3 Rationality And Spirituality

3 Rationality And Spirituality

3

RATIONALITY AND

SPIRITUALITY

INTRODUCTION

This chapter will seek to evaluate what role Schaeffer accorded reason in his apologetics and in particular to consider whether he gave it an undue emphasis. The chapter will strongly argue that Schaeffer, when understood in his polemic context and in the totality of his writings, was not a rationalist. It does seem strange that Schaeffer, whose whole ministry at L’Abri was committed to proclaiming the reality of the supernatural aspects of Christianity, should even have to be defended against charges of being a rationalist. However, it is the contention of his critics that Schaeffer absorbed uncritically foundational Enlightenment assumptions and thus that “a strongly rationalist spirit” can be discerned within his apologetics.¹ It is certainly true that Schaeffer attached great importance to rationality and so attempted to show by reasonable argument why Christianity was the answer to the problems of modern man.

The fact that Francis Schaeffer believed that the non-Christian had the right to ask questions and explore the truth of Christianity is in contrast to the approach of Cornelius Van Til.² Those, such as Van Til, who adopt a presuppositionalist approach to apologetics argue that “issues between believers and unbelievers could not be settled by any direct appeal to facts or laws because the criteria whereby we determine what those facts and laws mean are not the same.”³ In traditional apologetics, the Christian had sought to find “common ground” with the non Christian whereby they could meet in rational discussion (without prejudice to their own position) given that there are certain epistemological truths that are common to all people. However, Van Til maintains that

it will be quite impossible to find a common area of knowledge between believers and unbelievers unless there is agreement between them as to the nature of man himself. But there is no such agreement.⁴

In contrast to Immanuel Kant, who said that we should completely ignore the demands of any alleged revelation external to ourselves, Van Til stated that the “very essence of knowledge is to bring our thoughts into agreement with God’s revealed Word.”⁵

As John Frame has noted, the “essence of Van Til’s message is that God calls us to ‘presuppose’ Him in all our thinking.”⁶ Yet, it would be wrong to conclude that Van Til’s approach resulted in him being unable to communicate with non-Christians. While he believed, as mentioned above, that the believer and unbeliever could not make any direct appeal to facts or laws, he accepted that in practice the Christian apologist could “place himself upon the position of his opponent” merely for “argument’s sake.” This allowed him to show the unbeliever that “on such a position, the ‘facts’ are not facts and the ‘laws’ are not laws.”⁷ William Edgar is correct to spot similarities between Schaeffer and Van Til in relation to their efforts to take “the roof off someone’s house” and to place yourself “on your opponent’s ground for the sake of argument.” Nevertheless, there was still a distance between Schaeffer and Van Til and, as Edgar acknowledges, Schaeffer went farther than Van Til “in using this approach as a psychological device, digging into various tensions in the unbeliever’s awareness.”⁸

However, a more fundamental difference between them related to their understanding of the point of contact between the Christian and non-Christian. Unlike Barth, Van Til strongly asserted the reality of the point of contact, not as a common ground, which would only be a con62 cession to human standards, but as revelation in every human being. Van Til’s approach to the point of contact was, as William Edgar points out, “very carefully worked out and was meant to fit the rest of Reformed theology.”⁹ Indeed it was so carefully worked out that in the past I failed to grasp its nuances, and I am grateful to Professor Edgar for explaining Van Til’s approach.¹⁰ Van Til was concerned to find that in one strand of Schaeffer’s thinking, the role of revelation at the point of contact was only partial. He felt that Schaeffer thus allowed unbelievers too much credence with their ability to make a proper use of reason. Because Schaeffer appeared to find the point of contact with the unbeliever in some area of interpretation of man and the world that the believer has in common with him, Van Til asked Schaeffer:

Am I wrong when I say that you are, not merely for the sake of argument, but in reality identifying yourself with the unbeliever so that together you may discover whether the Christian answer is really a proper answer to your common problem?¹¹

Schaeffer did not reply to the various questions raised by Van Til but instead continued to accept the right of the non-Christian to ask questions and probe the truth-claims of Christianity. Indeed it was this approach that led some evangelicals, as Louis Parkhurst has noted, to regard Schaeffer as a rationalist “because he tried to ‘think with’ sinners and appeal to their reason to convince them to accept with empty hands of faith the finished work of Jesus Christ [made on] their behalf.”¹² To be so different from Van Til, whose presuppositional style has become the dominant school of apologetics among Reformed theologians, perhaps in itself makes some people suspicious of Schaeffer.¹³ However, to view him as a rationalist is as much a misunderstanding of his apologetics as that by those, such as Steve Cowan, who wrongly view him as a presuppositionalist.¹⁴

FINDING COMMON GROUND

For Schaeffer, apologetics involved defending the faith against attack, and that meant giving answers to the objections raised. This was necessary if a Christian was to keep his personal, devotional, and intellectual life united. However, Schaeffer argued that “Christian apologetics is not like living in a castle with the drawbridge up and occasionally tossing a stone over the walls.”¹⁵ Schaeffer took it as a given truth that “no one can become a Christian unless he understands what Christianity is saying.” ¹⁶ Thus for him, that meant a positive side to apologetics, namely, the communication of the gospel to the present generation in terms they can understand. Schaeffer sought to do that through his individual discussions, and in such conversations he held that we must allow “at all points” the person to “ask any questions he wants.”¹⁷

Nevertheless, it is important to note that Schaeffer argued that there is “no use” talking to a non-Christian until his presuppositions are taken into account. Long before it was fashionable to critique the notion that you could enjoy pure empiricism and complete objectivity, Schaeffer stressed that there “are no neutral facts.”¹⁸ Drawing upon the work of Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius Van Til, Schaeffer recognized that everybody has a set of presuppositions, whether they know it or not. The groundbreaking work of secular scholars such as Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn also helped him understand how all individuals interpret “facts” from a subjective basis. As Burson and Walls point out, Schaeffer was an influential popularizer of the valuable insight that “everyone views reality through a grid of guiding assumptions.”¹⁹

Schaeffer was convinced that no non-Christian can be consistent to the logic of his presuppositions, and this provides a contact point. In 1948 Schaeffer had written in an article about apologetics that he believed that the non-Christian was “seldom consistent.”²⁰ By 1963 when he gave a key lecture at L’Abri explaining his apologetics, he stated that his experience with people led him to conclude that the nonChristian was “never consistent.”²¹ Schaeffer argued that the nonChristian cannot live in consistency with his presuppositions because he has to live in the real world, and his or her presuppositions “simply do not fit into what God has made, including what man is.”²² Because non-Christians live partly according to a “worldview which logically can only belong to Bible-believing Christianity,” their inconsistency creates a point of tension in their lives.²³ It is this point of tension that provides a point of contact between the Christian and the nonChristian. As stated earlier, Schaeffer did not accept that there are any neutral facts, and so he did not regard the contact with the nonChristian as “neutral.” Nevertheless, he felt comfortable with speaking in terms of a “common ground.”²⁴

NOT JUST A GAME

For Schaeffer, finding common ground with non-Christians meant helping them find the place where their tension exists. He recognized that many people have never analyzed themselves, and so “it will take time and it will cost something to discover what the person we are speaking to often has not yet discovered for himself.”²⁵ Schaeffer stressed that this “takes some love. It takes some thought. It takes loving this man. It isn’t just cold, intellectual play with presuppositions.”²⁶ Schaeffer’s first move was to push the non-Christian toward the logical conclusions of his or her non-Christian presuppositions. He believed that the non-Christian enjoys a false optimism by living partly on the basis of Christian presuppositions. Schaeffer aimed to destroy that by pushing the person toward the despair and darkness to which his or her non-Christian presuppositions logically led. Rather than allowing the non-Christian to live in a halfway house, Schaeffer was convinced that we have to confront him or her with the logical conclusions of his or her beliefs.

. . . you must take the roof off his house, and let the rain come in. You must take away his walls, and let him feel the blowing and the coldness of the wind—the wind of no meaningfulness, of blackness, the whole problem of being, and the whole problem of morals.²⁷

As the “truth of his awful position” dawns upon the non-Christian, Schaeffer suggested that the Christian apologist should initially not make a dogmatic statement about the truth-claims of the Scriptures. Instead he or she should share “the truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is.”²⁸ Schaeffer argued that no matter what persons may say about themselves, it doesn’t change the fact that they are made in the image of God. So “if a person says ‘I am a machine,’ he’s still a man. He’s still an image-bearer of God, even though he’s lost.”²⁹ For Schaeffer, this was “the key” to his work in making contact with the modern person who lived below “the line of despair.” When a person comes to understand his or her true situation, then the Scriptures should be used to “show him the real nature of his lostness and the answer to it.”³⁰ Yet Schaeffer recognized that even after the Christian apologist has exposed the modern man to his tension and has explained the biblical answer, he still may not be willing for the true solution. He sadly accepted that this would mean “we may seem to leave him in a worse state than he was in before.”³¹

In discussion with the non-Christian, Schaeffer believed that the Christian should be ready to receive blows as well as to give them. However, while the Christian must take the blows of the questions that a person might ask, the apologist should keep pressing the nonChristian back, for “he must keep answering questions too.”³² Schaeffer’s approach was very different from Van Til’s. The latter argued that allowing non-Christians to use their reason in such a way will result in their assuming “the position of judge with respect to the credibility and evidence of revelation.”³³ Van Til believed that only as you presupposed God-consciousness could you be “effective in reasoning with the natural man.”³⁴ However, we do well to remember that Schaeffer did not regard the point of contact with the non-Christian as neutral, given that there are “no neutral facts, for [all] facts are God’s facts.”³⁵ Furthermore, we need to note that in his 1963 lecture Schaeffer stressed that the worldview or system of thought of the Christian and the non-Christian have “absolutely no common ground.” Looking at the different worldviews from a philosophical point of view, he concluded that they were “absolute opposites.”³⁶

Schaeffer acknowledged that this appeared to be a contradiction of his seeking to find a point of contact with the non-Christian. His position is explained when we grasp his conviction that it would indeed be impossible to have a point of communication with non-Christians if they were consistent with their presuppositions. However, given that in reality no one can live logically according to his or her own presup66 positions, “in practice you will find a place where you can talk.”³⁷ In his 1948 article Schaeffer referred to this talking with the non-Christian as “a point of contact,” but by 1963 he called it “a common ground.” His many conversations with individuals at L’Abri led him to conclude that “there always is a common ground, not because there should be a common ground, but because, on the basis of the lack of logic of his presuppositions, there will be a common ground.”³⁸

With the non-Christian attempting to stand partly on the Christian’s ground, the apologist is able to reach him or her. Schaeffer was able to differentiate between the theoretical (no common ground) and the practical (a meaningful point of contact). This shows him to be perceptive in his dealing with people and certainly not someone preoccupied with any particular apologetic or theological system.

THE IMPORTANCE OF RATIONAL DISCUSSION

Inherent in Schaeffer’s belief that the Christian and the non-Christian should be able to question and trade blows in their discussions about life and its values and meaning lay a confidence in the rational ability of people. This confidence stemmed from his conviction, which he shared with Calvin, that the image of God was not completely destroyed in the Fall. It is a conviction we also see within Scripture itself. Paul, for example, is recorded in Acts 17–19 as one who “reasoned” (17:2, 17) and “tried to persuade” (18:4) and who was “arguing persuasively” (19:8, NIV). While the image of God was damaged in fallen man, for Paul it was clearly not destroyed. Schaeffer was concerned that “evangelicals have often made a serious mistake by equating the fact that man is lost and under God’s judgment with the idea that man is nothing—a zero.”³⁹ For Schaeffer, man was not only wonderful when he became a Christian—he was already wonderful by virtue of being made by God in His image. Thus he has value because of who he is by creation.⁴⁰ Because people remain God’s image-bearers, they can assert their unique “mannishness.” Schaeffer thought that the marks of “mannishness” include rationality, love, longing for significance and beauty, and a fear of nonbeing. Although a person is twisted, corrupted, and lost as a result of the Fall, he is still man, and as Schaeffer pointed out, he can, for example, still love. “It would be a mistake to say that only a Christian can love.”⁴¹

In the same way, Schaeffer argued that non-Christians can use their rationality to discover truth. Schaeffer maintained that through the revelation of the Scriptures God has spoken truth concerning Himself, man, history, and the universe. There is thus a unity of truth over the whole field of knowledge because God has spoken into every area of our knowledge. Nevertheless, it was wrong to conclude that because God has communicated truthfully, He has communicated exhaustively. Furthermore, given that the knowledge of mankind was not meant to be static, Schaeffer contended that man, with his rationality, is “able to, and intended to, explore and discover further truth concerning creation.” ⁴² The marks of “mannishness” not only allow a person to discover truth about the universe but also to change something of its form. Drawing upon his or her rationality and beauty, a person can use his or her creative imagination to create and make—be it as an artist, a poet, an engineer, or a gardener—and so “change something of the form of the universe as a result of our thought world.”⁴³

In proclaiming the Lordship of Christ over all of life, Schaeffer was careful to teach that God has granted much freedom within certain boundaries. Referring to this as “form and freedom,” Schaeffer taught that although God has created the form, which we—given that we are not autonomous—have to live within, He allows considerable freedom within that form.⁴⁴ This reflected his conviction that mankind remains “significant” and can affect his environment rather than be controlled by it as behaviorist psychology has taught.⁴⁵ Indeed Schaeffer felt that man has a “nobility,” for there is “something great about man.”⁴⁶ Thus he argued that one “must not belittle man’s achievements. In science, for instance, man’s achievements demonstrate that he is not junk.”⁴⁷ It was this rational (but lost) man whom Schaeffer sought to reach with the gospel. Yet Schaeffer was not deluded into thinking that rationality was sufficient for salvation. He recognized that there is much more than reason and the intellect but stressed that “this ‘much more’ must be in continuity to reason and the intellect rather than in discontinuity.”⁴⁸

ANTI-INTELLECTUAL PREJUDICE

Schaeffer regretted that evangelicals “have been exceedingly proud in despising the intellect.”⁴⁹ Indeed he lamented that many young people were not given any intellectual answers to the tough questions they were asking and with

a sort of evangelical Kierkegaardianism, their parents and pastors patted the youngsters on the head and said, ‘Don’t ask questions, dear, just believe’. It was more spiritual to believe without asking questions than it was to ask questions.⁵⁰

Schaeffer traced this anti-intellectual stance to the influence of secular Platonic thought, which he believed downplayed the importance of the body. This led to a tendency to view only the soul as valuable and to regard its value only in terms of its going to heaven and thus having “very little to do with anything in the present life—the body, the intellect or the culture.”⁵¹ Schaeffer, by contrast, argued that the biblical view was that “God made the whole man, and the whole man is important.” ⁵² He therefore insisted that “it must be the whole man who comes to understand that the gospel is truth and believes because he is convinced on the basis of good and sufficient reason that it is truth.”⁵³ Schaeffer recognized that being made in the image of God, men “have human hungers that need to be satisfied. To some the major need is intellectual; they must have answers.”⁵⁴ Schaeffer was never foolish enough to believe everybody was a potential philosopher. But for those who grappled with difficult questions, his ministry sought to provide some answers.

Schaeffer realized that for many evangelicals who had been influenced, albeit unconsciously, by Platonism, their interpretation of 1 Corinthians 1–2 was adversely affected. They took its teaching about God having “made foolish the wisdom of the world” (1:20) to be an attack on wisdom and rationality as such. Rejecting this as bad exegesis, Schaeffer maintained that the biblical text showed that Paul did not despise the mind but was only opposing “autonomous intellectualism and refined contemplation.”⁵⁵ Schaeffer acknowledged the danger of apologetics falling into proud intellectualism, but he also held that there is “the danger of lacking a love and compassion for man great enough to inspire the hard work needed to understand men’s questions and to give them honest answers.”⁵⁶

Although rationality should never become “exclusively important” or be “the end of the matter,” Schaeffer went so far as to say that “rationality is needed to open the door to a vital relationship with God.”⁵⁷ As an illustration of what he meant, Schaeffer referred to the freedom an artist must have in creating a picture. Nevertheless, if there is no form to his painting, the artist loses all communication with his viewers. While it is possible to add to rational verbalization and so enrich it, it must be in genuine continuity with what has gone before it or “no one can say for certain what the added things mean.” Rationality is certainly not the whole, but it “defines and provides a form for the whole.”⁵⁸ Schaeffer hoped that the “biblical emphasis that knowledge is needed prior to salvation will influence us in attaining that knowledge which is needed to communicate the gospel.”⁵⁹

QUESTIONS AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

Schaeffer recognized that you cannot separate true apologetics from the work of the Holy Spirit and that there has to be something more than rationality. Yet he believed that man’s reason was necessary to begin the process, and he declared that “if we give up the rational everything is lost.”⁶⁰ In his apologetics Schaeffer wanted to “begin with man and what he knows about himself”⁶¹ and the “present lostness with which he wrestles.”⁶² When through rational discussion you reach the point where the person is ready to hear God’s solution, Schaeffer suggested that you just share the good news of the gospel. Once the person understands his or her need of salvation, whether he or she is a philosopher or a peasant, there is no point in being complicated, and “the same ideas and even the same words are all that is needed.” Indeed Schaeffer frequently said to L’Abri colleagues that “everyone, in the end, has to go the same way with a double humbling as a creature and as a sinner.”⁶³ For Schaeffer, his apologetics was not about changing the gospel in order to make it more palatable. Rather, its role was to overcome the “problem of how to communicate the gospel so that it is understood.”⁶⁴ This is perhaps the key to understanding Schaeffer’s apologetics and the role he afforded reason within it.

Not everyone whom Schaeffer helped understand the gospel came to accept it. Regeneration, the beginning of a new life in a Godward direction, remained the work and the responsibility of the Holy Spirit. But at least, humanly speaking, Schaeffer had done his job as an evangelist in explaining the gospel to the person and helping him or her understand his or her need of God’s forgiveness. The experience of his own conversion to Christianity made Schaeffer sympathetic to those who wrestled with doubts and difficulties about the faith and who hesitated to believe in Christ. It was as an agnostic who wanted to compare Christianity with the claims of Greek philosophy that Schaeffer began to study the Bible. Over a period of about six months he became a Christian because, as he says, “I was convinced that the full answers which the Bible presented were alone sufficient to the problems I then knew.”⁶⁵ While only a small number of people wrestled with the philosophical problems that Schaeffer faced, by the 1960s the majority of young people wrestled with the question of authority.

They were increasingly unwilling to accept authority or to believe something just because their family did or because they were told, without reason, to do so. Some of Schaeffer’s most effective ministry at L’Abri was in communicating the gospel to rebellious and disillusioned young people who lived outside the reach of the institutional church. He believed that one of the key reasons he could communicate with hippies was the fact that he tried to get them “to consider the biblical system and its truth without an appeal to blind authority.”⁶⁶ Taking time with the individual, giving serious consideration to his or her questions, and then presenting rational arguments for believing in Jesus Christ opened many young persons to the claims of the gospel.

KARL BARTH’S BLIND ALLEY

Schaeffer totally rejected the neo-orthodox view of Karl Barth and his followers that it is “immunity from proof which secures the Christian proclamation.”⁶⁷ For Schaeffer, Barth was only reflecting modern secular thinking in separating religious truth from the historical truth of the Scriptures. Schaeffer declared that man

with his reason [can] search the Scriptures which touch not only ‘religious truth’, but also history and the cosmos. He not only is able to search the Scriptures as the whole man, including his reason, but he has the responsibility to do so.⁶⁸

Citing scriptural grounds for this approach, Schaeffer referred to the Gospel of John (which was a record of signs so that we might believe) and the account in Acts 16 of the Philippian jailer. The jailer’s question (“What must I do to be saved?”), Schaeffer argued, did not arise in a vacuum. It was because of Paul’s preaching, the earthquake, and the way Paul and Silas behaved in prison that “the jailer had reason to be aware of the existence of a personal God.”⁶⁹ Apart from the Bible being a revelation of God’s plan of salvation, Schaeffer believed that it is also “true to what is there.”⁷⁰ Thus as you read the Bible you discover that when God works in the flow of history, He works consistently with the way He says the external world is.⁷¹

In his book Christianity and Barthianism Cornelius Van Til wrote a stinging criticism of Karl Barth for being more irrationalist than theologically existentialist. This distinction between Geschichte (religious truth) and Historie (ordinary history or historical truth) led Barth to conclude that a “true faith will not build its house upon the quicksands of ordinary history.” Thus he did not identify the resurrection of Jesus Christ with ordinary history and indeed said one cannot ascribe an “historical” character to it.⁷² He was therefore quite willing to allow different interpretations to the resurrection and to other aspects of the gospel story. Van Til believed that Barth followed, without much alteration, the “type of dialecticism that we found in Existentialism and, back of it, in Kant.”⁷³ As we have already noted, Schaeffer agreed with Van Til’s critique of Barth. However, in his 1963 keynote lecture on apologetics, Schaeffer pointed out that by insisting upon the non-Christian’s accepting Christian presuppositions before you can talk, Van Til “sounds the same as Barth.” Schaeffer recognized that there were differences but suggested that in practice Barth’s and Van Til’s approach were similar because “in both cases, there’s no real discussion.”⁷⁴

In contrast, Schaeffer believed in the importance of rational discussion not only for explaining the Christian faith to others, but also for helping to ensure that the faith they express—if they come to belief—is real. Schaeffer maintained that since Christian faith is turned outward—to the person and the work of Jesus Christ—it is a faith that “rests on content. It is not a vague thing which takes the place of real understanding, nor is it the strength of belief which is of value.”⁷⁵ For Schaeffer, rationality not only introduced you to the Christian faith, it continued to be an important element of true spirituality. He regarded 1 John 4:1-3, which teaches that a person is to test the spirits, the prophets, or any experience, as “very crucial in his own thinking.” Testing a spiritual experience by relating it to the coming of Jesus Christ meant asking a question of content. And this is “a question in the area of where reason can deal with it.” Schaeffer argued that the Bible teaches that “you must not trust the emotional bang you can get or any of this ‘much-moreness’” but use what is open to you in “the area of reason and the intellect.”⁷⁶

RATIONAL OR RATIONALISM?

The importance accorded to reason by Schaeffer in his apologetics has been strongly criticized. Clark Pinnock, for example, has attacked Schaeffer for embracing a rationalistic apologetic that inevitably led him to “construe Christianity after the manner of a rational truth system.” ⁷⁷ Pinnock’s criticism of Schaeffer is, at times, rather personal and patronizing. While commending him for what he sought to achieve given his “very unpromising background,” Pinnock regarded Schaeffer as being much of the time “beyond his depth.”⁷⁸ Pinnock rejected Schaeffer’s claim that the Reformers shared his view that mankind, though fallen, is “not nothing.” Far from accepting that Calvin and Luther endorsed rational apologetics, Pinnock argues that given their stress “on the witness of the Spirit to the Word, I think a decent case could be made out for the neo-orthodox interpretation of Reformation theology, in preference to Schaeffer’s own rationalism.”⁷⁹

In view of our examination in Chapter One of Calvin’s understanding of our knowledge of God and the role of reason in this, we must question Pinnock’s claim for Barthian neo-orthodoxy. With his strong emphasis on the importance of rationality, Calvin was no proponent of a “leap of faith.” By contrast, Schaeffer’s “mannishness of man” finds a clear echo in Calvin’s view that the image of God was not completely wiped out by the Fall. Given Pinnock’s own sympathy for Barth, there is perhaps a large element of wish-fulfillment in his desire to claim an affinity between neo-orthodoxy and Reformation theology. Pinnock is wrong to say Schaeffer is “unfair” to Barth for failing to recognize that the Barth of Church Dogmatics had moved away from his earlier existentialist theology of the Bultmann type. To talk of Barth, as Pinnock does, as “an ally in the work of defending the orthodox faith” is theologically incorrect.⁸⁰ Even in his later phase Barth continued to express solidarity with the concerns of existential thought. This is most clearly seen in his discussion of the philosophy of the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.⁸¹ As Cornelius Van Til has observed, Barth’s approach in Church Dogmatics is basically the same as in his earlier theology. Everything centers around the idea of the Christ-Event, and in this God is wholly revealed and at the same time wholly hidden. From his consideration of Barth’s writings, Van Til is convinced that Barth never forsook “his principle that revelation is historical but that history is never revelation.”⁸² In contrast to Barth, Schaeffer held that God had acted in time, space, and history, and so His actions were open to discussion and verification.

Yet it was this very commitment by Schaeffer to rationality that Pinnock found so objectionable. He queried the very coherence of Schaeffer’s basic approach given that he drew upon reason in his efforts to oppose autonomous reason and so position an inerrant Bible as authoritative. Pinnock believes that Schaeffer was so anxious not to view commitment to biblical authority as an upper-story leap of faith that “he saw it after the manner of a commitment to a rational axiom such as one would make in geometry. Such axioms are always chosen and then become the basis for subsequent logical deductions.”⁸³ However, given that reason is fallen, Pinnock suggested that Schaeffer’s argument lacked coherence. But isn’t the question of coherence in itself an expression of rationality? Isn’t Pinnock guilty of the very thing he accuses Schaeffer of, i.e., using fallen reason? Yet in practice he has no alternative, for rationality is in itself an expression of our humanity. Thus for us as rational creatures, reason—albeit fallen—is a functional necessity. Reason, while damaged by the Fall, is not destroyed. As Schaeffer often pointed out, “man is not only wonderful when he is ‘born again’ as a Christian; he is also wonderful as God made him in His image.”⁸⁴ Schaeffer’s use of reason does not indicate a lack of coherence in his approach. Instead it should be seen as a useful tool in allowing him to communicate with non-Christians.

RATIONALITY IS NOT ENOUGH

Schaeffer engaged with people in rational discussion, but it is wrong for Pinnock to term this a “rationalist” approach. Reason, for Schaeffer, is never enough, whether seen as the source of answers to mankind’s deepest questions or as the sole guide to bring a person into relationship with God. Revelation from God and the illumination of the Holy Spirit remain essential: reason is never autonomous. Yet while Pinnock is wrong to depict Schaeffer’s mode of argument as rationalist, he is correct in his view that Schaeffer has a clear preference for rationality as opposed to an empiricist approach. Many Christian thinkers find empiricism (i.e., the belief that all human knowledge arises from sense experience) attractive as they work out the details of the Christian worldview. Not so Schaeffer. He held that the presuppositions of Christianity and the alternative worldviews need to be considered to see “which of these fits the facts of what is.”⁸⁵ Schaeffer did not present his presuppositions in a “straight authoritarian” tone but in a rational manner for discussion. Pinnock suggests that having put his axioms in place, Schaeffer, like Gordon Clark, “ventures out onto common ground with sinners and offers to debate the issues with anyone on the basis of the superior coherence of the Christian system as compared with any alternative world view.”⁸⁶

In the next chapter we will examine in some detail the status afforded by Schaeffer to presuppositions in his apologetics. At this stage we need only note that for Schaeffer presuppositions affected, consciously or unconsciously, how people reason, and thus they needed to be included in any rational discussion with non-Christians. Pinnock is right to describe Schaeffer’s use of presuppositions as non-authoritarian; i.e., he did not simply declare them as absolutes to be received but presented them for consideration on the basis of their reasonableness.⁸⁷ However, Pinnock is wrong to view Schaeffer’s approach as the same as Gordon Clark’s. Clark attempted to show that all non-Christian worldviews refute themselves because they are internally self-contradictory. For him, the “ultimate test of truth is coherence,” and he sought to establish that by the “application of the law of contradiction.”⁸⁸ As has been observed, Clark “was undoubtedly the strongest proponent of coherentism among Christian apologists” in the twentieth century.⁸⁹ Gordon Clark is fairly unfashionable among many contemporary Christian writers who tend to regard him as a rationalist.⁹⁰ To be fair to Pinnock, I doubt that he compares Schaeffer to Clark in an attempt to label him a rationalist, albeit by association. Rather it is because he genuinely— but mistakenly—views them as being the same.

Coherentism, of the type favored by Gordon Clark, takes coherence to be both necessary and sufficient as a test for truth. Like Clark, Schaeffer believed that for something to be true, it must be noncontradictory, and he stated that we “must be able to live consistently with our theory.”⁹¹ However, Schaeffer did not view coherence as a sufficient test, and unlike coherentism, he also believed that the principle of correspondence is necessary to declare certain knowledge. We see that when he invites a person to choose between a Christian and a nonChristian set of presuppositions. Schaeffer asks people to consider the two sets of presuppositions and choose which “really and empirically meets the facts as we look about us in the world.”⁹² As has been noted by David Clark, because correspondence involves assessing “the truth status of statements by comparing them to the real world revealed through sensory observations,” it is more empirical, while “coherence is a more rational principle.”⁹³

Although as stated earlier, Schaeffer may have had a preference for rationality as opposed to an empiricist approach, it can now be seen that he did not allow rationality a monopoly. For Schaeffer, Christianity was coherent, but it also corresponded to the facts of “what is.” He believed that the Christian, given that Christianity as truth is comprehensive, did not have to choose between knowing the external or inward worlds. Indeed for Schaeffer the “strength of the Christian system—the acid test of it—is that everything fits under the apex of the existing, infinite-personal God.”⁹⁴ The other key difference between Schaeffer and Gordon Clark that Pinnock fails to identify is in relation to the role of the Holy Spirit. Quite apart from the importance that Schaeffer attached to prayer as an integral part of apologetics, he gave a strong emphasis to the need for an increasing experiential relationship with Christ. Later in this chapter we will explore Schaeffer’s teaching on a moment-by-moment spiritual reality. At this point we need only point out that seeking—in a personal and subjective way—the guidance of the Holy Spirit, praying for specific results, and relying upon the Lord to provide financial support was completely alien to the rationality of Gordon Clark.⁹⁵

THE DANGER OF IRRATIONALISM

Whether in response to the criticism of Clark Pinnock or in reply to other critics, Schaeffer added an appendix to the 1982 edition of The God Who Is There. In it he defended himself against all those who viewed his apologetics as a form of rationalism, and in particular he refuted the charge of being an Aristotelian. He believed that they accused him of being an Aristotelian because of his emphasis on antithesis. Schaeffer rejected the view promoted by Martin Heidegger that rational thought in terms of antithesis originated with Aristotle. He maintained that Heidegger’s claim lacked any historical foundation and argued that rational thought as antithesis is rooted in reality. For Schaeffer, “our minds are so created by God that we think in antithesis: so much so that the only way a person can deny antithesis is on the basis of antithesis.”⁹⁶ Schaeffer understood salvation in terms of antithesis: he regarded the point of justification as the absolute personal antithesis. When a “person casts himself on Jesus Christ as Saviour, at that moment he has passed from death to life, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s dear Son.”⁹⁷

Schaeffer noted that in modern theology there is no personal antithesis at the point of justification, for with the liberal theologians “there can never be a qualitative difference in man’s relationship to God.”⁹⁸ He believed that the writings of the later Heidegger were “crucially important in certain forms of modern liberal theology.”⁹⁹ Thus by embracing Heidegger’s upper-story semantic mysticism that seemed to give hope, modern theology drowns in a sea of anti-philosophy. Yet it wasn’t only modern theology that was drowning: Schaeffer felt that modern secular man was left in cynicism if he didn’t make some mystical leap. Writing in 1971, Schaeffer argued that positivism, which was an optimistic rationalism, had died, but the new alternatives “cause man to be hopeless concerning ethics, values, meaning, and the certainty of knowledge.”¹⁰⁰ Twenty years before it was fashionable to talk about postmodernism, Schaeffer—with his lectures on Wittgenstein and Heidegger—was tracing fundamental shifts in the area of epistemology. ¹⁰¹ He recognized that some of his critics who accused him of rationalism did so because they had become trapped in irrationality and could no longer distinguish between rationality and rationalism.

For Schaeffer rationality concerned the validity of thought, while rationalism concerned someone beginning with himself and his reason plus what he observes, without information from any other source, and coming to final answers in regard to truth, ethics, and reality. Far from regarding mankind as autonomous, Schaeffer believed that his books stressed “that people have no final answers in regard to truth, morals or epistemology without God’s revelation in the Bible.”¹⁰² Indeed one L’Abri worker has suggested that Schaeffer was so strong on revelation and the need for truth to come from outside us that he was like Barth with his emphasis on revelation. However, Schaeffer’s theology of creation was stronger, and unlike Barth he was not afraid “to show a correlation between created reality and revelation.”¹⁰³

Pinnock claims that even in his use of the Bible Schaeffer acts in “a truly rationalist manner.”¹⁰⁴ However, compared to the neo-orthodox approach to the Bible—which Pinnock finds so attractive, and which subjects Scripture to higher critical methodology—Schaeffer is distinctly non-rationalist. Nevertheless, one must note that in his eagerness to guard against irrationality and a theological leap of faith, Schaeffer could at times be overrational. For example, he rejected the idea that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was irrational because “God’s words at this time were in the context of Abraham’s strong reason for knowing that God both existed and was totally trustworthy.”¹⁰⁵ Yet this fails to deal with the point that when God initially called upon Abraham to leave his country and promised offspring to the seventyfive-year old, Abraham had no grounds to believe that God would be able to fulfill His promise. That he went to the land that the Lord showed him is indeed a testimony of faith.

WHAT WE THINK IS WHAT WE ARE

Meanwhile, another Christian academic, Richard Pierard, believes that Schaeffer’s starting point—that people are what they think—is “far too simplistic.” Pierard praises Schaeffer for helping him “to see that it was not necessary to abandon the life of the mind in order to be a Christian.”¹⁰⁶ Nevertheless, he was unhappy with Schaeffer’s stance that people’s presuppositions determine how they act and, as these change or are modified, affect both individuals and the society they construct. For Schaeffer, what we think is what we are, and so he sought to persuade a person to embrace the Christian view of reality. Yet Pierard finds such “hard-nosed idealism” unacceptable and believes that Schaeffer failed to realize that “presuppositions are shaped by our cultural, social, economic, religious and political environment.”¹⁰⁷ He felt that Schaeffer’s philosophical idealism left him without many of the necessary tools to carry out rigorous historical analysis, and his “commitment to presuppositionalism places him far from the mainstream of twentieth-century historical scholarship.”¹⁰⁸ For Pierard, opinion among mainstream historical scholars favored a theory that gave great importance to the social and economic conditioning of thought.

One has to ask why a Christian scholar like Pierard was concerned about Schaeffer (or himself) being placed outside the mainstream of twentieth-century historical scholarship. Why should Christians feel a need to find acceptance among mainstream scholarship, particularly if the presuppositions of that academic world are in themselves non Christian or anti-Christian? As Abraham Kuyper, the great Dutch theologian and statesman, has written, there is an antithesis between the Christian and the non-Christian worldview, and it is an antithesis that “is permanent and extends to every branch of scholarship.”¹⁰⁹ Kuyper called upon Christians to wage a struggle against all compromises with truth in every area of life and learning. Much of the historical scholarship in the twentieth-century was Marxist-influenced, holding that “ideas change in accordance with economic developments.”¹¹⁰ The fact that Schaeffer chose not to go along with the Marxist trend in thinking was hardly grounds for criticism. However, it did mean that as he took up an unfashionable stance for truth he was seen as “Schaeffer contra mundum.” Despite widespread admiration on the part of the general Christian public, Schaeffer stood increasingly alone, “not only against the secular world and the liberal religious establishment, but against many of the accepted leaders of evangelicalism.”¹¹¹ Schaeffer’s stress on the primacy of reason or thought might have been unfashionable, but it was not wrong.

Apart from rejecting the Marxist presuppositions that social and economic factors control the formation of ideas, Schaeffer’s view that the motive force in history was ideas may have indirectly drawn upon the philosophy of idealism. Idealism, in its widest sense, held that the mind and spiritual values are more fundamental than material values. It opposed naturalism, which sought to explain the mind in terms of material things and processes.¹¹² Van Til, Schaeffer’s onetime teacher at Westminster, studied idealism and “made liberal use of the idealist vocabulary (the philosophical use of the term ‘presupposition’ originated in idealism).”¹¹³ Yet it is important to note that Van Til rejected the substantive content of idealism, and the most important philosophical influences on him, and also on Schaeffer, were distinctly Christian. It is therefore wrong to conclude that it was idealism that prevented Schaeffer from being able to consider factors other than ideas.

INFLUENCED BY OUR UPBRINGING

Pierard is completely wrong when he says Schaeffer’s obsession with the propositional affirmation of absolutes gave him a “fear of sociological factors.”¹¹⁴ Schaeffer was quite capable of recognizing sociological trends—for example, the disillusionment caused by the Vietnam War and the protests against the “plastic culture.”¹¹⁵ Os Guinness, who was a close colleague of Schaeffer for many years, delivered a number of lectures at L’Abri that included a sociological examination without any objection from Schaeffer. Of course, Schaeffer rejected the sociological determinism of B. F. Skinner, who taught that all that people are can be explained by the way their environment has conditioned them. Schaeffer’s position was “not that there is no element of conditioning in human life, but rather that by no means does conditioning explain what people are in their totality.”¹¹⁶

Furthermore, given the impact of the Fall on each person, Schaeffer also accepted that there was, to some degree, a psychological influence on individuals. While rejecting the psychological determinism of Freud, Schaeffer recognized that all people have problems and that there are no perfect people, just “differences in intensity in psychological problems.”¹¹⁷

Nevertheless, while recognizing other contributory factors, Schaeffer was convinced that in the final analysis it is ideas that drive and motivate people. On the basis of Scripture, he found wanting the sociological and psychological explanations for the moral problems of mankind. His exegesis of Romans 1:24 led him to conclude that it is not moral declension that causes doctrinal declension. Instead it was a “turning away from the truth—that which is cognitive, that which may be known about God—[which] produces moral declension.”¹¹⁸ Schaeffer called upon all Christians studying sociology, psychology, or ethics to resist the modern concept that all sin can be explained merely on the basis of conditioning. He believed that the modern secular explanations were not more humanitarian than the Christian view, for they decreased the “importance and significance of man.”¹¹⁹ Schaeffer maintained that the biblical view of mankind gives the person great significance. An individual “is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it.”¹²⁰ By the standards of mainstream scholarship, Schaeffer’s views on the primary importance of presuppositions may have been oversimplified and unfashionable, but they were biblical. Surely for Christians, that is cause for commendation, not criticism.

TOO LOGICAL AN APPROACH?

In his book Francis Schaeffer’s Apologetics: A Critique, Thomas Morris asserted that Schaeffer’s “argumentative progression and his terminology often indicate an underlying model of human thought or reasoning as a totally dispassionate, disinterested, nonpersonal, mechanical operation.”¹²¹ Morris felt that the weakness in Schaeffer’s apologetics is that he failed “to recognize that predispositions as well as presuppositions must be taken into account.”¹²² Schaeffer’s mechanical model needed, Morris argued, to be extended to include the many “tacit, personal, and nonlogical moves necessary in any process of coming to know or believe.”¹²³ Some of Morris’s criticism of Schaeffer may apply to those apologists who rigidly follow a presuppositional style. However, as Gordon Lewis points out, it cannot be said of Schaeffer, “the chaplain to the countercultural youth of the sixties,” that he failed to recognize the importance of a person’s predispositions.¹²⁴ Schaeffer himself stressed that apologetics should not be mechanical and that “each man must be dealt with as an individual, not as a case or statistic or machine.”¹²⁵

This personal approach to apologetics was appropriate, Schaeffer thought, because “the person before us is an image-bearer of God, and he is an individual who is unique in the world.”¹²⁶ Nevertheless, Schaeffer was clearly concerned that those who adopted his advice about finding the point of tension in the presuppositions of the nonChristian were in danger of following a mechanical formula. He later wrote and added an appendix to The God Who Is There, stating that love should be the dominant consideration. Love and compassion were called for because the person is made in the image of God and is a unique individual and valuable. “Thus, we meet the person where he or she is.”¹²⁷ As for the criticism of Schaeffer by Morris, Lewis believes that “in his entire book Morris makes no serious attempt to expound Schaeffer’s views with any degree of objectivity.”¹²⁸

SALVATION AS INTELLECTUAL ASSENT?

A more substantial criticism was made by E. R. Geehan when he questioned Schaeffer’s personal synthesis of theology and apologetics. He asked:

Where does the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit fit into your apologetic method? In what sense is this divine work necessary? Of what import to apologetics is the doctrine of the Fall? How does the doctrine of election fit into a thoroughly rational apologetic for the Christian faith?¹²⁹

Schaeffer knew that no one would “believe without a work of the Holy Spirit,”¹³⁰ and consequently that Christian apologists “must look to the Lord in prayer and to the work of the Holy Spirit for the effective use” of discussions with non-Christians.¹³¹ Yet one can understand why Geehan would question the role of the Holy Spirit in Schaeffer’s apologetic method. Apart from the above two quotations, there are no other references by Schaeffer in his three apologetic books to the work of the Holy Spirit in relation to a person being led into faith. The whole emphasis seems to be on the importance of rational discussion. In an important illustration about climbers being lost in the Alps, Schaeffer outlined how you would not blindly accept the advice of a would-be rescuer but “would ask questions to try to ascertain if the man knew what he was talking about and if he was not my enemy.” In the same way, he suggested, God invites us “to ask adequate and sufficient questions and then believe Him and bow before Him.”¹³²

Schaeffer’s illustration appears to suggest that if you can rationally establish a, b, c, and d, the person will accept e and become a Christian. At only one point in the Trilogy does Schaeffer acknowledge that the person “may not be willing for the true solution,”¹³³ and he does not explain why some accept and others do not accept the Christian faith. Neither does he mention about a person coming under the conviction of the Holy Spirit or deal with the place of contrition in salvation. All of this could lead one to conclude that Schaeffer was a rationalist, or at least gave an undue importance to rationality at the expense of spirituality. Indeed he even appeared to play down emotions or “experience” in a way that was alien to much evangelicalism that drew upon “German pietism and its emphasis on Herzensreligion, the religion of the heart.” Tom Noble believes that for Schaeffer, trusting religious experience was “associated with liberalism, existentialism and subjectivism.”¹³⁴ However, I wish to argue that Schaeffer was not a rationalist, and to suggest that he was—as Clark Pinnock does—only reflects a superficial and inadequate reading of him.

First, to deal with Noble’s criticism, Schaeffer’s alleged opposition to experience was in fact only an objection to locating the basis of truth within experience (which then had no point of reference). He also rejected irrational experience, which he viewed as a leap of faith in the post-Kierkegaardian sense. He believed that this resulted in a faith that was “introverted because it had no certain object, and where the preaching of the kerygma is infallible since it is not open to rational discussion.” 135 For Schaeffer it was “crucial” that knowledge precede faith, and he argued, “only that faith which believes God on the basis of knowledge is true faith.”¹³⁶ Nevertheless, and it is essential to grasp this point, Schaeffer did not view salvation and knowledge of God in purely intellectual terms. Speaking at L’Abri in the late 1950s he declared: “[W]e must jump the fence from where we are, if we have only believed these things as a sort of mental assent, into the experience and practice of it, and then we get hold of the reality of it.”¹³⁷

Schaeffer was adamant about the need for Christians to experience the reality of their salvation in the present moment of time. He maintained that without it, “our talking becomes just argumentation and unreal to us individually.” Schaeffer believed that there “is nothing mechanical about the Christian walk, no way to quantify spiritual reality. It is always a person to person relationship in which we believe God.”¹³⁸ Talking of Christ to a colleague in L’Abri, Schaeffer said, “Christ is the mysticism. The only mysticism with a base located in verifiable propositional truth which leads into a relationship which can’t be put into words.”¹³⁹ Schaeffer recognized that his own ongoing relationship with Christ could at times lack a spiritual reality, and so he unashamedly and “very movingly” prayed for a deeper reality in his life.¹⁴⁰ Hardly the approach of a rationalist.

Just as Schaeffer was not opposed to experience per se, neither did he reject a role for the emotions. While his public discussions and books presented an “intellectual apologetic,” a L’Abri staff member noted that “in personal talks he often moved on to involving the emotions.” ¹⁴¹ Apart from dealing with a person’s emotional state, Schaeffer also saw a role for the emotions when a person accepts Christ as Savior. Although this is not necessary to secure a person’s salvation, he believed that it is most helpful for a person to

say thank you to God for your salvation. For so many of these new Christians, that’s when the emotion comes. That’s when they experience the reality of it. . . . That’s when they have realized that it’s really done, that they have really laid hold of the finished work of Christ.¹⁴²

Furthermore, in his work at L’Abri Schaeffer felt no inhibition about displaying his emotions, be that in tears and grief for those he considered lost or in showing loving compassion to those struggling with problems. As Barry Seagren, a long-time, serving member of L’Abri, recalls, Schaeffer was “very warm” in his dealings with individual people.¹⁴³ When someone became a Christian at L’Abri, with joy Schaeffer would “crank up the volume on his record player, throw open the windows of the chalet, and fill the surrounding Alpine countryside with a vibrant rendition of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’”¹⁴⁴

SCHAEFFER’S POLEMIC CONTEXT

In The God Who Is There Schaeffer, as already mentioned, did not elaborate on why certain people accept the arguments of Christianity and others reject them. This has led some to believe that he regarded becoming a Christian as a human process in which the response can be understood in rationalistic terms. However, in the apologetics lecture he gave in December 1963 at L’Abri (from which part of the book was drawn) Schaeffer said that those who become Christians do so because “God in his mercy deals with men so that they do accept Christ as Saviour.”¹⁴⁵ Apart from this sentence the rest of the paragraph appeared five years later in his book The God Who Is There. In the 1963 lecture, which has hitherto not been quoted by any writers, Schaeffer referred to an earlier article that he had published on apologetics. It appeared in 1948, and he declared in it that in apologetics, people could not be converted “without the predestination of the Sovereign God.” While the person converted is of “the elect,” Schaeffer maintained that “election includes the means as well as the end.”¹⁴⁶ Thus the rational discussion of apologetics was to be seen as an instrument used by the Holy Spirit. It is fascinating to note that by 1963 the reference to “predestination” and “the elect” had been dropped and that by 1968 the sentence referring to God’s mercy in saving men had been cut out. Was Schaeffer becoming more rationalistic?

The answer is no, and the explanation for the revision appears to be quite simply that Schaeffer wrote and spoke with a particular audience in mind. In 1948 as a minister of the Bible Presbyterian Church he wrote for others from a similar background; in 1963 though he spoke to a group who were Christians, they came from a variety of denominations; and in 1968 the book was aimed at both Christians and non-Christians. Issues such as predestination were considered divisive, and as Mrs. Schaeffer later remarked, “because we are trying to do evangelism, we don’t want to get sidetracked arguing issues that will prevent the gospel from being heard by the non-Christians.”¹⁴⁷ Indeed one L’Abri worker has suggested that Schaeffer was adopting the “perspectability” approach whereby at certain points certain perspectives need to be emphasized though not given a higher importance.¹⁴⁸

In his three books of apologetics, Schaeffer was anxious to present a rationally credible Christianity. By the 1960s it was widely believed among the Western intelligentsia that one had to “choose between treasuring our rationality and assenting to God’s existence.” Nicholas Wolterstorff points out that many theologians agreed “that believing that God exists requires throwing overboard the demands of rationality.” ¹⁴⁹ As part of his overall aim to win people for Christ, Schaeffer was prepared to fight on several fronts, and a key battle involved fighting the loss of rationality; so he shaped his writing accordingly. Even those like Pinnock, who criticize him for falling into rationalism, have acknowledged that Schaeffer “vindicated orthodoxy and put down liberalism in academically interesting ways.”¹⁵⁰

Taken in isolation, the Trilogy could create the impression that Schaeffer was over-rationalistic or at least gave undue importance to rationality. The latter point is explained by the above, while the former point is answered by stressing the need to consider the totality of Schaeffer’s writings. As he himself often said, “An artist can’t say everything in every picture but must be judged by all his work.”¹⁵¹ Nevertheless, even in The God Who Is There, Schaeffer makes mention of the “final apologetic” as being “what the world sees in the individual Christian and in our corporate relationships together.” Alongside the rational argument, people must see “substantial healing” and so realize that “Christianity is not just a better dialectic.”¹⁵² He recognized that non-Christians could not look for perfection in the lives of Christians, but he felt that “they have a right to expect reality.” For Schaeffer, the reality of our relationship to the Lord Jesus must be demonstrated in the present existential moment.¹⁵³ Thus I doubt if the Trilogy—even taken by itself—can actually be regarded as rationalistic. Yet there were those who did so, and to remove any misunderstanding, Schaeffer added an appendix to the 1982 edition rejecting the charge that he was a rationalist. Referring to the role of the Holy Spirit, he said, “as we give the adequate and sufficient answers (which we did not generate, but which we have from the Bible), we must consciously pray for the Lord’s work as these adequate answers are given.”¹⁵⁴

A TRUTH SYSTEM WITH TRUE SPIRITUALITY

However, Pinnock would detect a rationalist influence at a deeper level within Schaeffer’s thinking and in the very nature of his apologetics. It is this rationalistic mind-set, he believes, that led Schaeffer to construe Christianity after the manner of a rational truth system. It is certainly true that Schaeffer spoke of Christianity as a system and praised it for being consistent in a way that no other system is or has ever been. He maintained that as a system Christianity has the answers to the basic needs of modern man, and they are “answers which will stand up to the test of rationality and the whole of life as we must live it.”¹⁵⁵ Yet he warned that Christianity isn’t only a system. “God is there and we must be in a living relationship to him.”¹⁵⁶ For Schaeffer, in considering Christianity as a total system, one has to start with the beginning that “God exists and that He is the personal-infinite God.” He regarded personality as valid because it was rooted in the personal God who has always been.¹⁵⁷

In a key address given in 1974 at the International Congress on World Evangelisation in Lausanne, Schaeffer declared that a “dead orthodoxy with no real spiritual reality must be rejected as subChristian.”¹⁵⁸ This address was later published as Two Contents: Two Realities, and it has been described by one of Schaeffer’s long-time colleagues in L’Abri as “one of the most important talks he gave.”¹⁵⁹ In it, Schaeffer argued that the propositional truth of the Christian system must not be the end of the matter, as that would lead to a dead scholasticism. Instead, the end purpose of propositional truth was to enable us to be in relationship with God and to love Him with all our hearts and minds and souls.¹⁶⁰ For Schaeffer, this relationship involving our communion with Christ was true Christian mysticism, but in it “one is not asked to deny the reason, the intellect . . . and there is to be no loss of personality. . . . It is Christ bringing forth fruit through me.”¹⁶¹

The book True Spirituality, from which the above quotation is taken, is the key to understanding Schaeffer, rather than the Trilogy. Although not published until after the Trilogy, True Spirituality was written as an outcome of his 1951 spiritual crisis, and it reflects the change in his life. Schaeffer himself regarded it as “the real basis” of L’Abri and welcomed its publication as a counterbalance to his three books on apologetics. While seeking to keep a balance between the intellectual side and the spiritual reality, he acknowledged that this was more difficult to do in books than it was in the community of L’Abri itself.¹⁶² I believe that this acknowledgment in 1973 about the need for balance reflected his concern that some readers of the Trilogy—be they critics or followers—only focused on the rationality of his apologetics and overlooked his spirituality. As pointed out in the previous chapter, many people only know Schaeffer through his three apologetical books, and they view him primarily in terms of the importance he accorded rationality in these books. Sadly, they have not grasped that for Schaeffer how apologetics was conducted was as important as what was being said. Nor have some realized the spirituality that underlay the rationality of his apologetics.

THE NEED FOR REALITY

True Spirituality was a book Schaeffer re-read time and again. In it he says that while doctrine is important, it is not an end in itself. There is to be a “moment-by-moment, increasing, experiential relationship to Christ.”¹⁶³ Schaeffer stressed that salvation, as the word is used in Scripture, is wider than justification. In the future there is glorification, but there is also a present aspect of salvation. Sanctification is our present relationship to our Lord. While there are no degrees of justification—once you accept Jesus Christ as Savior, your guilt is absolutely gone—there are degrees of sanctification. There are degrees between different Christians, and we must also acknowledge degrees in our personal lives at different times.¹⁶⁴ Schaeffer believed that the present aspect of salvation must be emphasized because “Christians are called upon to be a demonstration at our point of history that the supernatural, the normally unseen world, does exist; and beyond that, that God exists.”¹⁶⁵

As Christians live by faith, and as Christ brings forth His fruit in us by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the way is open for the individual Christian to begin to know in the present life the reality of the supernatural. And for Schaeffer, this is where the Christian ought to live.¹⁶⁶

Schaeffer maintained that as Christians many of us experience a loss of reality in our Christian lives because we have lost the reality of the supernatural view of the total universe. Thus we “allow the spirit of the naturalism of the age to creep into our thinking, unrecognized.” ¹⁶⁷ Schaeffer argued that the true Christian life means living in the two halves of reality: the supernatural and the natural. For him there was a cause-and-effect relationship from the seen to the unseen world, and the real battle is in the heavenlies. Those Christians who do not live their present moment in the light of the supernatural, Schaeffer accused of living a life of “unfaith.” He believed that they had reduced Christianity to a dialectic or simply a good philosophy. And while he agreed that Christianity is a good philosophy, he taught that it is not only a good philosophy, for Christianity involves how we live in God’s universe.¹⁶⁸ For Schaeffer, truth, while vital for salvation, has to be lived out to be real. As he put it, “in the last analysis it is never doctrine alone that is important. It is always doctrine appropriated that counts.”¹⁶⁹

Schaeffer realized that if we try to live the Christian life in our own strength, we will only have failure and sorrow. However, he believed that we can experience great joy if we live in the power of Christ “through the agency of the indwelling Holy Spirit, by faith, moment by moment.”¹⁷⁰ Schaeffer explained how, by drawing upon the reality of our relationship with God, we can experience a “substantial healing” in all our relationships. He was convinced, on the basis of biblical teaching, that perfectionism (i.e., overcoming all sin) is not possible. Nevertheless, Schaeffer believed that by taking hold of the spiritual reality, Christians can discover “that they can have in the present life the substantial healing of the separation from themselves that is a result of the Fall and of sin.”¹⁷¹ He maintained that this substantial healing applies not only to our separation from God but to the separation we experience from ourselves and from other people. In True Spirituality Schaeffer therefore devoted whole chapters to the substantial healing of psychological problems and personal relationships.

FOUNDATIONAL FOR SCHAEFFER

True Spirituality, as already mentioned, was only published in 1971. Yet the material from which the book developed was first presented in a series of talks in the USA during 1953, then was repeated in 1955 when L’Abri began, and was reworked in a more complete form in 1963. Following their recording in 1964, when the talks were again given, the material (in tape form) was made available for study to individual visitors to L’Abri. The tapes were widely used by the Lord, as Schaeffer observed, to help people with spiritual and psychological problems in “a way that has moved us deeply.”¹⁷² Thus it can be seen that a stress on the need for a moment-by-moment personal spiritual reality with Christ lay at the heart of Schaeffer’s ministry at L’Abri. Long before the charismatic movement burst upon the scene in the 1960s, Schaeffer was proclaiming the importance of living in the power of the Holy Spirit. Writing to a friend in 1951, Schaeffer remarked about the joy of being indwelt by the Holy Spirit and then added, “would to God that our ministry could be under His full direction, and in His power without reservation.”¹⁷³ With the establishment of L’Abri in 1955, Schaeffer was anxious that his ministry, as much as his life, be conducted under the direction of the Holy Spirit.

I have dealt with True Spirituality in considerable detail because of its importance in enabling us to understand Schaeffer and to evaluate his apologetics in relation to the totality of the man. It allows us to see that Pinnock’s claim that Schaeffer reduced Christianity to a rational truth system is incorrect. Not only did Schaeffer not allow rationalism to control his apologetics, but neither did he allow his apologetics to control his theology. It is quite simply not true that Schaeffer’s emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible led him “to inflate the admittedly important place of the Bible in Christianity and thus to obscure the very point of the Bible, which is to bear witness to Jesus Christ.”¹⁷⁴

In The God Who Is There Schaeffer says that truth is “not ultimately related even to Scripture” but “is finally related to something behind the Scriptures.” For Schaeffer the final screen of Christian truth is “that which is in relationship to what exists and ultimately to the God who exists.”¹⁷⁵ And once again Schaeffer stated that true spirituality consists of being in relationship to God. This involves, first, the “once-for-all act of justification, [and] secondly,... being in that correct relationship as a continuing moment-by-moment reality.”¹⁷⁶ It is worth pointing out that the above quote comes not from True Spirituality but from The God Who Is There. Thus even in one of his books that gave an important role to rationality, Schaeffer gave the greatest importance to spirituality and the need for that to find a moment-by-moment reality.

SALVATION AS PERSONAL AND RELATIONAL

Burson and Walls suggest that though “Schaeffer places a heavy emphasis on sanctification and the relational aspect of salvation, he clearly gives justification the logical priority.”¹⁷⁷ They also think that Schaeffer views the means by which we enjoy justification “primarily as a legal act of substitutionary punishment.”¹⁷⁸ Although they do not accuse him of being a rationalist (in the way Pinnock does), by depicting him as understanding salvation primarily in terms of legal justification and expressing it in rational, doctrinal terms, they help create such an impression. However, they are quite wrong in their assessment of Schaeffer. Certainly Schaeffer believed in the utter necessity of a moment in our life when, by grace, we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior and are justified by faith before God. Yet he did not give it priority over the relational aspects of salvation.

Schaeffer spoke against the danger of “thinking of Christianity as merely a sort of progression, without understanding that there must be a moment of justification, a moment of birth.”¹⁷⁹ Although this brings us within a proper legal relationship with God, Schaeffer pointed out that God’s dealing with us is “not primarily legal” but personal. God Himself always deals with us on the basis of a personal relationship.¹⁸⁰ Justification is an essential part of salvation, but “salvation also includes certain ongoing realities in our present life.”¹⁸¹ It is true that justification comes first, but its only “priority” is chronological in that there is a historical sequence: first justification, then sanctification. Writing in The God Who Is There, Schaeffer stated:

Birth is essential to life, but the parent is not glad only for the birth of his child. He is thankful for the living child that grows up.... So it is with becoming a Christian. In one way you can say that the new birth is everything; in another way you can say that really it is very little . . . it is very little in comparison with the living existential relationship. The legal circle of justification . . . opens to me a living person-to-person communication with the God who exists.¹⁸²

Schaeffer understood Christianity in terms of three concentric circles. The outer circle is the apologetic and defensive, while the middle circle is the intellectual (i.e., the doctrines of the faith expressed in a positive way). Important though this middle circle was, Schaeffer recognized that if it stood alone, it was not Christianity. For him, that involved the innermost circle, which is spiritual (i.e., “the personal relationship of the individual soul with a personal God”¹⁸³). Schaeffer deeply regretted that many evangelicals looked back to the moment of their justification as if that were the end of salvation, at least until death comes. When asked to give a word of testimony in church, he noted that many Christians spoke of their conversion albeit twenty or thirty years ago but said nothing about anything since. He believed that salvation is a running stream and not something static and warned that if we don’t have something fresh to thank the Lord for today, we “have surely fallen into mere orthodoxy, with no reality to it at all.”¹⁸⁴ To avoid this, not only should our relationship with God be real, but people “should see a beauty among Christians in their practice of the centrality of personal relationships.”¹⁸⁵

Schaeffer felt that there was a unity between the apologetic and spiritual writings that people needed to recognize. In the running of L’Abri he attempted to maintain this approach so that when “people come to L’Abri they are faced with these two aspects simultaneously, as the two sides of a single coin.”¹⁸⁶ He acknowledged that the balance wasn’t always totally kept but remarked that through prayer they consciously asked the Lord “for His help. And I think that is what all of us must do.”¹⁸⁷ This brings us to the question of prayer, which Schaeffer regarded as utterly essential. L’Abri was built upon the concept of prayer, and it is very interesting to note that in 1964 when the community was growing, both in terms of numbers and buildings, Schaeffer gave a sermon series on the importance of prayer. As the new chapel opened and L’Abri took on a greater sense of permanency, Schaeffer called everyone in the community to spend time preparing their hearts and reflecting about their prayer life as he spoke on the subject.

PRAYER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

On the first Sunday in the new chapel, he declared that too often Christians live “as if there was no promise of the Holy Spirit and as if the promises concerning prayer were simply not made.” He suggested that if God withdrew the promises about the Holy Spirit, the “awful thing” is that it would make “no difference what-so-ever” to most Christians. Schaeffer regarded this as “wrong beyond all words” in view of the emphasis in the Bible on prayer and the role of the Holy Spirit.¹⁸⁸ It was for him an example of “unfaith” when a Christian prays so little, because while such a Christian might claim to believe in God’s supernatural world, he or she does not act in practice on the basis of the supernatural in the present life. For Schaeffer, prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit must be coupled together since Scripture reveals them to be closely related in a very special way.

Schaeffer believed that the Bible presents “a picture of prayer which is simplicity, practicability and power.” Prayer is simply our speaking to the God who is there, and he suggested that our prayer life should be like those early disciples who knew Jesus face-to-face. In their relationship with Jesus while he was on the earth, “they expected to be heard and so should we.”¹⁸⁹ By “practicability” Schaeffer meant that prayer has, among other things, a result in the external world. However, he recognized that the power of our prayer at any particular time rests upon our attitudes and the quality of our Christian life at that moment. Consequently, “not all Christians are in equal place and none of us are in equal place all the time.”¹⁹⁰ If, as Schaeffer thought, prayer is at the heart of maintaining our spiritual reality and developing our relationship with God, then conversely our relationship with God is at the heart of our prayer life. Schaeffer understood prayer in a very relational way and compared our talking to God in prayer to a “little child with his hands up-raised saying to his father ‘Up, daddy, up.’”¹⁹¹

In prayer, Schaeffer suggested, we should have the same attitude as a little child—trusting, depending, and longing to be lovingly embraced by our Father. Citing Romans 8:26, Schaeffer pointed out the role of the Holy Spirit in taking our prayers when we don’t know what to say and making them what they should be. To people worried about selecting the right words, Schaeffer said, “it does not matter. If your cry is right, it is heard as it is really meant.” Here is Schaeffer, the man accused by Pinnock of being a rationalist who is preoccupied with propositions, referring to our communication with God in a form beyond words. Hardly the rationalist! Quoting Gresham Machen, the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, that there are times when we can94 not even verbalize our cry, and all the child of God can say is, “Father,” Schaeffer acknowledged that he had known such times. Yet because we deal with God, there is a “tremendous reality,” a “tremendous power,” and something “really happens.” He felt that this explained why the apostles said in Acts 6, in the order they did, that they would give their attention to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.¹⁹²

CORRUPTED BY THE FALL

One of the questions raised by Geehan concerned the doctrine of the Fall and its relationship to apologetics. While Schaeffer laid great importance on a true, historic, space-time Fall, it has to be said that he made very little reference to the noetic effects of the Fall in the presenttime reality. Although (as a Presbyterian) Schaeffer believed in the doctrine of total depravity and recognized that the inherent corruption of sin extends to the faculties of the mind,¹⁹³ in practice this appeared to make little difference as to how he conducted rational discussion. Of course, he recognized the limitation of the mind and its inability to reason through to a saving knowledge of God without special revelation. ¹⁹⁴ Yet Schaeffer remained confident that man’s rational abilities were such that the Christian apologist could appeal to them. As stated earlier, because men were “not logical to their system, in practice you can find a tension and common ground: so you can talk in terms which can be traded.”¹⁹⁵

However, lest we conclude that in practice Schaeffer’s apologetics accorded reason too great a role, we do well to remember just what he was about. Schaeffer was an evangelist who wanted to rescue the lost, and his apologetics was a tool employed in that work. Evangelism, not apologetics, guided his ministry. Working in the 1960s when academics regarded evangelical Christianity as irrational, Schaeffer was concerned to show it as being rationally credible. He was also anxious to oppose the mysticism influencing students exploring the Eastern religions. Schaeffer therefore gave an emphasis to the rational faculties and their role in our coming to a knowledge of God. This is an example of what Gavin McGrath has called the perspectability approach: certain perspectives need to be emphasized but not accorded a higher importance. Emphasizing certain perspectives and downplaying others was a common approach adopted by Schaeffer. To put an emphasis on the importance of rational discussion wasn’t to imply that rationality was all-important but rather that it was most appropriate in that environment. In the same way, we can understand Schaeffer’s lack of real emphasis on the need for personal confession and repentance from sin. It was not because he thought people were not guilty of sin, for after all, as already stated, he held that the central antithesis of the Christian faith is the moment of justification.¹⁹⁶ Rather, Schaeffer’s not stressing the need for repentance from sin was a reaction against the “heavy emphasis given by some fundamentalists to repentance.”¹⁹⁷

In giving a certain emphasis to rationality, Schaeffer believed that what he did “was an application of what Paul did in Romans 1 and 2.”¹⁹⁸ In the end non-Christians will be judged guilty because there was sufficient evidence for them to know the truth that there is a God. Schaeffer maintained that creation “reveals knowledge to the rational person—who can’t escape his rationality even though he is a rebel.”¹⁹⁹ In seeking to explain to persons about their need of God, Schaeffer was just attempting to draw upon their innate rationality. He held that despite the Fall, “man continues to be a rational, moral creature. He never becomes a machine.”²⁰⁰ Yet while Schaeffer may not have made many references to the sinful corruption of the mind, he recognized its limitations. It was not just that he recognized the need of the Holy Spirit to provide illumination in addition to rational discussion, but he accepted the need for the Holy Spirit to be working through the rational discussion. There is a tendency by some to isolate events—the discussion, the moment of conversion, etc.—but Schaeffer’s approach was to see it as an integrated whole. He did not believe that you established by rational argument that Christianity is true, and then (and only then) did the Holy Spirit take over to lead you into faith. For Schaeffer there was “a constant interchange of faith and reason all the time.”²⁰¹ It was never either/or; rationality and the Holy Spirit always interacted. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit didn’t just engage the mind but also related to the emotions. The Holy Spirit did not only illuminate in order to give understanding, but He dealt with the noetic effects of the Fall. Thus He provided “a sense of conviction and rebuking and a humbling of the mind.”²⁰² While Schaeffer gave an emphasis to rationality, he never divorced it from the whole of a person’s experience, nor wanted to promote intellectualism, never mind rationalism. As Ranald Macaulay, his successor at L’Abri, put it, their vision was

a mind which is overwhelmed by the reality of God’s truth, of God’s Word, revealed from above, thrilled by its objectivity and its rationality, and as a result of that, in love with God, rejoicing in Him and labouring gladly for Him.²⁰³

CONCLUSION

While this chapter has demonstrated that Schaeffer did not accord reason too great a role, some evangelicals felt that the emphasis he gave to rational discussion was misplaced. Influenced by Abraham Kuyper, they favor a presuppositional approach to apologetics. As outlined in Chapter One, Kuyper held the view that God “as revealed in Scripture is known by us, not as a conclusion of an argument, but as a primary truth immediately apprehended as the result of spiritual communication to the human consciousness.”²⁰⁴ Perhaps it is because Geehan stands firmly in the tradition of Kuyper and adopts Van Til’s approach that he is unhappy with the way Schaeffer seeks to use biblical doctrines (such as the Fall and the Trinity) to deal with apologetic questions. Geehan felt that Schaeffer should have mentioned that these doctrines “are conceptually elusive having long histories as recalcitrant puzzles within Christian theology.”²⁰⁵ As we have noted in this chapter, Schaeffer repeatedly emphasized that no one can fully comprehend God or His revealed truth. Yet, as Lewis points out, for Schaeffer “the mysterious is the incomprehensible, but not the illogical, the unreal, or the irrelevant.”²⁰⁶ Surely this is correct, and Schaeffer was right to want to demonstrate that “Christianity is not a blind leap of faith but rather that there are good and sufficient reasons which can be pursued with one’s reason for knowing that Christianity is Truth.”²⁰⁷

Nevertheless, Schaeffer recognized that there are certain things about God—such as the Trinity—that we cannot grasp. He stated:

[W]e must stop here where the Bible stops and as soon as we try to explain the infinite God with our finite knowledge we begin to twist the Scriptures and we are rationalistic in the bad and Enlightenment sense of insisting that we as finite can put everything into mathematical, Cartesian formulas.²⁰⁸

Written in 1981, three years before he died, the above letter indicates that Schaeffer continued to accord reason an extremely important role, but, as in 1948, it was a reason to be exercised within the limits set by the Sovereign God. It was a marvel to Schaeffer that God, who is infinite, should in His infinity “create significant people in a significant history.”²⁰⁹ Holding these two truths in tension—God’s infinity and man’s significance—is difficult, but Schaeffer was right to try.

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