Preface
In one way, this is the book that should have been written immediately after The God Who Is There. Over the last few years my wife, Edith, and I have been carrying through a somewhat comprehensive program of books. This book is one of the basic pieces, and without it the structure has inevitably been incomplete. Let me explain why.
My first two books were The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason. Many people assumed —perhaps because it is shorter —that Escape from Reason is the “introduction” and The God Who Is There was written first and lays the groundwork, establishes the terminology, and sets out the basic thesis. This is something for which we have struggled and struggled at L’Abri —a Christianity that has balance, not only exegetically and intellectually, but also in the area of reality and beauty; an insistence that 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 those two books, this one should have come. That would have been its logical place. The three make a unified base, and without them the various applications in the later books are really three feet off the ground. This book 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 I say that this book 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; that changes the whole world. Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus, can find only silence in the area of values and meaning. Bergman made the same point in his film The Silence. This book challenges their pessimism. He is there. He is not silent.
On the base of these three books of mine, which constitute a conscious unity that I believe rests on the unity of Scripture itself, all the other books which have come and will come depend. They apply this unified Christian system to various areas. It should be noted that The God Who Is There has two appendixes that 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 North 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 Twentieth Century moves on into other areas of application —sociology and also ecclesiology. The two appendixes to that book, “Adultery and Apostasy” and “The Mark of the Christian” (also published as a separate small book), pick 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. 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, etc. 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 their true unity and balance. It 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 also crucial; it is a systematic treatment of the whole basis of Christian living in an open relationship with God, and then with ourselves and others.
From all of this it will be clear that The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason, and this book form a unity. Indeed, they could have been one book divided into various sections, with some subjects —ecology, for instance —treated as extended footnotes, developing a detail of the case in a specific area. In the total of all the books, Edith’s book Hidden Art has an important place since it carries these things into the practical and beautiful area of creativity in the Christian’s life. A book on the first eleven chapters of Genesis, entitled Genesis in Space and Time, will soon follow along, giving an even greater exegetical base at the decisive point of beginnings. Taken together, all of these books represent a unified concept, which was developed over a long time of study and a long time of experiential knowledge of the God who is there, and is now being worked out in various disciplines.
It will also be clear that this book, dealing as it does with a primary area, forms a vital part of our case in speaking historic Christianity into the twentieth century. He is there and is not a silent, nor far-off, God.