“The Christian system is consistent as no other system that has ever been. It is beautiful beyond words, because it has that quality that no other system completely has—you begin at the beginning, and you can go to the end.”

Francis Schaeffer was recommended to me as a strong Christian apologist who is helpful in navigating the varieties of Jesus-flavored spirituality that pass themselves off as Christian these days. The book that was suggested to me was True Spirituality. When I went online to purchase it, I realized that if I ponied up about three times the cost of that book, I could get The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, which consists of twenty-two books. Some back-of-the-napkin work told me I’d be getting a per book deal of about 1/5th of the cost of buying them individually. So I signed up for the whole thing and started with the first book in the collection, which seems to be organized thematically rather than chronologically.

Because I was coming at Schaeffer’s work with only a vague idea of what would be contained in it, I was caught off guard when The God Who Is There began with an extended analysis of art history. This is logical, though, because in Schaeffer’s view, our cultural decay can be traced from its beginnings in philosophy, through art, music, and culture, and finally into theology, where it has had a damaging effect on Christian thought. Art is where it is introduced to society at large, and so focusing there seems appropriate.

His general theory branches out from the central idea that as history has unfolded, mankind has lost hold of an agreed upon concept of absolute truth. (Not that there was never a consensus on what that truth is, but at least that it existed.) He traces this splintering of thought through different branches of society. He teases out the dire implications of the new worldviews that have developed in the age of synthesis, in which man has rejected the idea of antithesis.

It should be noted that Schaeffer has been criticized for playing fast and loose with the history of philosophy and perhaps painting a picture that is lacking some of the grey that should appear between the black and white. While I’m not in a knowledge position to validate those criticisms, I think it is fair to say that even if they are valid, Schaeffer’s analysis of the current state of things is largely correct, even if his analysis of exactly how we got here isn’t as robust as it could be.

Anyway, Schaeffer posits what he calls “the line of despair”—a mental threshold, upon which crossing one must give up rationality in order to dismiss the notion of absolute truth. It’s a slippery concept, holding that you must rationally approach the suprarational, whereas if you dismiss anything beyond rational you will eventually have to give up rationality as well. Since modern society has rejected the existence of God, they’ve drifted into despair, because their worldview is intrinsically linked to concepts that emanate from that core belief. The result of this denial, once brought to its inevitable conclusion, is a loss of understanding of self and a lack of life purpose.

To further flesh out the “line of despair,” Schaeffer uses a two-story house as an analogy. In the upper story, we find things that don’t necessarily follow from rational thought and logic and experimentation. But if we exist only in the lower story, where man is the measure of all things, we cannot appeal to notions of justice or love or repentance, for those exist beyond rationality. Thus, taken to its logical endpoint, life in the lower story leads to despair, because everything is meaningless chance.

But no one lives in practice as if everything is meaningless chance. Everyone acts in some capacity as if there are absolutes, and the world makes more rational sense when you have those concepts as a structure for your beliefs, which ultimately inform your actions. For instance, we feel guilty when we commit sins, not because we’ve evolved to act as if certain things are wrong or because of some latent survival instinct that indicates our sinful actions lessen our chances of propagation, or whatever—but because we are actually guilty. You know something to be true because it is actually true, not merely because it seems to be. That’s how everyone functions.

One of Schaeffer’s aims here is to target those who exist in a hypocritical in-between space, those who take upper story terminology and pervert it, repackaging lower story ideas as transcendental, thus offering a sickeningly false version of upper story experience. Much of this has happened beneath the surface, so to speak. Many cultural leaders who have pulled us in this direction earnestly believed they were doing the right thing without realizing that their presuppositions were unlivable and ultimately destructive. The most memorable example in the book (or at least the one stuck with me), is John Cage, the minimalist musician who would compose music by flipping a coin, letting the god of chance dictate his music, for chance was the basis of everything in his worldview. But then, later in life, when he became a minor authority on wild mushrooms, Cage admitted that he couldn’t apply his beliefs to his hobby, else he might eat a poisonous mushroom. It sounds like such a simple thing, to make John Cage think through his own presuppositions; to make him eat his poisonous mushroom. But it is hard because the vast majority of people don’t understand what they claim to believe. (Sadly, this is true of many who claim Christianity as well—under the slightest pressure they wilt and then end up plunging beneath Schaeffer’s “line of despair” because they’ve never worked through the hard questions for themselves. And I don’t exclude myself from this critique.)

The uncertainty over the fact of true moral absolutes and the redefining of upper story terminology have had terrible ramifications in the 21st century, which Schaeffer missed seeing by almost two decades but seemed to adroitly pin down in his own time when such ideas were fringe. Without a proper conception of God, we have progressive activists calling for “justice” while at the same time holding that “justice” does not exist in a morally absolute sense. They want to redefine the term but continue utilizing the framework that was developed around it when it was based on the original definition. In the before times, we’d execute a man for killing his neighbor because he was truly guilty in the absolute sense; because we believed in an absolute scale by which to measure such things. In the current political discourse, those calling for the heads of others are not possessed of a coherent worldview, and so cannot appeal to the scale. Well, they do, because they use the same words, but there’s no basis for their beliefs. They don’t believe the scale exists, so they substitute a newfangled one that fits their agenda and try (and so far have succeeded) at bringing people to the chopping block based on this nebulous, ever-changing scale of justice. The same exact thing has happened with love, forgiveness, kindness, &c.

Schaeffer believes that the answer to all of this is, unsurprisingly, Jesus Christ, who lived and breathed and died and rose again, which happened in real space and real time and is thus verifiable in the rational realm. This was a lower story event with upper story implications. That is to say, God’s acting in human history links the two stories.

Schaeffer’s advice to the compassionate Christian is to “take the roof off” of these worldviews—not by offering any apologetic for the truth, at first, but simply by walking their own conception of reality through to its ultimate endpoint. His position is that many of these people stuck in the middle are intellectually dishonest (consciously or not) and have never taken their own views to their logical ends. This roof-lifting operation will expose flaws, engender doubt, and dig up existential yearning. That’s good, because there is an answer to those problems. God, not humanity, is the measure of all things. If we reorient our worldview to place God at the center instead of humanity or the individual, most if not all of those existential conundrums suddenly have sensible answers. The Gordian knots we’d resigned ourselves to juggling for a lifetime are cut through.

In the end, Schaeffer is encouraging Christians to tackle only a few tasks: defend the biblically sound Christian worldview, which he believes to be the only one that is unified and complete; to show compassion to those who find themselves stuck in the lower story, beneath the line of despair; and to think long and hard so as to develop a robust, all-encompassing worldview that has the personal God of the bible at its very center.

While the book at times falls victim to Schaeffer’s spiderweb of interconnected thoughts and he doesn’t always navigate it with poise, and though he may at times misrepresent some of the specific thoughts of prominent thinkers of history—nonetheless he offers a stirring call to engage the culture without kowtowing to its whimsy.