In "The God Who Is There", Francis Schaeffer explains that our world needs to know that GOD is THERE. God is really there - not as a helpful psychological construct but really, a real personality who is truly alive and acts and acted in real, verifiable space-time history as certainly as I sit here typing now. And "God" - the word is not up to our definition but refers to the God revealed in the Bible, this is the God who is there. In a culture that imagines an impassable chasm to exist between faith and reason, the objective reality of this truth must precede anything else we wish to say or our words will be completely misunderstood.

So that's the big idea.

How do you get there? Schaeffer contends that Christianity is a complete, livable system - and the dominant philosophy we encounter in other men is not. When the rational and faith were separated, when God was cut out of the picture, many of the most important concepts we discuss and value - morality, personality, purpose, became figments, or shadows of their former selves, if they could still be believed in at all. (One of the more interesting parts of the book to me was where Schaeffer traced out the repercussions of this separation as it moved from the realm of the philosophers down into music and art. From the idea that life is random and chance came musicians and artists who used random methods to create their music and art - Jackson Pollock most well known, perhaps.) And yet, though their philosophy tells men these things are figments, they live as though they are not. And so the first task of an evangelist is to "blow the roof off", to show men the real conclusions of their beliefs, conclusions they themselves could not live with. After this the evangelist may talk about our guilt before God and the necessity of faith - but ALWAYS making it clear what he means by guilt, and what he means by God, and what he means by faith, as the world has forgotten that reason and reality and faith go together. "As the twentieth-century mentality would understand the concept of religion, the Bible is a nonreligious book" he says in one place. And elsewhere, "The Bible insists that truth is one - and it is almost the sole surviving system in our generation that does."

But he doesn't end there, and I appreciated the final two chapters. We've spent all this time talking about how the world doesn't, really can't, live in consistency with its presuppositions about life - but are we Christians? When man fell, he says, we were separated from God, separated from ourselves (the psychological problems of life), separated from others (the sociological problems of life), and separated from nature. The work of Christ does not cure all of these problems completely in this life, but should bring substantial healing, healing the world can see - "behold how they love each other" the Romans said. Do the Americans say it today? And perhaps, he says at the very end, Christians should be the most "human" people you ever meet. Because we know who God is (really), and so we know what humans are (really), how we are special and different, created uniquely in the image of God, what we are meant to be. So let us live lives that reflect that.