Summary
In this book I have attempted to describe the sociological milieu in which the church of Jesus Christ now finds itself Those who have read my previous books, especially The God Who Is There and Escape From Reason, will find some repetition in Chapter One of this present book. However, three things should be kept in mind: (1) For those who have not read the other books, this base -- "how we got to be where we are" -- must be laid, or the rest of the book floats in space. (2) New material is added which will be helpful in viewing the total context in its specific sociological perspective. (3) Even for those who have read the other books, listened to my taped lectures, or heard me lecture in person, a review will still not be amiss, for the material in Chapter One should be consciously before all of us as we consider "where we are" in regard to the church in the midst of the present and future sociological situation.
Furthermore, this analysis emphasizes and reemphasizes the fact that modern problems in many fields are really not many, but one basic problem with a number of results in what at first may seem to be unrelated fields or disciplines. Thus, the modern cultural problem, the sociological problem, the problem of governing our countries today, the problems of ecology and epistemology are all related, for the basic problem of modern man gives the specific form in which each of these confronts us. And if our comprehension of this relatedness is not clear at its base, we cannot give basic solutions to effect a cure.
On the other hand, I would urge those who have not read the other books, and who may easily feel Chapter One moves too quickly, to read the book-length treatments in The God Who Is There and Escape From Reason.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Preface)
Commercial Availability of Work
The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (paper - out of print)
The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (paper - incl. The Church Before the Watching World)
The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer (paper)
The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer (Windows CDROM)
Quotes From The Book
Reasonably you cannot have both an autonomous machine, a machine that encompasses everything including man, and autonomous freedom at the same time.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
If everything is put into the machine, of course there is no place for God. But also there is no place for man, no place for the significance of man, no place for beauty, for morals or for love. When you come to this place, you have a sea without a shore. Everything is dead. But the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system does not explain the two basic things that are before us: (1) the universe that exists and its form, and (2) the mannishness of man.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
Modern man says, "No, we are just machines -- chemically determined or psychologically determined." But nobody consistently lives this way in his life. I would insist that here is a presupposition which intellectually, in the laboratory, would be cast out simply because it does not explain what is.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
If we do not begin with a personal Creator, eventually we are left (no matter how we string it out semantically) with the impersonal plus time plus chance. We must explain everything in the uniqueness of man, and we must understand all of the complexity of the universe on the basis of time plus chance.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
But modern man does in fact assume -- wittingly or unwittingly -- that the universe and man can be explained by the impersonal plus time plus chance. And in this case man and his aspirations stand in total alienation from what is. And that is precisely where many people today live -- in a generation of alienation: alienation in the ghettos, alienation in the university, alienation from parents, alienation on every side. Sometimes this takes the form of "dropping out," sometimes it takes the form of "joining the system" to get along as easily as possible and to get as much from the system as possible. Those who are only playing with these ideas and have not gotten down into the real guts of it forget that the basic alienation with which they are faced is a cosmic alienation. It is simply this: there is nobody there to respond to you. There is nobody home in the universe. There is no one and nothing to conform to who you are or what you hope. That is the dilemma.
Let me use an illustration I have used previously. Suppose, for example, that the room in which you are seated is the only universe there is. God could have made a universe just this big if he wished. Suppose in making the only universe there were a room made up of solid walls, but filled up to the ceiling with liquids: just liquids and solids and no free gases. Suppose then that fish were swimming in the universe. The fish would not be alienated from the universe because they can conform to the universe by their nature. But suppose if by chance, as the evolutionists see chance, the fish suddenly developed lungs. Would they be higher or lower? Obviously, they would be lower, because they would drown. They would have a cosmic alienation from the universe that surrounded them.
But man has aspirations; he has what I call his mannishness. He desires that love be more than being in bed with a woman, that moral motions be more than merely sociological something-or-others, that his significance lie in being more than one more cog in a vast machine. He wants a relationship to society other than that of a small machine being manipulated by a big machine. On the basis of modern thought, however, all of these would simply be an illusion. And since there are aspirations which separate man from his impersonal universe, man then faces his being caught in a terrible, cosmic, final alienation. He drowns in cosmic alienation, for there is nothing in the universe to fulfill him. That is the position of modern man.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
Beginning with rationalism, rationally you come only to pessimism. Man equals the machine. Man is dead. So those who followed Kierkegaard put forth the concept of an optimism in the area of nonrationality. Faith and optimism, they said, are always a leap. Neither has anything to do with reason.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
The difficulty with modern theology is that it is really no different from taking drugs. You may try drugs, you may try modern liberal theology. It makes no difference -- both are trips, separated from reason.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
Many people catch their presuppositions like some children catch childhood diseases. They have no idea where they come from. But that is not the way the thinker chooses his presuppositions. His presuppositions are selected on the basis of which presuppositions fit what is; that is, what presuppositions give solid answers concerning what is. It is only the Christian presuppositions which explain what is -- in regard to the universe and in regard to man.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
The Christ who claims to be God can be angry at the result of the Fall and the abnormal event which He now faces [at the tomb of Lazarus] without being angry at Himself.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
Society has reaped the rewards of its escape from reason. From modern science to modern, modern science, from man made in the image of God to man the machine, from freedom within form to determinism and autonomous freedom, from harmony with God to cosmic alienation, from reason to drugs and the new mysticism, from a biblically based theology to god words -- this is the flow of the stream of rationalistic history.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
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