DEATH IN THE CITY

Editor Posted in Book Reviews，
26 October 2006
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Author: Francis Schaeffer


Publication details: Crossway Books, Illinois, 2002


Death in the City was first published in 1969, at a time when America was undergoing great social and religious upheavals. In the thick of the countercultural movement away from being a nation with Christian underpinnings to being a postmodern, post-Christian world, America became the setting for Francis Schaeffer’s city pervaded by the dust of death and deathliness (Marcel Proust). Like the Jeremiah and Paul that he refers to, Schaeffer saw his role in this third book to be prophetic, as he delivered the call to remorse and repentance to a people who, having known God in the past, had left the ancient pathways. Decades on, Death in the City is a sombre and disturbing reminder that God’s warnings of judgment are not empty threats. In the wake of 9/11, Schaeffer’s book continues to speak with a sharpness to the times that we live in. The 21st century postmodern man who has traded his biblical and spiritual orientation of life, with the Judeo-Christian God at the centre of everything, for one that is humanistic and atheistic, will discover that the shroud of death and deathliness that covers life under the sun will continue to plague and darken mankind increasingly.

While Schaeffer spoke primarily to an American and European audience, today we find that the world has become so global that what afflicts the West has real implications and painful ramifications everywhere else. It is no longer useful to just claim that postmodernity is an American or European problem; the fact is, we all live in a strange, postmodern situation, wherever we may be domiciled. While Asia may not be typically called post-Christian since it was never really Christian in the first place, it is still the case that we live in plural societies that embrace such core values as religious relativism and tolerance, and we also often inhabit parallel worlds that the West is beginning to find characterizes its society today. If we are not post-Christian, we are certainly postmodern and pluralistic. If that is so, then the shroud of death is likewise upon our cities, and our lives. Schaeffer’s choice of Jeremiah, Lamentations and Romans is fitting: he speaks to both the “Jew” as to the “Gentile”, to the Christian “people of God” and to the rest of the world. Thus his message is to all humans, as indeed is God’s message.

What exactly is the “death” that Schaeffer speaks of? Foundational to his thinking is that death—spiritual and moral—comes to a city or a society because it does not live under the “philosophical and ethical foundation and practice …[of the] biblical view of God and man” (Udo Middelmann, Introduction). The point is that the city of man becomes simply an empty edifice once the prerequisite of the existence of the true God is removed. The result is that the denizens are condemned to fragmentation, lostness, disorientation and a terrible sense of unhomeliness (unheimlich) within the city walls. Schaeffer parallels the society of Jeremiah and Paul’s time with contemporary culture to demonstrate the relationship between the intellectual and spiritual orientation of a society and its well-being or decline. The day of Jeremiah’s lament, in other words, is today.

Demonstrated in the lives of many today are the chaos, confusion, fragmentations and disorientations that accompany the giving away of orthodox truth. The culture and society in revolt against the truth of God suffers from its being adrift on a terrible sea of motion and movement, where definitions and values change with every changing wave. If the truth of God is not in the picture, then the dust of death is upon everything: there is “death in the city unless there is a turning to that truth.” When God’s truth or his word is mistreated and diminished, then man lives a “plastic” life, where externals are all that he has left because he no longer has a firm or rational basis for life. He lives by rote or memory of the reality that no longer has real meaning for him. He is glibly optimistic that things will improve tomorrow in spite of evidence to the contrary. Such hypocrisy, in society or within the church, occurs when man stops speaking the true truth of God. Depravity and perversity are part of the landscape of moral ugliness that afflicts the city under death. In Jeremiah’s time, the people of the city were so blinded that they could not see their own decline. In place of the truth of God which the true prophet spoke, the falsehood of humanistic optimism that the false prophet Hananiah spoke became the new measure for these blinded children of God.

What is the concerned Christian to do in the tide of resistance to the “true Truth” of God? Jeremiah did not live to see change in his lifetime. He had to be contented with existential faith, or moment-by-moment faith as he lived and prophesied one day at a time. But he was faithful to his role simply as the prophet of Judah’s doom. But in this, Jeremiah functioned exactly as did Paul in Romans. Schaeffer knits these two bible heroes together because they both continued to proclaim the bad news to man. They knew that there had to be the message of judgment before the good news could make sense to mankind: “there is a time, and ours is such a time, when a negative message is needed before anything positive can begin”. It takes a long time for modern man to understand the negative because his memory of the events of the Fall has been clouded over, eclipsed by layers of optimistic humanistic lies that deny the basic message of sin and human depravity. Like Jeremiah and Paul, the concerned Christian is to continue to speak the ageless message consistently and faithfully.

What the concerned Christian must not do (which we may already have) is to defect, for in defection is also destruction. Abdication of role and responsibility does not lead to a lasting solution or resolution of the problem of man. Contemporary Christians who refuse to grapple with God’s truth themselves, and who resort to isolating themselves in an indulgent and self-serving feel-good bubble of spiritualised experiences will find themselves described by God as defectors who participate in the world’s destruction. In Paul’s Romans, there is clearly no room for anti-intellectualism in the Christian faith (Rom. 12: 1-2; cf. 1: 16). God is interested in our minds as in our hearts, since his gospel very clearly restores the whole man, including his God-made mind. Knowing firsthand the truth of God’s Word is essential and crucial to our Christian compassion because it helps us to see that the man outside of the kingdom is “the man without the Bible.” Such a man is lost and hopeless, without moorings or anchor, and is considered rebellious and under judgment by God. The Christian must know this word of truth if he is to understand and nurture his own compassion for the “lostness of the lost.” The truly concerned Christian does not simply give mental assent to Christian “philosophy” or statements of belief. Faith is putting into practice the convictions of the mind and heart. Anything else, Schaeffer contends, is unfaith, a kind of disbelief that is damning and terrible in its sinful indifference. Schaeffer is fond of this word, as doubtless it describes the state of many Christians who believe and yet are not convicted by their beliefs to practise them. 

Schaeffer concludes his book by drawing on another image he likes, that of the Universe and Two Chairs. The cosmos is viewed through two perspectives: the materialist’s chair and the Christian view which takes in both the material world and the supernatural world (or chair of belief). Death in the City challenges us to be more consciously aware that the foundational propositions of faith which we hold have meaning and consequence. There is indeed a very real consequence to ideas. Thus true Christian living is a matter of sitting in the chair of belief moment by moment, day by day, in an existentially faithful working out of the things we believe to be the “true Truth” of God. “True spirituality,” Schaeffer maintains, “is acting at the given moment upon the doctrines which one as a Christian says he believes.” In this way, a city under judgment might repent and return to the ancient pathways that bring life and healing. In the midst of the dust of death, therefore, it is this convinced Christian who will bring repentance, reformation and revival back into the city.                                      

                  

         

             

      

   

 

FULLY PERSUADED: FRANCIS SCHAEFFER’S TRUE SPIRITUALITY

Editor Posted in Book Reviews，
05 October 2006
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Publication details: Tyndale House Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois, 1971

 

“The inward area is the first place of loss of true Christian life, of true spirituality, and the outward sinful act is the result. If we can only get hold of this — that the internal is the basic, the external is always merely the result — it will be a tremendous starting place.”

 

True Spirituality introduced me to Francis Schaeffer’s writings. Perhaps he is better known for some other titles, but it was True Spirituality that made me understand how important and crucial having a proper theological framework and mindset was to my life. I read it first as a struggling undergraduate looking for a way to put my afflicted Christian understanding at the centre of debate against so many contesting philosophies that confronted me then. I was, at the time, very deeply affected by existentialism, and very influenced by the Absurdists. My reading took in Camus, Kafka, Ionesco and Sam Beckett, all of whom poignantly and starkly expressed the agonized human condition. I was also dabbling into bits of Nietzsche, although I threw in pinches of Kierkegaard, too for good measure. By my third year at varsity, the Christian perspective I had gained had all but receded to a distant and frankly unrecognizable shore. I found myself a paganized Christian, struggling again with the problem of reality—was God truly there, because the star-clustered universe seemed exceedingly cold and silent in the dark night, and decidedly closed to the questions of a lone human dot?   

If it was by chance, then I chanced upon True Spirituality, the first Christian book I had seen which daringly and boldly proposed the philosophical and intellectual truthfulness of the gospel. Schaeffer’s mental vigour surprised me—what he said seemed as insistently real and loud as the depressing literature I had consumed so voraciously. It vied for my attention and demanded thinking space as much as Camus’ L’Etranger or Kafka’s Metamorphosis did. True Spirituality talked about a Christian framework from which to think about life, and from which to begin the application of biblical instructions and values. For me, it gave a clarifying coherence to life by reminding me of the veracity and viability of the things I had already learned from Scripture. Strangely perhaps, the testimony of a man whose mind had been made captive to the thought of Christ provided me with the needed emotional assurance of the versatility and resilience of the Christian faith. It made me feel that I did not have to give in to despair, that perhaps in the tragedy of the existentialist’s world, and the absurdity of the human condition, God did purposefully intervene and insist on the salvation of foolish creatures like me.

Schaeffer’s Christian understanding in True Spirituality is resilient, and stubborn, and strong as it is in all his writings. I like his unapologetic evangelicalism, forceful and convicted, committed to the message of the gospel. He says that he too had to reconsider the basis of his faith, that he too had to return to the question or problem of reality. Did God make a difference to his life? Returning to a primitive agnosticism, Schaeffer reviewed and rethought his reasons for being a Christian, and rediscovered at the end of that journey that “Christianity is true.”  When I re-read True Spirituality, I was struck by its essential simplicity. Schaeffer traces his journey from agnosticism back to faith by reviewing the basis and basics of his Christian faith: salvation, sin, justification, sanctification (Section 1) … He says nothing that a Christian does not know. Yet his impact on my mind was what I would call healing wholeness. The reason is that Schaeffer sees the world not as fragments, but as a whole, coherent, united, integrated, and he anchors that world in one reference point alone: that the infinite-personal God does exist, and has spoken and reached out to man. That is the central reality from which all truth proceeds. True spirituality, he believes, covers all reality: “Christianity is not just a series of truths but Truth — Truth about all of reality” (A Christian Manifesto). At the centre of the universe, Schaeffer sees clearly that Christ is the central and unmoving point that holds all things together. That is his worldview.

Having the Christian perspective laid out in bare terms and so coherently did something for me. It demonstrated that the Christian faith is intellectually vigorous, that it is able to provide a rational (and supra-rational) understanding of life under the sun in a way that did not lead to despair. The existential angst and the Absurdist’s portrayal of the ridiculousness of life meant not that man realized the truth that he was alone in a hostile and unfriendly universe. Rather, such pain-riddled thought arose because humans started only with themselves and the natural world to build a framework to the questions of meaning, purpose and significance of being human. Take away the God of the Bible, Schaeffer says, and you end up with meaninglessness, dishonesty and inhumanity. Remove yourself from the source of life, and naturally, you begin to wither and die. True Spirituality provides another framework, one that nurtures because it has for its source the Christ who holds the universe in place.

Schaeffer sees the interrelatedness of all things in human life and culture stemming from this great truth of Christ. No aspect of life or experience falls outside of the purview of what Christ is and what he has done. No deed, no man, and no culture, stands outside the shadow of the looming cross. My experience of the silence of the closed universe, in which one could cry and despair, and God did not answer, was answered in Schaeffer’s determined rebuttal that God is there and he is not silent. All that was needed was for me to understand that God was there whether or not I realized it. In fact, whether or not I believed it. There was no Deus Absconditus here; rather, if anyone had failed to show up, it was the person on other side of the equation, meaning myself. For this reason, the chapter on “The Supernatural Universe” was probably the most affecting one for me because my struggle was with the inclusion (exclusion?) of supernatural reality in the universe. My reality, in truth, did get “covered by the barnacles of naturalistic thought.” But being a biblical Christian, Schaeffer contends, means living in the supernatural now. If we live as though the supernatural were not there, we would be living in the region called unfaith. In fact, “ ‘Unfaith’ is the Christian not living in the light of the supernatural now.” The two halves of reality, the natural and the supernatural, form the total reality of the Bible-believing Christian.

I cannot truly say that just one reading of a book does the job completely. True Spirituality gave me a chance to return to life under the canopy of God’s kindness. It provided a thorough framework, a united and coherent and intellectually convicting and sound worldview, from which to consider the rest of reality and life. It was refreshing and bracing, and probably saved me from sliding into total unbelief. Section 2 of the book talks about the practical healing of the soul in the application of doctrine and belief covered in Section1. The truth is that healing took a long time for me. I read and re-read True Spirituality several times over something like ten years, and each time, the read was sustaining and restoring to the mind and spirit. This says a great deal about the renewing of the mind leading towards the transformation of the heart. When I became intellectually convinced and convicted of the Truth, I found myself healed. I cannot remember when exactly the night sky stopped being cold and silent, but I realized eventually that the questions I had thrown to the air had been caught by Someone, and kept by Someone till he could answer me in the fullness of his time. It was not by chance that I chanced upon Schaeffer’s book. I can see now that it was placed there by a judicious hand to lead me to the “reality of true spirituality.”