How Should We Then Live?
http://punchdrunksoul.com/?wc-ajax=get_refreshed_fragments Both fiction and reality are filled with examples of characters who justify their heinous actions because ‘they had no choice.’ Perhaps they were under threat, or their loved ones were, or perhaps money or reputation were at stake. So ‘no choice’ is relegated to particularly unpleasant consequences.
What happens when you’re pressed between the god of this world – the state – and God? When God’s law comes into conflict with the power of the state, what do you do? A notable example is found in the history of Rome’s hatred of Christians.
In 286 A.D. the Roman commander Maurice received an order to direct a persecution of Christians throughout the Rhone Valley. He promptly handed his insignia to his deputy in order to join the Christians. As a believer, himself, he was killed. The Swiss town of St. Maurice is named in his honor. Did Maurice have a choice? Indeed. He could die, assured of a better life to come.
We act based on how we think, what we believe. Who we are is grounded in our worldview. Our political views, corporate actions, and our relationships flow from our core. As Francis Schaeffer writes, “The results of their thought-world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo’s chisel, and it is true in a dictator’s sword.” It’s true for the surgeon who saves the unborn baby’s life while yet in the womb, and it’s true for the abortionist. It’s true for the terrorist, and it’s true for the teacher who puts her body in the way of the bullets aimed toward her students.
If you’re going to read just one book by Francis A. Schaeffer, my recommendation is to read his 1976 piece, “How Should We Then Live?” Schaeffer is a presuppositionalist; indeed, he insists that everyone is. “People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. ‘As a man thinketh, so is he.’”
If you get your presuppositions wrong, then you will make foolish decisions, even if the world judges you brilliant. Much of Western foreign policy over the last few decades is based on the fantasy that ‘democracy’ – rather, this should be taken as ‘a constitutional republic with individual freedoms secured’ – can be planted anywhere. No, such government requires Christian foundations, which justify the rule of law by the absolute standards of God’s laws, coupled with the rights to life and liberty of all individuals, commensurate with the Biblical principle that we are all persons made in God’s image. Therefore, attempting to implant ‘democracy’ in an Islamic country is doomed to failure. Just look at any Islamic country, including Turkey, once lauded as an Islamic democracy, as it spins madly into tyranny, with a bent toward anti-Christian, anti-Jewish oppression.
Schaeffer observes that most people “catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.” Yet we don’t have to lock down on what we catch in our youth. I was raised Roman Catholic, but ingested enough evolutionism and secular humanism to convert to an atheistic worldview as a teenager. Thinking through and living out the consequences, however, especially the utter hopelessness of a materialistic worldview – we’re all just clumps of molecules in motion – opened me up to the truth of the Gospel.
My worldview since has been grounded in the Bible, for about 50 years now. The more I learn, the more I see that God’s word makes sense of creation, science, people, history, consciousness, culture, morality, meaning, beauty, love, and – most poignantly for me in the early days – hope.
Schaeffer’s book begins with several chapters tracing the impact of various worldviews throughout history, in the West, from ancient Rome to the present. I’ll only touch some of his points briefly, hoping to whet your appetite enough to read the book yourself.
One element from Rome’s persecution is this: Christians were not killed because they worshiped Jesus. Rome tolerated a wide variety of religions. Nobody cared who worshiped whom as long as the state was sacrosanct, centered in the worship of Caesar.
The Caesars would not tolerate anyone who claimed that only the infinite-personal God, through the Lord Jesus Christ, could be worshiped. That claim, those thoughts, and any words that expressed them were counted as treason.
“No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions.” Nothing has changed since Rome. Communist states persecute Christians today because the state is god. Leftists in America persecute Christians who refuse to do artwork on a wedding cake that is an abomination in the eyes of a believer. Teachers who challenge the religion of evolution are disciplined or fired. A Christian professor who is vocal about his faith will not receive tenure in most academic institutions. Indeed, in many disciplines, you will be refused the opportunity to earn a Ph.D. if you admit to Bible belief.
What explains the animosity, the visceral hatred of the Left towards Christians, and even non-Christian conservatives who have the sense to subscribe to some measure of Biblical values? It’s spiritual warfare. It makes no rational sense otherwise. The Christian, at least, should discern accordingly. The weapon the Christian has in his arsenal is not political activism. It is not conservative rhetoric. And it is certainly not political compromise. Rather, it’s the sword of the Spirit, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Why aren’t Christians out there? Why aren’t they in the face of the lost, pressing truth home? Yes, compassionately, but without hesitation.
In Schaeffer’s historical survey, he covers some of the same ground we see in his other books, which I have written on. He concludes those chapters with this: “Now having traveled from the pride of man in the High Renaissance and the Enlightenment down to the present despair, we can understand where modern people are. They have no place for a personal God. But equally they have no place for man as man, or for love, or for freedom, or for significance.”
When we kick God out, we kick man out, too. Personhood and everything that entails, including love, significance, morality, and respect for personal freedom, depends on the Ultimate Person, who created us as persons. In modern philosophy man is only a machine, “but those who hold this position cannot live like machines!” Everyone yearns for meaning, and so the modern fellow must make an irrational leap for meaning in his life, all the while denying his existence as a person.
The oh-so-relevant modern philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980), is a good example. He signed the Algerian Manifesto (1960), declaring the Algerian War a dirty war. He made a value judgment, destroying his own philosophy, which insisted that man cannot use reason to judge some things right and some things wrong. Yet that manifesto used reasoned arguments to judge the morality of the war.
Karl Jaspers (1883 – 1969), the German existentialist, suggested that a ‘final experience’ may give meaning to life, that even though we must see life as absurd, a huge experience may give us encouragement to plod along with some measure of contentment.
A young Dutch man who followed Jaspers came to study with Schaeffer in Switzerland. He had an experience one night at a theater, an emotional experience provoked by a play that gave him the hope of some meaning to life that had not been there before. He could not describe the experience because it was emotional, and to the existentialist reason is excluded from such experiences. Eventually he left Switzerland in despair because there was no content he could stand on.
I have met a number of such fellows over the years as I’ve shared the Gospel. One fellow claimed that he had died for four minutes and saw things that were indescribable. He was immune to my Gospel presentation because, to him, no reasoned argument, no matter how grounded in history, in experience, in conscience, could trump his experience. It occurs to me that demons know this about human psychology and they will use it to lock the door against a Gospel witness.
Even though existentialism as a formal philosophy might seem outdated to many academics – “That’s oh-so-20th-century!” – the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) survives as a dominant mindset in today’s culture, reflected in over-emphasis on self-esteem, flexible morality, and disrespect for absolutes, particularly the Biblical.
Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) proposed drugs to provoke the ‘final experience’ and for finding truth ‘within.’ Many rock and roll groups extolled the hallucinogenic drug culture which still infests our culture. Political activism today is certainly a ‘drug’ for seeking experiences to give life apparent meaning. Without God, government serves as the god of the Left, and acquiring governmental power elevates activists as little gods, controlling, annoying, and punishing those who disagree. I’d love to ask some of these activists whether their religion provides comfort on their deathbed.
Look at politics today. It’s all propaganda, lying, and dirty tricks. There is no moral foundation. Even secular conservatives have no foundation to make moral arguments. It’s clear that they have a conscience that helps, but superficially. What ground do they stand on?
New Age lifestyles in the West, derived simply from old-fashioned Hinduism and Buddhism, enable acolytes to grasp for nonrational meaning. It’s difficult to get through to these folks, because no matter what truth and reason you provide, their vague pantheism promotes a ‘whatever’ attitude that’s hard to penetrate. ‘Whatever’ is deadly. Far better for someone to argue that the Gospel is wrong. At least then they’ve got a chance to get in touch with reality and reverse course. But ‘whatever’ kills.
The occult is also on the rise. Occult activities offer some meaning, for someone who can’t bear the idea of man as machine, but the meaning is horrendous, following devils as if they are benevolent aliens or interdimensional spirits.
Existential methodology, Schaeffer explains, is the core of modern humanistic thinking. People come to believe that they can arbitrarily put different concerns of life into two separate categories, reason and nonreason. Evolution and man-as-machine go into reason, but meaning and morality go into nonreason. On the one hand, you see yourself as a clod of molecules in motion, but on the other hand you make moral judgments, condemning those who disagree with you politically.
The Christian worldview sees everything as built on reason, built on the Biblical God and His word as foundational to origins, philosophy, science, morality, politics, etc. The existentialist doesn’t worry about internal contradictions. He just stays busy. Immerse yourself in projects that serve for meaning in life and don’t think too much about whether life has any point. Certainly don’t think about what happens when you die!
Over the last several centuries, theology and church culture have been gradually corrupted by rationalism, the idea that you start with man as judge over everything, including whether God exists and / or whether you find parts of Scripture trustworthy or not. In the Renaissance both Roman Catholics and Protestants tried to synthesize Plato and other ancient philosophers with ‘Enlightenment’ rationalism and institutional Christianity. The result is religious liberalism, which essentially denies Biblical authority and focuses on making man’s material life better . . . now. Don’t think about what happens when you die!
Consequences are huge and varied, including textual corruption, which has generated all the corrupt ‘popular’ translations of the Bible; also, theistic evolution which, in my view, is less respectable than blatant atheistic evolution. Theological liberalism, furthermore, weakens the Gospel, promoting an ‘easy believism’ void of repentance, producing multitudes of false converts populating the churches. A weakened Gospel leads naturally to universalism and denial of judgment, denial of the existence of Hell. And, since everyone is ok now, regardless of commitment to sin, worldliness and licentiousness run rampant in Western Christendom.
Consider how many churches accept anyone into membership and even leadership positions without simple queries about conversion or conduct. I recently had a long talk with a middle-aged fellow who had just joined a local megachurch. He had already signed up for leadership training so he could take on some volunteer (unpaid) responsibilities. But it was clear in our conversation that he had never been born again. He ultimately admitted as much, but was reluctant to embrace the idea of repentance and the new birth. Certainly his new church would never be so bold as to find out whether he is actually a Christian.
Schaeffer was prescient in identifying a trend we hear much about in today’s culture. Theological liberalism has led many to identify themselves as ‘people of faith.’ A popular morning show co-host on Fox News has referred to herself as a ‘person of faith.’ I don’t think she was aware that she was thereby distinguishing herself from her two co-hosts, who apparently aren’t. More significantly, the modern idea of faith is faith without an object. What they mean is ‘faith in faith.’
Liberalism does not allow faith based on absolutes, faith that presupposes Biblical truth. In contentless religious experience, reason has no place. It’s all about feelings. How many times after a tragedy have we heard a media personality say, “Our hearts and minds and prayers go out to . . .” No, they don’t. You’re not really praying when you utter such platitudes.
I’ve noted how this co-host, who also refers to herself as an evangelical Christian, sees no distinctions within Christendom . . . Mormonism, Roman Catholicism, evangelicalism, hey, they’re all just ‘flavors,’ it’s all just a matter of personal preference, a matter of feeling. And she has shown her affinity for all varieties of secular worldly culture, including drinking beer at London pubs when she went across the pond to cover the royal wedding.
I cite her particular case as just an example of how squishy ‘Christianity’ becomes when it is not grounded on the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. Hey, lady, those folks you’re drinking with in that pub are not merely nice guys and gals. They’re sinners in need of a Saviour. She can’t see people that way, though. How can someone be truly saved and not see that judgment or salvation is the destiny of everyone she meets? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.)
As a counterpoint, it’s interesting that in the Welsh rivival of 1904 – 1905, pub owners were converted and put signs on their doors: “Owner Converted, Closed Forever.”
New Age beliefs take hold because there are no absolutes. Cruelty is equal to non-cruelty. Hindus see Kali as a manifestation of God, a feminine deity with fangs and skulls hanging about her neck. Everything that exists now, including all the pain and cruelty and death, is simply part of what has always been, and everything that is, is part of ‘God,’ so don’t worry about right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, and don’t fuss about those 10 commandments, either.
Nietzsche analyzed the despair of modern man. God is dead, but man yearns for more than his pointless machine-like life. The Christian knows, as a person, that meaning is found only in knowing the infinite-personal God, who gave us personhood. Nietzsche said that without God all we can do is develop projects, make systems, construct game plans. Just don’t look outside your game plan or you’ll get depressed. Your game plan might focus on pleasure seeking, but even Nietzsche knew that “all pleasure seeks eternity – a deep and profound eternity.”
We all yearn for happiness, peace, rest, fulfillment . . . salvation. Observe how Satan works in our modern tech-based culture to distract with media and provide an infinite variety of ways to seek pleasure. But I don’t see a lot of happiness out there.
So, Schaeffer notes, the activist devotes his life to an ideal he resonates with, like government policies that produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Utopia won’t happen, though, this side of the 2nd Coming. A scientist devotes his life to some precise measurement or some brilliant model that addresses some bit of physical reality. His focus allows him to avoid thinking about the big questions, like why things exist at all. Or, “it can be a skier concentrating for years on knocking one-tenth of a second from a downhill run.”
Schaeffer: “That is where modern people, building only on themselves, have come, and that is where they are now.”
His analysis of newsmakers is oh-so-relevant to today . . . “the ideal of objectivity in the news columns in contrast to the editorial pages is increasingly diminished. Thus, the loss of a philosophic base for truth and the certainty of knowing has the practical result of making for a sociological science and a sociological news medium – both available for use by manipulators.”
Science is dominated by evolutionary fantasies which feed the narrative of no God, no sin, no judgment, and people are animals to be manipulated. The education, media, and political establishments are perfectly in sync here.
Schaeffer analyzes the movies of his era which, he says, are the cultural expressions of man-centered philosophy. In Antonioni’s Blow-Up, the ads proclaimed, “Murder without guilt, love without meaning.” The story had no hero. Indeed, there seem to be a lot of movies with no hero, unless the hero is deeply flawed. Even in the current craze for superhero movies, we see the Ironman character as flawed – although not so much, perhaps, from the world’s point of view.
In a Blow-Up scene Schaeffer cites, clowns play tennis without a ball. At the end of the movie a reverse zoom shot shows the central character disappearing entirely – all that remains is the grass. Man is gone.
“If people begin only from themselves and really live in a universe in which there is no personal God to speak, they have no final way to be sure of the difference between reality and fantasy or illusion.”
Such radical changes in worldview are the reasons why it is unsafe to walk city streets at night. “As a man thinketh, so is he.” In the suburbs it’s rare to see children playing outside without supervision, particularly away from their own house. When I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, we roamed far and wide by foot or on our bikes. And that was on the South side of Chicago. No more.
In our day, the Marxist / socialist resurgence in the West, including America, is horridly fascinating. The Left in our country is openly anti-American, anti-Constitutional, anti-capitalism, anti-free speech, anti-Christian, pro-abortion, pro-violence, pro-immorality, and pro-indecency. It’s like history never happened.
Schaeffer cites Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, in which the Soviet dissident details the lawless oppressions of Lenin and Stalin. In Volume 2 of his work, he reported that the Soviet prison camps held 15 million inmates and that from the Revolution to 1959 at least 66 million prisoners died.
Yet the Left drives us right back toward Stalinism. The current leader of China recently acquired dictatorial powers and so China looks more and more like it did under Mao. (You might review my recent blog on a Mao biography.) None of these stories end well. My only hope is that we’re on the final death spiral toward the rapture, the Antichrist, and the Tribulation. The Christian’s only rational response in this climate is to offer the Gospel to as many individuals as possible.
Solzhenitsyn observed that by 1966 some 86,000 Nazi war criminals had been convicted, in large part due to a huge effort in West Germany to track them down. But there was no such effort in communist East Germany. In Russia, many of the huge crimes and atrocities of Stalin were eventually condemned. But the perpetrators walked. Molotov, for example, was “a man who has learned nothing at all, even now, though he is saturated with our blood and nobly crosses the sidewalk to seat himself in his long, wide automobile.”
He further reflects, “From the most ancient times justice has been a two-part concept: virtue triumphs and vice is punished.” But in Russia, “Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.”
Yet America is already well down this path. Look at the unpunished crimes and the coverups among our national leaders, and the rampant corruption over the last several years at the highest levels in government and law enforcement.
Schaeffer: “Materialism, the philosophic base of Marxist-Leninism [or the Left’s socialism today], gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man.” It claims to be for the people, but destroys everything and everyone it touches. Socialism always oppresses, while lying that its leaders care for people. Once in power, the elite do what they want, and will persecute, prosecute, intimidate, imprison, and even murder anyone in opposition. Why shouldn’t they? There is no God above them, no foundation below.
Schaeffer notes that in the pagan Roman Empire, abortion was commonly practiced, but Christians stood up against it and prevailed. Our modern Supreme Court does not care to see an unborn child as a person. The only way they can justify that is to deny God and His declaration that all persons are God’s image-bearers. The Black Lives Matter movement also does not care that most American abortions are murders of unborn ‘black’ persons. Although the Biblical view is that there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, male or female – in God’s sight – and certainly no distinction between black and white, which are mere percentage differences in skin melatonin, because we are all descendants of Adam . . . one race.
As the Christian consensus disappears in the West, Schaeffer sees just a few alternatives. Hedonism is popular – everyone does his own thing and don’t you dare judge someone else. This is chaos in society, however. “Consider two hedonists meeting on a narrow bridge crossing a rushing stream: each cannot do his own thing.”
Another societal possibility is the absoluteness of the 51 percent vote. In a Christian culture, a lone man (or woman) with the Bible can judge and warn, because there is an absolute above society. But without God and God’s laws, a Supreme Court majority sanctions baby murder. Once Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, he did whatever he wanted.
If the majority votes for it, why not refuse medical treatment for the elderly, or just kill them outright? Why not declare as nonpersons those who are inconvenient, like the ‘insane’? Why not let a family vote to withhold terminal care from their wealthy dad or mom so they can obtain their inheritance more quickly?
The secular conservative pundits and politicians are content to let majority rule dictate. Or to invoke economics in place of morality. Recently in the news there have been quite a few instances of vile insults against political enemies by reporters, pundits, and comedians. It seems the best that the secular conservatives can do is invoke the power of the marketplace to decide whether the foul-mouthed media personality should lose his job, or her show should be canceled. So absolute morality is replaced by mere economics.
I’ll conclude my too-short review of Schaeffer’s book with his analysis of our nation’s future. He believed that the majority of Americans, whom we would consider fairly conservative, “will sustain the loss of liberties without raising their voices as long as their own life-styles are not threatened. And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things . . . or at least an illusion of them.”
Edward Gibbon (1737 – 1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said that five attributes marked Rome at its miserable end:
- Love of show and luxury (affluence)
- A widening gap between rich and poor
- An obsession with sex
- Freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality
- An increased desire to live off the state.
Schaeffer: “It all sounds so familiar.”
Why do I write on such depressing subjects? If you’re at all like me, I hope that we might be like the children of Issachar (1 Chronicles 12:32), “which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.”
In our day, the Christian’s mission is the Great Commission. That’s what we ought to do! Do get upset, but transform your outrage into Gospel fervor. Come on! Life is short. Get out some Gospel tracts this week. Witness verbally to ONE PERSON. Or a few. Or many. Do something out of gratitude for the grace of salvation in your life! If that idea doesn’t grab you, then get saved.
- drdave@truthreallymatters.com