books:

	Escape from Reason: A Penetrating Analysis of Trends in Modern Thoughts (Ivp Classics) Francis A. Schaeffer IVP Books, 2007 - 123 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

How did we get here? And where do we find a remedy?

In this modern classic, Francis A. Schaeffer traces trends in twentieth-century thought and unpacks how key ideas have shaped our society. Wide-ranging in his analysis, Schaeffer examines philosophy, science, art and popular culture to identify dualism, fragmentation and the decline of reason.

Schaeffer's work takes on a newfound relevance today in his prescient anticipation of the contemporary postmodern ethos. His critique demonstrates Christianity's promise for a new century, one in as much need as ever of purpose and hope.

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Everything old is new again!

Francis Scheaffer wrote about 40 years ago that the church had forgotten "The Larger Story" of God and so lost the supernatural element of Christianity. His warning to the church was not taken and now today the Holy Spirit has revealed to John Eldredge to take up the banner again and proclaim to the church that we have got to get back to teaching the "Larger Story". Eldredge wrote a small book called "Epic" in which he tells the "Larger Story" like a play with four acts.

Scheaffer shows how through the years the church has slowing been ignoring the fact that God created the universe, then angels, and then man. That there was a war in the heavens between Lucifer and Michael and Lucifer and his angels fell and were cast to earth long before man was ever created. This world has always been the dwelling place of Satan and his angels. Man was created and the war continues. Satan his angles lost the war with God but the war with man is still going on and this war is spiritual and supernatural.

Anyone with questions about how the church lost the total story of God will see through Schaeffer's writings the chipping away by men down through the years. One thought building on another thought until all is lost. We have to get it back and reclaim the "Larger Story of God" so that the supernatural elements of this world are understood.

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Schaeffer Puts his Finger on the Path of Modern Thought

I read this little book for the first time in the early 1970s. A friend from Vassar read the book and became a Christian. When you look at the world 40 years after the book was written, Schaeffer's analysis of the modern trend of ideas away from the God of the Bible was surely prophetic. If you don't believe in God and you are a thinking person, then you may want to avoid reading Schaeffer because it has the power.


Strong Christian apologetics

Francis Schaeffer in his early life was left to accept agnosticism because of what he was taught by the liberal church. But today he is a warrior for Jesus Christ and a defender of Truth. He says, "the Christian is the real radical of our generation, for he stands against the monolithic modern concept of truth as relative" Schaeffer has come to an understanding that few of us will reach. He brings a new and refreshing perspective in apologetics, backed with powerful arguments; he is able to communicate to the laymen as well as test the Scholar. He tells us, "first I am not an apologete if that means building a safe house to live in, so that we Christians can sit inside with safety and quiescence. Christians should be out in the midst of the world as both witnesses and salt, not sitting in a fortress surrounded by a moat."

Some of what Schaeffer espoused in "The God Who Is There" is carried over into this book: the dichotomy that the early, brilliant artists, philosophers and scientists faced, only to end in irrational thought. These are the men who led us to modern day rationalism and naturalism. Early science dealt with the natural world, but it did not yet become "naturalistic" until later, "it was the biblical mentality which gave birth to modern science". Schaeffer argues that the Renaissance opened the door to humanistic autonomy and the recognizing of nature in a totally different light.

The destruction begins when nature is made autonomous----Grace is then eaten up by it. Man thus continually changes what is placed into the upper story (God) in hope for some kind of meaning. Without that upward belief in a creator and Christ-centered-absolutes we are then left with our downward relativistic rationality of the world: rationalism----where even evil becomes fuzzy. "In order to confront modern man effectively, we must not have this dichotomy. You must have the Scriptures speaking truth both about God Himself and about the area where the Bible touches history and the cosmos." We Christians might as well be speaking a foreign language unless we understand the minds (language) of today. What is tragic is the church has now accepted this dichotomy, or, duality.

Christians need to know the steps that brought us to this point, and the minds that have influenced the world, in order to strengthen us in defense of the truth.

A good book to add is "7 Men Who Rule From The Grave"

Wish you well
Scott

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Return to reality...

Francis Schaeffer admits that this small book overlaps much of his book titled The God Who is There. What Schaeffer does in this small treatise is give a glimpse on the impact that Thomas Aquinas had on the thinking about nature and grace. Meaning that before Aquinas much of what was thought about God and the heavenlies were never pictured in any way besides mere symbols. For instance, before Aquinas, Mary and Jesus were never portrayed as real bodies with a physical element, but were only allowed to be pictured using symbols. As well as this, nature held no interest to the artist and were never pictured at all in art in any way. This came from the fact that before Aquinas, to simply climb a mountain for the sake of climbing a mountain had never been done.

Out of this nature started to have more meaning for people, which if taken from a biblical perspective can be good in so far we speak of stewardship, but what we find is that from this time on, nature took on more of a role than Aquinas would have thought.

In the Escape from Reason Schaeffer shows how from the start of Aquinas and the Renaissance nature started to depart from the Scriptural understanding of its place among men. So, art, poetry, theatre, etc. took from this and lead us down the road of being completely autonomous from God, where nature ended up "eating up grace" so that it was completely free from the God who created it and us.

Schaeffer goes to show the history of this thought and then gives the better understanding through the Reformation and the Scriptures. Namely, that the only way that man can be the most free is within the "constraints" of the knowledge given by the personal, communicable triune God of the Christian bible.

Even though much of this was overlapped from The God Who is There, this book was still very worth the read and gives greater understanding of how, from Aquinas on, nature and autonomy took a dangerous turn from the freedom found in God, and turned instead to an autonomy apart from Him. Highly Recommended.

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Poor Thomas

As I read this work, I couldn't but help notice how often Reformed writers blame Aquinas for current philisophical thought. They blame the others, and Schaeffer simply says that ever since Aquinas, men lost hope in finding a unifying principle that would make sense of both matter and spirit, body and soul, love and sex. And modern man (defined: 1200s to present), had since Aquinas messed it up, have failed at unification and despaired of ever achieving this end. And that failure, felt not only by the intellectual elite, has also drifted and seeped into the average man's life. The man on the street no longer has an authoritative voice--it used to be the Catholic church but no longer. C.S. Lewis also alludes to this in Miracles. Modern man has tried to search for unification in something other than the Scriptures.

Schaeffer contends that since man has failed to unify experience in nature and since also modern man has long since abandoned "grace" or "heaven" or "Scriptures" as the principle of experiential (i.e. existential and ontological and epistemological)unification, he has nothing left but despair. So now, man is trying mysticism, pornography,drugs, death and other forms of ways to 'leap' into something else that can provide meaning. Modern man has given up on dualism. The universe is not rational, it is an impersonal machine and man a part of that. But man is a personality and personhood according to Schaffer cannot be found in a mechanistic universe.

In sum, Shaeffer's work is a small overview of what he believes are the causes of modern thought (Aquinas, Kierkegaard) and its implications on modern culture. It is very interesting and a little depressing. You would never have guessed that you had such a longing for a theory or principle of unification and are really deppressed being stuck in the bottom storey. I don't believe Schaeffer realized that what was happening (maybe still), was no more than philisophical learning in any other age. Philosophy is the aim to unify all into one system with corresponding logic-based cohesion. But every system (so far) fails at unification. And modern culture or the man on the street is no more "irrational" than the medieval Catholic man for going along with the dominant thought of his respective age.

Despite its weaknesses, Escape from Reason is a vital little book because of its brevity and lucidity. He does a wonderful job of at least introducing his readers to the human side of an age old debate.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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