"The God Who is There" is one of Francis Schaeffer's earliest books. He revised and updated it and added three appendices in the early 1980s, not long before his death.
Schaeffer argues that figures such as Kierkegaard in philosophy, John Cage in music and Van Gogh in art led our culture down an existential path to despair. Without understanding and engaging in that culture, Christianity can't offer solutions, he said. Before we get to "Jesus died for your sins," we have to start with "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
The evangelical church of his day was a middle-class institution that spoke to the middle class, Schaeffer said, but it did little to reach intellectuals or laborers, are its own youth.
"Every honest questions deserves an honest answer," he wrote in Appendix B. "It is unbiblical for anyone to say, 'Just believe.'"
Truly engaging our culture is risky business, he said.
"To be engaged in personal 'witness' as a duty or because our Christian circle exerts a social pressure on us is to miss the point," he wrote. "The reason we do it is that the person before us is an image-bearer of God, and he is an individual who is unique in the world. This kind of communication is not cheap. To understand and to speak to sincere but utterly confused twentieth-century people is costly. It is tiring; it will open you up to temptations and pressures. Genuine love, in the last analysis, means a willingness to be entirely exposed to the person to whom we are talking."
What historic Christianity had to say to his generation, and to our generation, is a message of objective truth in the midst of postmodern murkiness.
This is from Appendix A:
"For the 'modern person,' we can keep talking in a way which helps because in contrast to the concept that everything is relative, we know that there are good, adequate and sufficient reasons to know that Christian answers are truth. I do not believe that there is a leap of faith needed ..."
I won't pretend to have fully grasped what Schaeffer had to say in a single reading. This isn't a long book, but it's packed full. I don't really understand, for example, his use of the term "antithesis," even though the term itself is simple enough. (Joy is the antithesis of sorrow.)
There are deep waters here, and I feel I'll have to buy my own copy -- so I can put my highlighter to use -- and read this book again, and perhaps a few more times after that. I think it will be worth it.