s answer is totally unique.

There are two concepts or ideas of knowing which must be kept separate. The first is the rationalistic or humanistic concept, namely that man, beginning totally independent and autonomous of all else, can build a bridge toward ultimate truth—as if attempting to build a cantilever bridge out from himself across an infinite gorge. This is not possible because man is finite and, as such, he has nothing toward which he can point with certainty. He has no way, beginning from himself, to set up sufficient universals.

The second concept is the Christian one. That is, as man has been created in God’s image, he can begin with himself—not as infinite but as personal; plus the important fact (as we shall see below) that God has given to fallen man content-full knowledge which he desperately needs.

it is a truly wonderful thing that, although man is twisted and corrupted and lost as a result of the Fall, yet he is still man. He has become neither a machine nor an animal nor a plant.

On the other hand, beginning only from himself autonomously, it is quite obvious that, being finite, he can never reach any absolute answer.

We may take, for example, what occurred at Sinai.1 Moses says to the people, “You saw; you heard.” What they heard (along with other things) was a verbalized propositional communication from God to man, in a definite, historic space-time situation. It was not some kind of contentless, existential experience, nor an anti-intellectual leap.

The Bible teaches that, though man is hopelessly lost, he is not nothing. Man is lost because he is separated from God, his true reference point, by true moral guilt.

Modern man has come to his position because he has accepted a new attitude in regard to truth. Nowhere is this more clearly and yet tragically seen than in modern theology. In order to see this new attitude to truth in perspective, let us consider two other concepts of truth: first that of the Greeks and then that of the Jews. Often the Greek concept of truth was a nicely balanced metaphysical system brought into harmony with itself at all points. The Jewish and biblical concept of truth is different. It is not that the rational concept which the Greeks held to was unimportant to the Jews, for both the Old and the New Testaments function on the basis of that which can be reasonably discussed; but, to the Jewish mind, something firmer was needed. And the firmer base was an appeal to real history—history in space and in time which could be written down and discussed as history. The modern view of truth drives a wedge between the Greek and Jewish views, but it does so at the wrong point. Those who hold the modern view would picture the Greeks as holding to rational truth and the Jews as being existentialists. In this way they would seek to claim the Bible for themselves. This is ingenious but a complete mistake. The Jewish concept is separated from the Greek in that the Jewish was rooted in space-time history and not just a balanced system. But the Jewish and biblical concept of truth is much closer to the Greek than to the modern, in the sense that it does not deny that whic...