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The Church Before the Watching World - A Practical Ecclesiology

Summary
"Don't think. Just let your emotions go and experience Jesus." -- "That's fine for you, but my God isn't like that." -- "The Bible has errors in it, but God can still speak to us in it." -- "I know they're opposites, but they can both be true." -- "Don't try and understand it, you just have to have faith."

Do any of these phrases sound familiar? This is what is being taught in large sections of the church today. They may use different words, but the meaning is the same. In The Church Before the Watching World Schaeffer explains where this thinking came from, how it crept into the church and what it's consequences are for "true truth" and our actions. If you're wondering why the church just doesn't seem to make sense today or refuse to blindly "experience God" without your mind, this is the book for you.

Commercial Availability of Work
The Church Before the Watching World (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

It is interesting, but not surprising, that from the time theology became naturalistic, it has tended simply to follow the curve of secular naturalism. It really says nothing different from the surrounding consensus; whatever the surrounding nontheological consensus is, theological liberalism has conformed to it. If we were to draw a graph giving the curve of the shifting secular naturalistic consensus in red ink and then the teaching of liberal theology in green ink, we would find almost identical curves, with the theological liberalism simply following a few years later and using religious terms instead of secular ones. Liberal theology uses different terminology, and yet says the same thing just a short time later. It has a naturalistic perspective that is totally opposite from the perspective of historic Christianity and the Bible.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, Ch. 1)


Basically, the biblical perspective is this. First, there is an infinite-personal God who exists and who has created the external universe, not as an extension of His own essence, but out of nothing. Something of the nature of this created universe can be found out by reason because that is the way the infinite-personal God has created it. The universe is neither chaotic nor random, but orderly. Cause and effect is real, but this cause and effect is not in a closed system, but rather in an open system -- or, to say it in a different way, it is a cause-and-effect system in a limited time span. Though this universe has an objective existence apart from God, it does not operate solely on its own; it is not autonomous. God is not a slave to the cause-and-effect world He has created, but is able to act into the cause-and-effect flow of history.

Second, God has made man in His own image, and this means, among other things, that man too can act into the cause-and-effect flow of history. That is, man cannot be reduced to only a part of the machine; he is not an automaton.

Third, not only can God act into the world, but He is not silent; He has spoken to men in the historic, space-time situation. The Bible and Christ in His office of prophet have given a propositional, verbalized communication to men that is true about God, true about history, and true about the cosmos. This should not take us by surprise, for if God has made man in His own image and has made us so that we can verbalize facts propositionally to each other on a horizontal level of communication, then it is natural that the infinite God who is personal would also communicate vertically to man in the same way. Of course, we must be careful to make a distinction here. Although God has not given us exhaustive knowledge (only He is infinite), He has given us true knowledge (what I have often called true truth)-- true knowledge about Himself, about history, and about the cosmos.

Fourth, the universe as it is now is not normal; that is, it is not now as it was when it was first created. Likewise, man is no longer as he was when first created. Therefore, from Godís side there is the possibility of a qualitative solution for man as he is now and for man's cruelty, without man ceasing to be man.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, Ch. 1)


For after the failure of rationalism [to find meaning and significance], if rationality was maintained there were two possibilities. The first was to become nihilistic. That is, on the basis of reason, they could have concluded that all is blackness and then given up hope. Their other rational alternative was to conclude that rationalism was wrong, that men -- being finite -- cannot gather enough particulars to make up the universals. That in fact, men need knowledge outside of themselves if they are ever to find a satisfactory answer to life. In other words, it would have been reasonable to accept the possibility of revelation or at least the necessity for revelation. But, of course, to do this they would have had to give up their presupposition of rationalism. The point is that they could have taken either of these alternatives and yet have remained men of reason.

It must have been a hard moment for them; they had to choose between these two alternatives if they were going to keep their rationality. Instead, they did something new. They did what previously would have been unthinkable to educated men: they split the field of knowledge. They held on to their rationalism by letting go of the concept of a unified field of knowledge. NonChristian philosophers had formerly thought that they would be able to come up with a unity on the basis of reason, but they abandoned this hope.

Rather, they now accepted that on the basis of reason men will always come to pessimism -- man is a machine and meaningless. Therefore, they developed a concept of nonreason, an attempt of man to achieve meaning and significance outside the framework of rationality. For them, everything which makes human life as human life worth living falls in the area of nonreason, what I call in my other books the upper story.

It is crucial that we understand the situation here. The areas of reason and nonreason are held to be completely apart. Picture the line between reason and nonreason as a solid concrete wall with barbed wire in the middle charged with 10,000 volts of electricity. Then you can begin to understand how there can be no interchange between the lower story with reason which leads to despair and the upper story of hope without reason. Everything that is worthwhile for human life ó meaning, values, love, etc. -- Is in the area of nonreason. In what we may now call the new humanism, we have a semantic mysticism with no facts.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, Ch. 1)

Definitions given by Schaeffer:

rationalism: man can understand the universe by beginning from himself without any recourse to outside knowledge, specifically outside knowledge or revelation from God.

rationality: reason is valid. The first axiom in the classical concept of rational methodology is that A is A and A is not non-A. That is, if a proposition is true, then its opposite is not true.


Because this type of thought [rationalism coupled with mysticism] has severed the meaning of life from any connection to reason, the secular or religious existentialist is left with no categories of truth, and no categories of right and wrong. Down in the lower story, reason tells him that he is only a machine, that he may be expressed in a mathematical formula. Upstairs in the upper story of nonreason, he has become something of a Greek shade unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, Ch. 1)


Words like Jesus are separated [by some people] from all reason and have no real base. So what is the word Jesus? A contentless banner which men take and say, in effect, "Follow me on the basis of the motivational force of the word Jesus."
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, Ch. 1)


When the young people say to us, "I hate god words," if we are to be Christians we must say, "I hate god words too." For such god words are separated from all verification and falsification; they can be made to mean anything. The new theologians seem to be saying something more than secular thinkers are saying because they use such religious words. But they are really saying the same things with a different set of linguistic symbols. There is many a liberal theologian today who uses the word God to equal no god -- to give optimism in what is to him a totally pessimistic predicament, using words only as psychological tools to give psychological help or to aid in sociological manipulation.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, Ch. 1)

Schaeffer defines "god words" as "contentless-connotation religious words" or religious language used vaguely and without a meaning based in scripture and reason.


Unless we see the new liberalism as a whole and reject it as a whole, we will, to the extent that we are tolerant of it, be confused in our thinking, involved in the general intellectual irrationalism of our day and compromising in our actions.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, Ch. 1)


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