How Should We Then Live Part 7: The Age of Non-Reason (I)

I've often thought about the opening segment of this video, Schaeffer standing on the beach and drawing circles in the sand. Each represents a unified theory, comprehensive system or worldview. Because (Schaeffer argues) these circles or systems are rooted in man they fail and another philosopher comes along, crosses out the circle(s) of his predecessors and develops his own – and so on.

Schaeffer of course posits there is a true circle, the Biblical worldview. He never challenges the notion that there is a circle, or that we as Christians should seek to construct one. It's assumed and it has to be, because if you're going to speak in terms of culture – the culture will need some kind of unified theory in which to operate, some kind of glue to bind it together.

Here's where Schaeffer and I fundamentally differ and it really comes out in this philosophically-oriented episode – I argue that we as Christians should reject the quest for the circle. The answer isn't a unified theory. The answer is Christ. Not Christ as the basis for a new circle or unified theory but Christ and His Kingdom – an entity or paradigm (indeed a Person) that erases all man-made temporally oriented and rooted circles. The worldview quest itself is flawed and wrong-headed. The quest is not only absent from New Testament concern, I would go further and argue the New Testament repudiates it, a point I will revisit later in this critical essay.

Schaeffer wants Christian paradigms to answer the world's problems. He wants to construct a Christian politic, a Christian aesthetic, a Christian economic system and social order. The problem is there are no Christian 'solutions' to these problems. These problems are born of the Fall. The solution is Christ – the Christ who posits an alternate eternal Kingdom and as Judge will destroy this fallen sin-cursed world and all of its works. To posit a pre-Parousia solution is to suggest answers may be found in this age as it is – apart from the Kingdom of Heaven – a very humanistic outlook to be sure. As I've repeatedly argued elsewhere the Bible defines a Christian as one who is in union with Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit is reconciled with God, being sanctified and on a path to glorification. How then can these categories be applied to a culture? Since they cannot it is only be redefining the terms and the very concept of Christian that such an application can be made. If a new definition of gospel and completely extra-Biblical conception of Christian isn't a confusion of the Church's identity, if it isn't another gospel (as per Galatians 1), then I don't know what is.

The answer to the world's problems is not to fabricate some pseudo-Christian contrived 'circle', unified theory or worldview. That's no answer and in the end will fix nothing. At best it can create an empty shell, a facade or form lacking substance. The problem is people need to repent and believe in Christ. On the one hand we could say that Christians living in the Spirit don't need such systems anyway as they will not be in contests of power, fighting over mine and thine. However this is purely hypothetical as the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that the course of this age is one of increased wickedness and apostasy and the Church will always be a minority – even a remnant within a larger framework of apostasy. From a hypothetical Christian majority position, the question is moot. And from an actual reading and application of the New Testament (and its revealed realities for the course of this age) – the question is moot.

The ethos of Postmillennialism which has crept into all the mainstream eschatological schools and millennial factions is a pernicious fiction. Dominionism which is at the core of that ethos is a heretical lie, both expressions being rooted in a low-view of the Fall, of man's depravity and they rely on a de-covenantalised understanding of the Kingdom – one that confuses Church and world, one that confuses Christ's Reign as Risen King, Lord of Hosts and Judge and that of His Holy Realm – The New Covenant Temple-Kingdom, the Church and Bride of Christ over which He is head. Only at the eschaton will these be reconciled (1 Cor 15).

Schaeffer laments the fact that man has seemingly given up the quest for a circle – for a unified theory and has embraced what he calls non-reason. I lament the unbelief that is in the world but in terms of philosophy I do not lament this development. Indeed the prophets of Counter-Enlightenment and Scepticism are in fact strange allies – helping us in the apologetic enterprise to destroy man-made systems. We can destroy them utilising the Sword of the Spirit to be sure as well we ought. But as agents of the New Jerusalem we can even use the tools of Athens – turning them in on themselves, aiding them in their systemic suicide as it were. We don't use the tokens of Athens in a positive sense to help us build but we turn them loose as it were and let the dogs and wolves tear each other apart.

The Counter-Enlightenment, a reiteration of Medieval Scholasticism's fragmentation is in some respects not a counter-move but the logical consequence of applied epistemology. Man can build philosophical castles but in the end they're paper castles built on sand. And given time the philosophers figure this out. Aristotelian Thomism degenerates into Nominalism and Pyrrhonist Renaissance Scepticism and the Enlightenment degenerates into Counter-Enlightenment and eventually into Solipsistic Idealism on the one hand and Materialism and Positivism on the other. And the process goes on and will repeat again.

But Schaeffer is wrong if he thinks there's no circle in today's world. In the 20^th century the circle was re-drawn and while the Sartre's of the world reveled in an absence of a 'circle' and searched for meaning in acts of the will – the only hope of individual existence or meaning – the mainstream of society created a new circle with new positivist or materialist rules. Certain questions were outlawed and metaphysics were in principle rejected – even though their construction, a conjured, ad hoc, deformed and frankly miniscule circle cannot exist without them.

Rousseau is undoubtedly a pivotal figure and one that is claimed by multiple camps. He (like Kant) is reckoned both an Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment figure – depending on who is doing the analysis. And again while for some (like the Analytical School) the Counter-Enlightenment represents a turn to anti-realism and the subjective, others (like the Continental School) would posit that the Counter-Enlightenment is not 'counter' at all but a Copernican Revolution, the logical outworking of the former – if anything an attempt to rescue the Enlightenment from the epistemological crisis born of the Rationalist-Empiricist debate and the scepticism which results from it. Schaeffer's treatment of Rousseau is therefore narrow and self-serving.

In terms of political philosophy, Rousseau is not nearly as distant from the American Founders as Schaeffer would pretend – especially when one focuses on the Jeffersonian camp. There are echoes of Rousseau in Jefferson's language in the Declaration, in their related concepts of General Will and General Welfare, and there are parallels between Rousseau's primitivism and Jefferson's rural agrarianism and hostility to urban civilisation.

Can Rousseau's ideas fall prey to tyranny? Indeed, radical non-representative democracy is always subject to mob rule or even the so-called tyranny of the 51% - which is why many argue for republicanism and the need for an overarching authoritative or custodial structure to any democratic system – or even a capitalist economic order which easily falls prey to utilitarian moral judgments. In the American context it was figures like Hamilton, Adams and Washington who stood for federalised-republican ideals in opposition to Jefferson the radical democrat. These issues, these tensions which also appear in Rousseau and how his ideas played out in the phases of the French Revolution are also at the heart of the Federalist debates and the power of the Supreme Court. It's a common and complicated theme and struggle throughout post-Enlightenment history. Schaeffer would have his audience accept his commentary prima facie but even the casual student of these issues knows that it's not that simple.

Schaeffer is not wholly wrong in his analysis of Rousseau but as usual his arguments are dubiously framed as he seeks to avoid uncomfortable parallels. He oversimplifies and draws connections between pessimism and tyranny – ignoring the fact that tyranny can also come from certainty. And tyranny does not always lead to nihilism. There also many cases of non sequitir such as his Gauguin analogy. Rousseau was claimed by both the figures in the original French Revolution and in the Reign of Terror. Both factions applied his ideas and his ideas were at work among the Jeffersonians in the Americas – and yet who would equate Jefferson with Robespierre?

The simplest way to put it is that Rousseau was complicated and left a complicated legacy. It would be a mistake to project on him all the views and actions that others took in his name. It's a valid point of discussion and exploration but it requires some restraint and caution. The connections and analogies made by historians often contain some truth but it's never simple. To equate Calvin with Capitalism, the Reformation with Enlightenment secularism, Marx and Stalin – there's more than a hint of truth in those analogies but generalisation and dogmatism should probably be avoided.

Schaeffer is right to point out that humanism is flawed in thinking that man is good by nature – indeed but can he really ignore the fact that Locke and others thought the same and the American Founders (indeed much of the democratic and capitalist nature of the American system is predicated on the idea) also believed in similar Enlightenment notions? And yet how then would he account for the differences in his narrative?

I did applaud his comments on nature being 'abnormal'. It was another one of those moments where the shift in thought is pronounced as today's Evangelicals and Dominionists continue to rapidly abandon the idea that anything is truly wrong with creation as it now stands. The Fall affects man (and maybe or maybe not his intellect) but the creation is 'good' they argue. Indeed it was created so but then it fell and the very fabric of the created order has been affected by this and subjected to vanity-futility, corruption and death. They so willfully miss that in Genesis 9 the command is to multiply and replenish the earth. The covenantal call to subdue it has been removed and now instead of dominion, man encounters weeds, sweat and the animals will fear and dread him. The call to subdue, to dominion, the context of an Edenic world has been removed and can only be restored by the Second Coming of Christ when this world order is brought to an end and is replaced by the New Eden – the Holy Kingdom of Heaven. Any attempt to reconstitute Eden prior to the consummate manifestation of Christ's Kingdom results in a Babel at best – a bride turned whore at worst.

Evangelicals in the 1970's still used to think that way about creation and thus there were still vestiges of antithesis and what is today derided as nature-grace dualism. Forty years later these Biblically rooted tensions and realities have been largely eradicated – and yet not to the satisfaction of the radicals who continue to aggressively push and market their Monist structures and understandings of creation and The Kingdom.

Schaeffer is certainly correct to argue that the later philosophers – he focuses on Continental thinkers like Kant, Hegel and the existentialist Kierkegaard created unlivable systems. I appreciate his point but it's a broad sweep given their differences and I find it odd as these are not the philosophers (apart from maybe Hegel) that view man as mechanism, a point Schaeffer is determined to labour. I think Hegel would say man is caught up in a machine-like historical process, but I don't think either Kant or Kierkegaard belong to a mechanist camp – that tendency (apart from Descartes) is more a development of the Empiricist side of the spectrum coming to its fruition in the Anglo-American analytic schools and their concepts of materialism and physicalist monism (as opposed to substance dualism). Philosophical mechanism is an epistemological and metaphysical reiteration of Nominalism as opposed to the say the Absolute Idealism of Hegel – not to mention the various spin-off philosophies born of Hegel. In many respects the philosophers and systems Schaeffer wants to attack in this episode are anti-mechanistic even while mechanist thinking dominates much of society. You can't draw simple lines. It's too complicated for that and frankly society and culture are often grossly inconsistent in applying and living out the ideas and philosophies which shape them.

Both Nazism and Marxism were fueled by Idealist constructs and yet both systems behaved as cold materialists in their wanton disregard of human life. In both of their cases a kind of ethic born of historicism – process, destiny and inevitability resulted in a cold and callous treatment of human beings that resisted them or didn't fit their narrative. Marxism might be technically materialist but it has always been an Idealist construct with its own messianism, epistemology and eschatology.

This is in many respects different from the kind of calls for mass euthanasia or population control made by materialists who root their ethics not in a specific or guiding narrative but in the cold mathematics of science and utilitarianism. Of course for those on the ground, living under such systems the terrible end result is the same – but on an intellectual level we should understand their ideas flow from different sources. That said, there is in all of philosophy and politics a circularity at work – all these systems and patterns go through a process and are eventually forced onto the same deeply furrowed pathways that lead to the same dark places. Eventually they succumb to collapse and dissolution. The so-called 'Christian' expressions of philosophy and politics are (since they're not of the Spirit) subject to these same processes and in the end follow the same dark paths.

Returning to the question of mechanism, while Hegel's historicism might be said to have something of a mechanistic process this teleological view is a far cry from viewing man as mechanism or even the radical individualism at work in something like Existentialism.

Continue reading Part Seven (II)