I haven’t read very much by Francis Schaeffer, so I was glad to come across this handsome reprint by Crossway, a publisher who continues to impress with the aesthetic and editorial quality of their books. And I came across it while browsing in a local library in Southwest Florida – something that I feel quite sure would never happen in Canada.
The book is short, moving along at a fine clip. And yet it is anything but simplistic. What it is is a readable popular-level work of Christian philosophy responding to the particular shape and blind spots of contemporary culture circa 1970. But despite the fifty-five years that have elapsed since its publishing, the insights are certainly still relevant.
I was impressed with Schaeffer’s use of simple language to cut through academic jargon and get at the nub of the issue. You can tell he cares little about academic respectability and a lot about the lives of regular people. He rightly identifies two areas of catastrophic error in the modern mind: metaphysics and epistemology. This comes back to the title of the book: He Is There (Metaphysics) and He Is Not Silent (Epistemology).
An alternative title might have been: “A Christian Response to Contemporary Metaphysical and Epistemological Thought.” And then we would never have heard of it because it would have been read by exactly seven people. So Schaeffer had a gift for boiling things down to their essentials. This comes across strongly in this brisk and fast-paced book, which leaves the reader with the impression that it might have been written in a week-end. The style of writing is conversational, and not especially eloquent. It’s a workmanlike prose that gets the job done.
The drawback of Schaeffer’s style is that he deals very briefly with those he disagrees with. He boils down their view to some essential points and then explains why he disagrees. This is actually quite helpful for the layman who is not and cannot be familiar with the finer points of, let’s say, logical positivism, but I am sure it would be objected to by a logical positivist, who might rightly point out that Schaeffer glossed over many important nuances. Be that as it may, for a work this brief, it manages to cover a lot of terrain in contemporary philosophy.
Schaeffer’s driving concern seems to be twofold: To speak to the seeker who is dismayed and confused by the spiritually devastating consequences of modern philosophical materialism; and to build up the believer in holding fast to a Biblical view of metaphysics and epistemology which is so out of step with the late 20th-century mind. When this is kept in mind, the pace and style of the book makes a lot of sense.
It is a work of evangelistic and pastoral philosophy. It’s central message is something like: “The world now says that ‘the material world is all there is and that the best we can say about God is that God-language is comforting to the mind’, but in reality, despite this modern hubris, there really is a God Who Is There. He is not just a projection of religious hopes, not just the composite picture of responses to religious experiences, but an eternal, self-existent, Triune Being who can and does reach down into the universe he made at His pleasure. And despite the claim that we can never truly know anything with certainty, the truth is that God Is Not Silent — He has chosen to reveal himself using human language. That revelation, it is true, cannot lead to exhaustive knowledge, but it is true revelation that does lead to true knowledge of God. Modern man is wrong. There *is* a God. He is There and He is Not Silent.”
While some of the references in Schaeffer’s book may be a bit dated, the central argument is fresh and relevant. It is a message that not only remains relevant, but may in fact receive a warmer response now than at any point since its original publication in 1972. I say this because of the massive shifts roiling the Western world in recent years. In God’s providence, people are open to reconsidering these most fundamental questions in a way they were not before. Call it the vibe-shift or the ‘Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God’ as Justin Brierley does, it is a real phenomenon.
I for one hope that this short and readable treatment finds its way into many more hands.
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