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

by Francis A. Schaeffer

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.

Today we have a weakness in our educational process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines.

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.

The point to be stressed is that, when nature is made autonomous, it is destructive.

The Reformers said that there is nothing man can do; no autonomous or humanistic, religious or moral effort of man can help. One is saved only on the basis of the finished work of Christ as he died in space and time in history, and the only way to be saved is to raise the empty hands of faith and, by God’s grace, to accept God’s free gift—Faith Alone.

The Scriptures give the key to two kinds of knowledge—the knowledge of God and the knowledge of men and nature.

It is an important principle to remember, in the contemporary interest in communication and in language study, that the biblical presentation is that, though we do not have exhaustive truth, we have from the Bible what I term “true truth.” In this way we know true truth about God, true truth about man and something truly about nature. Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge.

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 Bible says that you are wonderful because you are made in the image of God, but that you are flawed because, at a space-time point of history, man fell.

People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, and they do not know how to because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God.

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

So man, being made in the image of God, was made to have a personal relationship with him. Man’s relationship is upward and not merely downward. If you are dealing with twentieth-century people, this becomes a very crucial difference. Modern man sees his relationship downward to the animal and to the machine. The Bible rejects this view of who man is. On the side of personality you are related to God. You are not infinite but finite; nevertheless, you are truly personal; you are created in the image of the personal God who exists.

In contrast to Eastern thinking, the Hebrew-Christian tradition affirms that God has created a true universe outside of himself. When I use this term “outside of himself,” I do not mean it in a spatial sense; I mean that the universe is not an extension of the essence of God. It is not just a dream of God. There is something there to think about, to deal with and to investigate which has objective reality. Christianity gives a certainty of objective reality and of cause and effect, a certainty that is strong enough to build on. Thus the object, and history, and cause and effect really exist.

The individual’s freedom is seen not only as freedom without the need of redemption, but as absolute freedom.

What is autonomous freedom? It means a freedom in which the individual is the center of the universe. Autonomous freedom is a freedom that is without restraint.

When a man says that thinking in terms of an antithesis is wrong, what he is really doing is using the concept of antithesis to deny antithesis. That is the way God has made us and there is no other way to think.

We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that, when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in our whole culture—in the theater of cruelty, in the violence in the streets, in the murders on the moors, in the death of man in art and life.

What Hegel changed was something more profound than merely one philosophic answer for another. He changed the rules of the game in two areas: epistemology, the theory of knowledge and the limits and validity of knowledge; and methodology, the method by which we approach the question of truth and knowing.

Truth as truth is gone, and synthesis (the both-and), with its relativism, reigns. The basic position of man in rebellion against God is that man is at the center of the universe, that he is autonomous—here lies his rebellion. Man will keep his rationalism and his rebellion, his insistence on total autonomy or partially autonomous areas, even if it means he must give up his rationality.

Previously, educated men would not give up rationality and the hope of the unified field of knowledge. Modern man has given up his hope of unity and lives in despair—the despair of no longer thinking that what has always been the aspiration of men is at all possible.

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.

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

The old mystics always said that there was somebody there, but the new mystic says that that does not matter, because faith is the important thing. It is faith in faith, whether expressed in secular or religious terms.

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

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.

Christianity is a system which is composed of a set of ideas which can be discussed. By “system” we do not mean a scholastic abstraction, nevertheless we do not shrink from using this word. The Bible does not set out unrelated thoughts. The system it sets forth has a beginning and moves from that beginning in a noncontradictory way. The beginning is the existence of the infinite-personal God as Creator of all else. Christianity is not just a vague set of incommunicable experiences, based on a totally unverifiable “leap in the dark.” Neither conversion (the beginning of the Christian life) nor spirituality (the growth) should be such a leap. Both are firmly related to the God who is there and the knowledge he has given us—and both involve the whole man.