How Should We Then Live?

Dr. Francis Schaeffer was one of the great Christian philosopher/theologians of the 20th century. He and his wife, Edith, founded L'Abri Fellowship, a Christian community which has helped many people think more deeply about God and Christianity. His book How Should We Then Live? is an overview of Western culture and thought, including the development of Christianity. He traces the progression of Western thought from the Roman era to modern times, paying special attention to the underlying assumptions of influential thinkers throughout these times.

One important theme is what Dr. Schaeffer refers to as the Upper and Lower story (see below). He uses the idea of the two stories in a house to represent the realm of ideals and moral absolutes (upper story) and the realm the material universe and everyday experience (lower story). Dr. Schaeffer's contention is that philosophers have repeatedly attempted to derive knowledge of the upper story while only using imformation from the lower story, but that these attempts have all met with failure. In the modern era, this project has largely been abandoned resulting in reductionism, materialism and existentialism.

Dr. Schaeffer points out that that divine revelation has been given to man in the Bible , and that this information can give him upper story understanding, and thus make sense of the lower story experience. Thus man's effort to understand can succeed, but he must allow for external information to enter the picture. This isn't presented so much as an apologetic argument, but rather that it is true, and therefore makes sense of human history and experience.

Dr. Schaeffer also explains how new ideas progressively gain acceptance in culture. This progression begins with an individual who proposes a new and radically different view of the world. This view may be initially rejected, but gradually gains acceptance by other intellectuals. Over time artists, writers and musicians begin to adopt this viewpoint and express it in their work. And finally, perhaps generations later, the culture is influenced by this work and the ideas become the sensibility of a new era.

The Middle Ages
Dr. Schaeffer notes that the Middle Ages was largely dominated by the Christian church. The church during this period was sometimes devout. At other times it was isolated or corrupt. Despite its shortcomings, the Christian church of the Middle Ages did act as a preserver of the Judeo Christian Bible as well a the ancient Greek and Roman writings.

At the conclusion of the Middle Ages (about 1200 to 1400 A.D.) two major influences lead up to Renaissance. First is the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who revived the study of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and brought about a new interest in the study of non-Christian philosophers. Second was the work of John Wycliffe (1320-1384) and John Huss (1369-1415) who emphasized the authority of the Bible as the Word of God and its supremacy over church and papal traditions. These influences led to the two major worldviews of the Renaissance: Renaissance humanism and the Christian Reformation.

The Renaissance
Moving next to the Renaissance, Dr. Schaeffer uses many examples from art, music and architecture to trace the development of humanistic thought during this time. One painting in particular, Raphael's The School of Athens, is used to demonstrate these trends. The painting has two central figures, Plato, who is pointing upward, and Aristotle, who has his outstretched fingers pointed horizontally.

Plato pointing upward represents the universal ideal, whereas Aristotle's outward pointed fingers represent the many particulars of the physical world. Many artists and thinkers of the Renaissance started from the particulars of the physical world and attempted to empirically derive universal ideas.

During the Middle Ages, God (as mediated through the church) was the center of all things. However during the Renaissance, man became the center of the world, working outward from his own rational thoughts and observations of the world. The roots of Christianity persisted, however this period was marked with attempts to unify humanistic and Christian thought. These attempts failed though because men were unable to begin with the physical, observable particulars and derive meaning or universal truth.

Upper and Lower Story
One of Dr. Schaeffer's recurring themes is the concept of higher and lower realms. (See also The God Who Is There.) In the current work he refers to them as grace/nature and higher/lower, and later the upper and lower story. Some of the contrasts between these concepts are:

1. God vs. Man
   
2. Creator vs. Creation
   
3. Heaven vs. Earth
4. Unseen vs. visible
5. Unity vs. diversity
6. Universals vs. particulars
7. Moral meaning vs. individual actions

The upper story represents the realm of ideals, perfection and eternity. The lower story represents day-to-day experience in the present and the physical, visible world. Dr. Schaeffer describes many of the historic philosophical attempts to derive truth about the upper story beginning solely from the particulars of the lower story. All of these attempts fail though, as demonstrated by the lack of consensus and continued search for a humanistic answer to this riddle. Dr. Schaeffer concludes that there is no humanistic answer to this question. On the contrary, the higher realm explains and gives meaning to the lower realm, but cannot be derived from it.

The major concepts of the Renaissance are:

1. Humanistic ideals
2. Man is the center of all things
   
3. Man is autonomous

The Reformation
Theologians of the Reformation turned to the Bible and original Christianity for truth. From the Bible they recovered the following concepts:

1. Because of the Fall, human reason is insufficient to answer the great questions confronting mankind.
2. Man needs God
3. Man needs revelation about God.
4. The Bible is the source of revelation.
5. The Church is under the authority of the Bible (Sola Scriptura)

This reliance on Biblical truth provided a framework to northern European society. This framework provided a great measure of personal freedom, yet without chaos. This framework also greatly influenced political thought of the time. The idea of checks and balances in government became more fully developed. The work of Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661, Lex, Rex) was very influential in England. He also influenced John Witherspoon (1723-1794) and others who helped create the U.S. Constitution.

Purpose and Meaning
The Bible also provides a unity to the problem of universals vs. particulars. Truth about God provides meaning, morals and value to life. Additionally, the Bible provides truth, but it does not do so exhaustively. That is, there is purpose in Man's work to discover the world that God has created.

The Enlightenment
Dr. Schaeffer summarizes the Enlightenment with five words: reason, nature, happiness, progress, liberty. Enlightenment philosophy was a thoroughly secular utopian dream. The "father of the Enlightenment" was the French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778). Having observed the bloodless transition from absolute monarchy to shared power in England, he attempted to inspire the same transition in France. Thus, the French Revolution was based on a secular rather than Biblical foundation. The result was the bloodbath of the Reign of Terror, and finally dictatorship by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821).

Humanism, devoid of absolutes, providing no basis for determining right and wrong, was left with only two options for society: anarchy or repression. France, and many other nations following this path, experienced both.

Modern Trends
In the remainder or the book, Dr. Schaeffer outlines the effect of these humanist trends in science, philosophy and religion. The non-Christian philosophers from the Greeks until the modern period had three things in common:

• Rationalism - man, though finite and limited, can begin from himself and gather enough information to derive universal truth.
• The validity of reason - they believed that things can be demonstrated as either true or false.
• Optimism - they believed they would be successful in their quest for truth.

However, in the modern era, shifts occurred in the areas of science, philosophy and religion. In science, the viewpoint shifted from the idea that God and man were outside of the world of cause and effect, to a system with no place for God and man is simply part of the materialistic universe.

In philosophy, four men directed the modern outlook away from optimism to a loss of hope.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) - Rousseau began to downplay reason and saw the restraints of civilization as evil. He viewed primitive man as innocent and autonomous freedom as the ultimate good. He though that society would be ordered on a social contract, which imposed freedom on the individual.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) - Though he tried, he was never able to tie the Upper and Lower worlds together.

George Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831) - The universe and man's understanding slowly unfold. No single statement can represent truth. For every statement (Thesis) its opposite (Antithesis) also has some truth. A synthesis is gradually formed and replaces the original Thesis. And so on, forever.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) - One must try to find optimistic answers to meaning and values on the upper story without using reason. One must find meaning through a leap of faith. To Kierkegaard, the lower story was the domain of reason and pessimism. The upper story was the domain of non-reason, faith and optimism.

Dr. Schaeffer summarized the philosophic outlook this way:

Humanistic man tried to make himself self-sufficient and demanded that one start from himself and the individual details and build his own universals. His great hope that he could begin from himself and produce a uniformity of knowledge led him, however, to the sad place where his mind told him that he was only a machine, a bundle of molecules.

These philosophical trends were gradually reflected in modern art, music and culture. Though we live in unprecedented affluence, these areas, though marked with genius and creativity, have grown steadily more pessimistic and degraded.

Finally, modern man's concern is mainly for peace and affluence. However without a Christian consensus in society, freedom tends to lead to chaos. The result, unfortunately, has often been totalitarianism, especially in the Communist states.
Dr. Schaeffer concludes his book this way:

[P]eople function on the basis of their world-view more consistently than even they themselves may realize. The problem is not outward things. The problem is having, and then acting upon, the right world-view -- the world-view which gives men and women the truth of what is.

Originally: Fleming H. Revell, 1979
Crossway Books, 2005, ISBN 978-1581345360