The God Who Is There – The Shift to Post-Modernism

Earlier this year I read a fascinating book called The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer combines philosophy and theology in order to give a historical explanation of how we got where we are. Here is a very condensed summary of Schaeffer’s point.

Man has always been looking for a universal. The whole tragic history of mankind is based on man trying to find a universal outside of Christianity, with which to explain the world and give meaning to life. The unifying factor of non-Christians is rationalism. Until the 20th century men were rational optimists, working from their finite selves in hopes of finding a way to make sense of the Universe. They were humanists. They were able to do this because they were, without realizing it, working with the Christian presupposition of absolutes and anti-thesis, which they had no logical right to do, because without Christianity there can be no absolutes.

But with the arrival of the twentieth century a shift in non-Christian thinking began to take place. Exactly when it all started cannot be pinned down, but as a general rule, it was the year 1890 in Europe, and 1935 in America. The shift spread gradually, in three different ways. First, it spread geographically, beginning in Germany, spreading across the Continent, crossing the Channel to England, and then crossing the Atlantic to America. Second, it spread through society, working its way downward from the educated upper classes to the lower working classes. Third, it spread from one area of thought to another, beginning with philosophy, then art, music, general culture and theology.

It all started with philosophy. Men began to realize the contradiction of supporting rationalism with absolutes and they tried to do away with absolutes all together. Philosophers Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Satre, Jasper, and Hegel began it. They were no longer rational optimists. They reached what Schaeffer calls, ‘the line of despair,’ and they went beyond it. They gave up hope of trying to find a rational universal that would contain all thought. Logic had failed to come up with a meaning for life, so they forsook reason and tried to find something, anything that would give life meaning. Thus Nihilism came into being. Nihilism, the belief that everything is chaotic and meaningless, is the simplest form of despair. But in the struggle to get out of despair, and find an answer to nihilism, one is led even deeper into it. The next level of despair is the acceptance of a blind optimistic hope of meaning, based on a non-rational ‘leap of faith.’

The ensuing dichotomy is that the rational and logical, result in lack of purpose and meaning, and the non-rational and non-logical result in some kind of an incommunicable, unexplainable, unaccountable existentialist ‘experience’ that can give meaning to life. This ‘experience’ is usually achieved by means of drugs and other forms of Eastern mysticism. But they could not reconcile the rational with the non-rational so they gave up the traditional idea of thesis and antithesis and replaced it with the concept of synthesis – the combination of partial truths to obtain a higher truth. But men cannot live with the conclusions of this system. In practice, one simply cannot entirely reject the methodology of antithesis, without a total alienation of man from himself, by some form of mental breakdown.

The result of inability to actually practice the conclusions of either of these worldviews, has led modern thought to the third level of despair, a level of mysticism, of ultimate Nothing. The artists followed step soon afterward. The pillars of modern art - Picasso, Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh. They introduced impressionism. They tried to abandon the particulars, and instead strove to capture the universal on canvas. Their pictures and the tragic stories of their lives reflect their failure. Then Duchamp and others introduced the element of chance into Art. It lost all its meaning. Pierre Schaeffer did the same thing with Music, producing senseless cacophony that reflected the message of Modern man. There is no meaning. When it comes to the fourth category, the general culture, we find pop music that combines the concept of drug use, the psychedelic, and vague pantheism, heavily reflecting the decline of humanity. In the cinema, Nihilistic and Existentialistic films follow suit.

Karl Barth and the liberal German theologians opened the door of theology to the new mentality. In order to reconcile Reformation Christianity to the post modernist philosophy, they tried to do away with all the supernatural elements of Jesus, and recover the ‘historical Jesus.’ But they failed dreadfully. They discovered that if you remove the supernatural that is so intricately intertwined with the ‘historical,’ then there is no Jesus left. Then they could have either gone back to the original Reformation theology or gone ahead to nihilism. But they did neither. They created a new theology, a neo-orthodoxy, a religious existentialism that no longer held all the answers, and was in fact, an anti-theology.

Neo-orthodoxy seems to have an advantage over secular existentialism, in that it can use certain religious terms to provide an illusion of communication of the incommunicable ‘final experience,’ whereas secular existentialism cannot. Every word has two parts - the dictionary definition and the connotation. The new theology therefore uses words, such as ‘pantheism’ that can have no actual relation to the subject, but their connotation makes the hearer thinks that he knows what is meant. The secret to the strength of neo-orthodoxy is that it uses symbols, such as ‘god’ with a connotation of personality that provide an illusion of meaning. Its philosophy is ‘Do not ask, just believe.’ Men fall for this because it sounds spiritual and vibrant, and because they want a ‘greater reality’ and are sick of cliched religious phrases and forms. They do not realize the danger of using undefined words. They are taking a leap of faith into an irrational, semantic mysticism.

All these factors have worked together to make this monster called Post-Modernism. Humanity has stepped off the cliff, and fallen into madness. Today, every non-Christian is somewhere on a line between two points. On the one hand is the external reality about man, God, and the Universe. On the other hand is the logical conclusion of his false presuppositions, which are not compatible with reality. He is torn between these two consistencies. In order to rescue him from this dilemma, one must identify a man’s presuppositions, find the point of tension he is currently at, and then lead him farther and farther away from reality, to the logical conclusion of those presuppositions, until he recognizes the contradiction and realizes that his worldview simply doesn’t work. Then and only then can we bring in the solution, the thing that does work, God’s answer to man’s dilemma.