Appendix: Concerning the Books by Francis and Edith Schaeffer
appendix
concerning
the books by
Francis and Edith
Schaeffer
Over the last few years my wife Edith and I have been carrying through a somewhat comprehensive program of writing. This book is one of the pieces.
My first two books were The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason. Wrongly–perhaps because it was shorter–many people have assumed that Escape from Reason is the “introduction” and The God Who Is There a development of it. In fact, the opposite is the truth. The God Who Is There was written first; it lays the groundwork, establishes the terminology and sets out the basic thesis. We at L’Abri have attempted to show that Christianity has balance: that biblical exegesis gives intellectual depth, and also, in the area of practical living and beauty, Christianity has a relation to the whole man. Beginning with the Christian system as God has given it to men in the verbalized propositional revelation of the Bible, one can move along and find that every area of life is touched by truth and a song. Escape from Reason works out this principle particularly in the philosophical area of Nature and Grace, and shows how modern culture has grown from polluted roots far back in the late Middle Ages.
After these two books perhaps He Is There and He Is Not Silent should have been published. That would have been its logical place. The three make a unified base; without them the various applications in the other books are really suspended in space. He Is There and He Is Not Silent deals with one of the most fundamental of all questions: how we know, and how we know we know. Unless our epistemology is right, everything is going to be wrong. That is why it goes with The God Who Is There–a link emphasized by its title. The infinite-personal God is there, but also he is not silent and that changes the whole world.
On the base of these three books, which constitute a conscious unity (a unity which I believe rests on the unity of Scripture itself), all the other books which have come or will come depend. They apply this unified Christian system to various areas. It should be noted that The God Who Is There has two appendices which deal with two specific problems: the middle-class church in the twentieth century and the practice of truth in Christian work and evangelism. These are developed in the later books. Death in the City is exegetical, picking up the application of the earlier books to American and Northern European culture as it has turned away from what God has given us as a base.
Next came Pollution and the Death of Man, the Christian answer to the ecological dilemma, based on the same consistent system. The Church at the End of the 20th Century moved into other areas of application–sociology and ecclesiology. The two appendices to that book, Adultery and Apostasy and The Mark of the Christian (also published as a separate small book) picked up the theme touched on in the second appendix to The God Who Is There: They emphasize the balance to be struck between the practice of the purity of the visible church and the love which ought to mark relationships between all true Christians, no matter what their differences over secondary matters are. There is also a fuller and practical treatment of ecclesiology in The Church before the Watching World.
It might be alleged that this is merely a new, arid scholasticism, applied in the areas of epistemology, ecclesiology, ecology, sociology and so forth. If it were, then it would be nothing but a tinkling cymbal. Three books, however, redress the balance. The last chapter of Death in the City, “The Universe and Two Chairs,” is important here. Edith’s book, L’Abri, is a vital element, and without it the other books lack true unity and balance. Her book shows how acting upon the fact that the infinite-personal God is really there has worked out in day-by-day practice in the community of L’Abri. True Spirituality is likewise crucial; it is a systematic treatment of the whole basis of a Christian’s living in an open relationship with God and then with himself and others. Edith’s book Hidden Art has an important place as it carries these matters into the practical and beautiful area of creativity in the Christian’s life. The present book on the first eleven chapters of Genesis fits into the whole structure by giving a more fully developed exegetical base to the decisive point of beginnings.
Taken together, all of these books represent a unified concept which was developed over many years of study and many years of experiential knowledge of our God who is there.