“The strength of the Christian system—the acid test of it—is that everything fits under the apex of the existent, infinite-personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. In all the other systems, something ‘sticks out,’ something cannot be included; and it has to be mutilated or ignored. But without losing his own integrity, the Christian can see everything fitting into place.”
The further I dig into the work of Francis Schaeffer, the more prophetic his words appear to be. During the counterculture movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was just calling it like he saw it, correctly perceiving the detrimental effects that postmodern thinking would have on the culture.
He understood, in echo of Sartre, that a finite point cannot have true meaning without an infinite reference point. Of course, counter to Sartre, Schaeffer proposes that there is indeed an infinite reference point, namely the Christian God who has made himself known to man through direct revelation and the written word of the Bible. Unfortunately, the observations that concerned Schaeffer have only grown more apparent, to the point that they’re obvious even to dullards like myself. We as a society have not reversed course or slowed down our descent in the slightest. As a result, much of what Schaeffer merely glimpsed as a potential eventuality has regrettably come to bear in various Christian communities. In our increasingly godless world—or, at least one in which a variety of false gods receive the vast majority of our worship—the contemporary relevance of Schaeffer’s third book is startling and sad. Frequently dizzying and only occasionally casual, He Is There and He Is Not Silent harmonizes philosophy with divine and natural revelation to claim that the Triune God of the Bible is the only possible solution to questions of existence, meaning, morals, and so on.
A slim volume, He Is There and He Is Not Silent wraps up a loose trilogy that began with The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason. It is broken down into four chapters and two appendices. The first chapter reestablishes several ideas put forward in the first two books—such as the “line of despair” and the existence of a logical and knowable universe—and seeks to establish the metaphysical necessity of what he calls the “personal-infinite God.” In his view there are only a few viable options to explain why anything exists at all. He rightfully considers existence ex nihilo to be patently absurd, or, in his own words, “unthinkable.” If one holds to the proposition that everything is ultimately meaningless and came from nothing by chance, then goes and ties their shoes or eats a bowl of cereal, they’re violating their own stated beliefs. So no one actually believes everything is meaningless.
But he spends quite a few words dueling with the notion that existence might stem from an impersonal force, a description which does not accurately reflect the Christian conception of God. His issue with the impersonal, whether it be mystical or material, is that given time and chance—the only other possible ingredients involved in ushering the universe forward to its current state—the impersonal simply cannot create the personal. And yet the personal is evident.
He then comes to the metaphysical necessity for the Christian God, the only explanation that accounts for human uniqueness and the ordered nature of the universe. He uses the distinct and yet united persons of the Trinity to describe the unity and diversity evident in creation.
In the second chapter Schaeffer argues for a moral necessity. We all have moral urges, or “moral motions,” as he says; innate senses of right and wrong. (He uses a gut-punch example of a child prostitute so that even thoroughly evil people will feel a pang of emotion and be unable to deny this.) In any view except that which posits a personal-infinite God, these moral motions will eventually boil down to nothing. They’ll be meaningless no matter how many obfuscative layers of sophistication we might try to throw on top of them. Without a bedrock of true right and wrong, we might have relativistic morals, but these are ultimately hollow and our conception of them is out of line with a universe that is intrinsically indifferent.
And yet, presciently, he points out that one may start with the impersonal, which necessarily rejects a universal standard of right and wrong, but adamantly refuse to give up the use of such words. This is playing out in our current era as nihilistic heathens ridicule Christians for all sorts of things while implicitly denying any standard by which they can make such assessments. He sums it up excellently by quoting Marquis de Sade (the source of the terms “sadism” and “sadomasochism”) who said that “what is, is right.” “No one can argue against this if we begin with an impersonal beginning,” Schaeffer adds. After establishing the personal beginning, he traces the idea forward to deal with Baudeliere’s contention that “if there is a God, He is the Devil.” He does this by fleshing out the Biblical idea of the fallen nature of man.
Chapters three and four tackle the epistemological necessity, which Schaeffer identified as the central issue of his era (and which has only gotten worse). He attacks this from the opposite direction that he went about proving the necessity of a personal beginning by explaining Plato’s pursuit of universal forms. If we have only particulars, then man beginning from himself can produce only mechanics—finite machines without the universal reference point that gives meaning. He goes further in his critique here, suggesting that the rejection of absolutes frees man not just from morals but from knowledge, leaving him unable to say with certainty that things are real or fantasy. In the hippie culture of Schaeffer’s day, and in all sorts of pseudo-Christian and new age circles today, this has led to a search for ineffable mystical experiences to serve as proxy universals. He then offers the Christian answer to these issues and explains how it is only from such a standpoint that one can have a logical and consistent worldview.
The really basic horror of great darkness for modern man is that he cannot have any certainty of the relationship of the subject and the object. But the Christian position starts from another set of presuppositions altogether, that there is a reason for a correlation between the subject and the object. Now, interestingly, this is not against human experience. This is the experience of all men. If it were some mystical, religious thing that somebody offers as a leap completely out of reality and with no way to test it objectively, it would indeed be just one more piece of pie in the sky. But it does not matter how thoroughly a man in his philosophy holds a concept of unrelatedness; in reality he lives as though there is correlation between the subject and the object. […] What I am saying is that the Christian view is exactly in line with the experience of every man. But no other system except the Judeo-Christian one—that which is given in the Old and New Testaments together—tells us why there is a subject-object correlation. […] In other words, all men constantly and consistently act as though Christianity is true.
Although I’ve sketched the main thesis of Schaeffer’s book in broad strokes, he’s truly a scatterbrained writer and often veers off into tangential discussions. His breadth of knowledge is truly incredible as he nonchalantly alludes to the ideas and works from a vast array of people throughout history, from philosophers and sociologists to novelists and painters and filmmakers. Occasionally I found myself a little overwhelmed but he frequently repeats his ideas in several iterations before moving onto the next topic. In any case, even if he gets into the weeds so far that the reader loses the thread, the main thrust of his point is usually clear.
Schaeffer was a deep thinker and a great apologist, but he viewed himself primarily as an evangelist. There are several instances where he relates a real life story or a frequently used illustration that I found to be very instructive. In one anecdote, he describes a young couple staying at L’Abri who kept everyone up one night because they wanted to totally understand one another. Without the integration point of the personal-infinite God, they could not establish a foundation of what it means to be human or to love one another. In one of the appendices, he describes a group of mountain climbers who become lost in the fog. It would be a leap of faith to go on without being able to see, blindly hoping that they would remain unscathed, but then a voice informs the climbers that he has lived in the mountains all his life and can guide them to safety. The climber asks the voice of the wizened mountain man various questions to establish a trust between them before taking his advice. The point of the illustration is to dismiss the notion that the entirety of the Christian faith is just blind trust, to suggest that it is open to scrutiny.
Mixed in where appropriate are a series of barbed critiques of ideologies that are rearing their heads almost verbatim in current times—scientism, personal truth, the manipulation of science toward social and political ends. It’s a frustrating but endearing idiosyncrasy of his writing style that these topics crop up randomly as he writes with a ranginess that doesn’t always convey his points with crystal clarity but allows the reader to absorb the material on a deeper level (or at least I think so).
What does science mean once you are no longer sure of the objectivity of the thing, or you are no longer on an epistemological base which gives the certainty of a correlation between the subject and the object, or a clear base for the difference between reality and fantasy?
Near the end of the book he comes to a very profound point that I had not encountered before regarding creativity and imagination. In contrast to modern man, who cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, the Christian can impose the results of his imagination on the external world without confusion. The Christian is free to marvel at the painting that deviates from reality without becoming troubled because they have a basic framework for understanding how the imagination has dreamed beyond the created order. (Of course, many non-Christians do the same thing by borrowing the Christian framework.) I think there’s something to be said for this idea regarding sci-fi/fantasy stories and the correlation between the proximity to reality and the emotional resonance of the story. But that’s for another time.
Within the text of the book, Schaeffer comments on the fact that he is sometimes criticized because he doesn’t always preach the “simple gospel.” But to Schaeffer, and now to me, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so the simplicity of the gospel message is in the mind of the one to whom it is being preached. The “simple gospel” may be enough for someone raised in a Christian culture with two Christian parents who doesn’t have a skeptical mind, but for an increasing number of people the simplest version of the gospel must start with some of the big questions that he answers in this book. With an astounding pastoral warmth informed by countless discussions with atheists, agnostics, and doubters, Schaeffer explains why even those who claim that everything is meaningless or that humans are just a series of chemical reactions without a soul behave as if God exists. The answer—that God exists—is simple, and yet can be thought about and discussed endlessly.