Francis Schaeffer is a combination of intellect and compassion. In "The God Who Is There," Schaeffer does a brilliant job of communicating the importance of a logical worldview. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of personality and culture in the last chapter of the book. He stressed the importance of critiquing art through a biblical worldview without condemning the artist. All men are created in the image of God, just because an artist choses to use his creative skills to promote something other than a Christian worldview does not mean he is any less valued in the eyes of God (or in the eyes of his fellow man). I have always struggled with the sect of the Christian culture who claims the moral high ground and condemns a fellow man. We are always in a place to judge, but in a place to judge actions against what the Bible teaches. Condemn the sin, not the sinner. We all live in a fallen world.

My only real complaint about the book was its lack of detail concerning the philosophers discussed. Many philosophers were briefly mentioned, but Schaeffer assumed the reader was very familiar with all of them. I recommend having a laptop near by to do research as you go.

The following were some of my favorite passages:

"True education means thinking by association across various disciplines, and not just being highly qualified in one field." - p. 19

" . . . [W]eight of scholarship in defining words does not make up for weakness of argument in the larger questions." - p. 26

"There is nothing more ugly than orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion." - p. 36

"The God who is there, according to the Scriptures is the personal-infinite God. There is no other god like this God. It is ridiculous to say that all religions teach the same things when they disagree at the fundamental point as to what God is like. The gods of the East are infinite by definition - the definition being 'god is all that is'. This is the pan-everything-ism god. The gods of the West have tended to be personal but limited; such were the gods of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans. But the God of the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, is the infinite-personal God." - p. 94

"[I]f one lives in a world of non-absolutes and would fight social justice in the mood of the moment, how may one establish what social justice is?" - p. 107