Review: A Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer
My copy is definitely this original one with the groovy cover.
A Christian Manifesto by Francis A. Schaeffer
copyright 1981
Initially
I was born in 1980; the product of a Southern Baptist upbringing. Although – and I feel it’s necessary to make this disclaimer – it was a good Southern Baptist upbringing. A bad Southern Baptist upbringing would be one where I was taught to do it the “Baptist Way” just because it’s the right way. That was not my experience! The type of upbringing I received was one that encouraged me to not-be a Southern Baptist per se, but rather to be a person who thinks carefully about the Bible, tests the teachings of others against the Bible’s revelation of itself, a person who treasures God above all, and who lets my actions and words speak in everyday life. That was what I was taught, and I’m grateful.
I’m relating all of this because this book has helped me to more fully put some of my own worldview pieces together, and to better understand the worldview of the previous generation. I feel I now have a better handle on the religious-political thought of the 1980′s. I was born in 1980, raised around the ideas of the “Moral Majority,” and a product of much of this type of thinking. I’ve watched my opinions about how the church should engage culture and government change quite a bit during my short life, and I’ve wondered how so many Christians of the previous generation got so screwed up. This book helped me to understand those differences a little better.
Schaeffer’s Premise
Schaeffer’s basic premise is that America and its government were founded on a Judeo-Christian Worldview. He says “The Reformation in Northern Europe not only brought forth a clear preaching of the gospel, but also brought forth distinctive governmental and social results” (134, emphasis mine). He further claims that humanism is now the prevailing worldview represented by the American government, the media, and American schools. In Schaeffer’s opinion this worldview “would never have given the form and freedom in government we have had in Northern Europe (including the United States)” (43). In other words, according to Schaeffer, the United States, the Constitution, and the freedom we enjoy are all products of the Bible. They would never have come into existence apart from the founding fathers embracing it as their own worldview. From this central premise Schaeffer goes on to recount the destruction that humanist thought has wrought upon Western thinking, and he outlines a plan for proper resistance to the humanist takeover of America and abroad.
Reaction
From my perspective this book appears a lot more militant than I expected it to be. Schaeffer advocates picketing, civil disobedience, and other means of resisting secular society that honestly have a black eye in the thinking of many turn-of-the-century twenty-somethings. Many young Christians are sick of political maneuvering, the Moral Majority, Republicanism being equated with Christianity, and other methods that this book advocates. They seem like flawed methods that were doomed to failure.
Post-Modernity
That being said, I don’t want to sell Schaeffer short. I’m not sure he would have agreed with all the political action that Christians have taken in the last 30 years. I think it’s also safe to say that society has changed quite a bit in 30 years too. Many in American culture have morphed from a modern, concrete understanding of truth towards a postmodern, less-concrete, “your opinion is just as valid as mine,” understanding of truth. This change, whether helpful or not, has led to different approaches by Christians who are seeking to engage culture and government in meaningful ways.
People of my generation are more likely (I think) to engage culture through meaningful art and meaningful relationships. Rather than try to change law to make sure it endorses a Christian worldview, Christian twenty-somethings are more apt to try and change individual people. This change in approach is due in part to a shifting towards post-modernity, but it may also be due to a feeling that the battle for the government seems hopeless and misguided to begin with.
I’ve heard it argued most of my life that America was founded on a Christian worldview, but I’ve never heard it argued effectively by anyone until I read this book. My generation’s shift in epistemological understandings has led me in the past to say that “the claim that America was founded on a Judeo-Christian understanding is short-sided,” but Schaeffer has made me consider otherwise. The Constitution does seem to have been founded almost primarily on a Christian-esque understanding of the world, the law, and human rights. Having conceded that truth, I can understand why Schaeffer and others have so ardently sought to fight against the total secularization of government through political means. It makes sense once I’ve conceded Schaeffer’s premise.
A New, Old Approach
However, I’m not sure that those same methods still make sense. In light of America’s current political-social-religious landscape, fighting to return American law to a Judeo-Christian interpretation through political means seems hopeless. I understand that it’s justifiable, but I’m just not sure it’s a worthwhile cause. To be honest, maybe I do think it’s worthwhile, but I think we’ve been going about it the wrong way. Somewhere along the line a lot of Christians quit thinking about the totality of the political spectrum and began just voting along party lines. More than ever the Republican party simply does not represent Christian thought. Christians must approach politics agreeing and disagreeing with aspects of both of the main two parties. And we also must admit that the political front is only one aspect of living for Jesus. What little I understand of Schaeffer makes me think that this actually was his approach. Unfortunately many in the previous generation seem to have advocated only a political approach. They reduced Christian political activism to voting Republican, and they ignored other ways that Christians can engage culturally. Our approach should be political, but not just Republican, and our approach should go beyond politics, and be relational and artistic as well.
This approach: “The Lordship of Christ over every area of life,” is what Schaeffer advocated. Somewhere along the way many within pop-Christianity got confused. They forgot the arts and the importance of personal relationships, and they relegated our fight completely to politics. Hopefully we can re-learn the art of embracing the Gospel in every area of life. If we can’t, then the pendulum will swing too far the other way and Christians in 30 years will be wondering, “What the heck were the turn-of-the-century Christians thinking!” I for one hope that we’re learning to be balanced.
This is a good book. Some of the forms of civil disobedience Schaeffer advocates seem a little over the top to me, but maybe Schaeffer is just taking the Bible more seriously than I am. In the end this book gave me a lot to chew on, and it encouraged me to think about the ways in which I am embodying the Christian life politically.
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1 commentTotal Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey
My brother Andy recently read this book and wrote a review. I’m posting it here. The implications of this book are huge: I can’t wait to read it for myself.
Summary
In Total Truth Nancy Pearcey argues that western (American) Christians have been indoctrinated by secular culture, and by poor theological frameworks within the church, that have caused them to acquiesce into a bifurcated system of living and seeing the world, one in which there is a secular/sacred divide that keeps faith locked into the private sphere of life and out of the public sector (17). Pearcey states, “Many believers have absorbed the fact/value, public/private dichotomy, restricting their faith to the religious sphere while adopting whatever views are current in their professional or social circles” (33).
The problem with this is that it is a breakdown in theology and it highlights the insufficiency of many western Christians’ worldview. A right understanding of Christianity is, “that there is a biblical perspective on everything – not just on spiritual matters” (44). Thus, it is every Christian’s duty to think through and live out all of life from a Christian perspective. “Being a Christian means embarking on a lifelong process of growth in grace, both in our personal lives (sanctification) and in our vocation (cultural renewal)” (49). Christians cannot afford to accept the terms as they stand – leaving faith at home or in church on Sundays. Rather, the Christian’s entire life should be driven by a biblical worldview. This is the only real way to break free from the dichotomies that pervade our thinking and living. As Pearcey states, “The best way to drive out a bad worldview is by offering a good one (58); one that unifies both secular and sacred, public and private, within a single framework (65-66).
And it is the church’s duty to work to this end. The church is a training ground for cultivating people equipped to speak the gospel to the world (67). And by “gospel” Pearcey does not simply mean to share that all have sinned, that Christ died for sins, and that the proper response is repentance and faith. While it is inferred that she does believe this to be true and that it is the central message of the gospel, Pearcey argues that evangelism encompasses more than disseminating these basic truths. She states, “The task of evangelism starts with helping the nonbeliever face squarely the inconsistencies between his professed beliefs and his actual experience” (314). She goes on a few pages later, “In evangelism, our goal is to highlight the cognitive dissonance – to identify the points at which the nonbeliever’s worldview is contradicted by reality. Then we can show that only Christianity if fully consistent with the things we all know by experience” (319).
Moving on in her book Pearcey traces trajectories that led America into its dichotomized way of thinking. By looking from within the church and from the outside, she exposes several contributing factors to the secular/sacred split. First from within, Pearcey explains an overarching three-part theme that should guide the Christian worldview: Creation, Fall and Redemption. She summarizes, “All of creation was originally good; it cannot be divided into a good part (spiritual) and a bad part (material). Likewise, all of creation was affected by the Fall, and when time ends, all creation will be redeemed. Evil does not reside in some part of God’s good creation, but in our abuse of creation for sinful purposes” (86). This system is, “cosmic in scope, describing the great events that shape the nature of all created reality. We don’t need to accept an inner fragmentation between our faith and the rest of life. Instead we can be integrally related to God on all levels of our being” (95). Using this three-part grid as a tool of analysis, Pearcey then argues, “Throughout the history of the church, various groups have tended to seize upon one of these three elements, overemphasizing it to the detriment of the other two – producing a lopsided, unbalanced theology” (87).
One such failure was Aquinas’s overemphasis of Creation, leading him to a theology of “nature/grace dualism” (92). The outworking of this error was that the gospel was restricted to the “upper-story realm,” isolated from science, philosophy, law and politics (93). This gave leverage for the argument that later came to fruition during the Enlightenment; namely, that science and reason are religiously neutral. From this developed the notion that secularism and naturalism are objective, rational systems, binding on everyone, all the while biblical views are dismissed as biased, private opinions (94).
Once there was an accepted dichotomy between “nature” and “grace,” it was not hard to convince anyone that “science constitutes facts while morality is about values” (107). And with Darwins’s theory of natural selection came the ability to have a complete naturalistic worldview (106). The effect of Darwin’s theory has been pervasive. Pearcey states, “Virtually every part of society has been affected by the Darwinian worldview” (155).
What is insightful by Pearcey, though, is that the overwhelming acceptance of this dichotomy and of naturalism as the “lower-level” neutral sphere of truth is all based upon a philosophical foundation. The under girding of naturalism is the belief that matter is eternal and that the “system” is closed – neither of which can be proven on naturalist, scientific terms. Nonetheless, “once people have made that philosophical commitment, they can be persuaded by relatively minor evidence” (168). Furthermore, at this point, the “game” is biased, because once the two-tiered view of reality is accepted, the naturalists define the rules for access into the “lower realm.” Science (empiricism) is put forward as the only viable means for validating truth claims. Or conversely, we must now accept naturalism as a “central tenet” of science (169).
Moving on, Pearcey progresses to show how the dichotomy made its way into the development of our country’s politics and religion. Originally, in the colonial period, the dominant political philosophy was classical Christian republicanism. But with the development of thought – that cannot be divorced from the Enlightenment and Darwinism – came the new liberalism, which replaced the sentiment of self-sacrifice and the social structures of family and church with individualism. The focus was now on self-assertion and self-interest (280). Even evangelicalism1 with all of its positive affects in many ways worked to further the gap. The focus on individual conversion led to a doctrine of one-time emotional decisionalism, which ultimately contributed to the belief that Christianity is a “noncognitive, upper-story phenomenon” (272). Pearcey concludes, “Evangelicalism has largely given in to the two-story division that renders religion a matter of individual experience, with little or no cognitive content” (293).
Pearcey eventually reveals that the bifurcation of public/private has made it into the culture in which we are currently living. And therefore Christians have a great responsibility to fight against this way of thinking because it opposes truth. “What Christianity offers is a unified, integrated truth that stands in complete contrast to the two-level concept of truth in the secular world” (119). So what we must do is “evangelize”2 culture by exposing the flaws of other worldviews and then reveal that the Christian worldview offers a better alternative. And the alternative we offer is not simply for the private sector; we must, “find ways to make it clear that we are making claims about reality, not merely our subjective experience” (119).
Critical Evaluation
The premise set forth in this book has exposed an entire schema of thinking that I have used to interpret reality. While I have thought for some time that what Christians need is an entire worldview from which to operate, I have failed to see the pervasive nature of the public/private dichotomy in the western world and my acceptance of it many times. As a result, there are some questions I now have in relation to this new enlightenment. For one, how am I to understand the concept of “separation of church and state?” Originally, this clause was set forth to guard from the establishment of a church-state and to protect the right of individuals from forced religion. But as it is used now, it seems to “guard” the government from any religious influence (except naturalism), and this seems to be an extension of the public/private dichotomy. It would be fitting to trace how it is that we should specifically think through this concept of “separation.”
Another trajectory worth tracing is what the implications are for the education of Christian children. If evangelism is as broad as Pearcey defines it3, and if, “every subject area should be taught from a solidly biblical perspective so that students grasp the interconnections among the disciplines, discovering for themselves that all truth is God’s truth (129), then is public school even an option for Christian parents? And furthermore, where do we start as Christian parents in building a biblical worldview with our children?
Lastly, Pearcey calls for us to engage culture by exposing to individuals the inconsistencies in their worldview. But at what point do we share what Paul calls of first importance: that Christ died, that he was buried and that he rose again?4 And what’s the order in our attempt to put forward both the central gospel message, and an entire worldview that comes with it?
Review by Andy Adkison
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No commentsObama our first Postmodern President
While watching election coverage tonight, I heard Charles Gibson mention that some have been calling Obama the “first postmodern candidate.” The term “postmodern” is about as loaded a term as imaginable, and it has a ton of positive and negative connotations depending on your worldview. I found the statement interesting, googled “Obama postmodern,” and found this article. I think it’s insightful and worrisome in some aspects, just as postmodernism can be insightful and worrisome. If Obama is our first postmodern president, then he reflects the postmodern worldview that has largely invaded Western popular culture.
p.s. – I am not trying to be anti-Obama, nor am I anti-Obama (at least as things stand right now). I do believe that the election of a black man in America is a huge step forward for race relations in a country that is still largely divided in many areas.
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