This review of Francis A. Shaeffer’s seminal book The God Who is There will show it to be largely relevant today even though it was published some 45 years ago.
Years ago I remember seeing it on one of my dad’s bookshelves. He’s a preacher, and he has had this book since college. It was evidently a big deal when he was a student in the early 1970s at David Lipscomb College. I think it is still pretty relevant today. (Aside: the old cover from 1968 is pretty rad. Too bad it doesn’t look like this anymore. It is probably too “artsy” for most evangelical audiences — ha!)
Crisis of the Modern Man
In a nutshell, the first half establishes the crises facing the Modern Man, and the second half is about how Christians should talk to said Modern Man, meeting him where he is with compassion.I see far too many Christians alienating people and talking down to them simply because they themselves don’t know enough about the other person or even what Christianity is really about.
That compassion is a fundamental part of what Jesus was all about. Many Christians forget this.
Progression of the Line of Despair
An important premise of the first half is this: certain ways of thinking have moved through society in this way: starting with philosophy (university professors of philosophy and literature), to the visual arts, to music, to the general culture, and finally to theologians.That’s the order in which ideas spread. I found a really great graphic that explains this in the article from Susan E. Isaacs, Miley Cyrus And The Line Of Despair:
Take a good look at the above diagram. Once upon a time we celebrated Aristotle and the Venus de Milo. Now we worship John Waters and Lady Gaga. Tell me we are not living Below the Line of Despair. Of course, I didn’t need Schaeffer to tell me this stuff; I knew it the moment twerking was added to the OED.The graphic is kind of tongue-in-cheek and exaggerated, but you see where certain ideas start in the universities and work their way into popular culture and then theologians.
Theologians are always the last to catch on.
It’s not that churches should be early adopters of new ideas, but there is a definite tendency among the religious to ignore what is going on in the culture at large, sticking their fingers in their ears and saying “la la la la la” at whatever is different from what they know and believe.This is why the evangelical church in America shrunk so much in the middle part of the 20th century: they missed 50 years of art and culture, unable to understand the widespread nihilism present in the Modern Man.
Had evangelicals paid better attention when the 1913 Armory Show came to America, they would have been better prepared and equipped to face the existentialism that was prevalent in society by the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Now we have hipsterism, which in my opinion is the newest iteration of postmodern despair, with a sort of cheerful nihilism.
People Aren’t Wearing Enough Hats
Related: this scene from Monty Python’s 1983 film “The Meaning of Life”:(Can’t see the video? Click here instead.)
If there is no God…
The problem with modern thought is that it very quickly arrives at the conclusion that if there is no God, then moralism is moot.If there is no God, it doesn’t matter what you do. Kindness and cruelty are equal and ultimately zero. Therefore, anything you do is zero, and if anything you do is zero, you are zero, too. You can see where this is going. It’s pretty hopeless.
The Call
Shaeffer calls Christians to understand this despair and compassionately expose it for what it is when ministering to people. Don’t shock and convulse people and then leave them hanging.
Show them love; show them what Christ is really about. God is knowable — a who: he is personal, and he is in fact there.
The Art
Of course what got me about this book in the first place was the attention given to the fine arts: how the work of the Modern masters has embodied the ideas present in 20th century thinking.Refer again to the visual above and you’ll see how what happened in the arts a few years back is what is happening in mass culture now. And what’s happening in the arts now will spread to everything else in a few years.
Saving Leonardo
Yes, the book is almost half a century old. People call Schaeffer prophetic, but I see he was just follwing the line of Modernism into Postmodernism, which really started to take root in the 80s and 90s and now has entered the popular culture as hipsterism.You already know what’s next: the churches are ready to adopt similar lines of thought.
Cue a Jon Acuff tweet about preachers in unnecessary scarves talking about metanarratives:
Metanarrative is a huge part of postmodernism. Rather, postmodernism is skeptical of metanarratives.)
But if you want an updated version that doesn’t require a glossary and has a nifty appendix called “Morality at the Movies,” check out Nancy Pearcy’s Saving Leonardo. Pearcy was a student of Shaeffer’s, and she picks up where Shaeffer left off, making it more visual and relevant for today. I reviewed Saving Leonardo last year.
Things I have to ask myself
Reading this makes me ask myself what can I do as an artist to influence the world around me.Better yet, how can I answer the world around me in such a way that gives hope in spite of the despair that’s all around?
How can I use the gifts I have to reverse that trend, not just mirror it?
