Francis Schaeffer, Thieme and I Ching

I'm an evangelical intellectual but not a fundamentalist. Being an intellectual doesn't mean I think I'm so smart. (I know better than to think that because I read mostly the truly brilliant.) It simply means that I'm continuously learning from intellectuals like Peter Kreeft, N.T. Wright, Edward Feser, Mortimer Adler, Alistair McGrath, C. S. Lewis, Chesterton, Aquinas, Augustine, Ravi Zacharia, Tom Wolfe and Walker Percy, and in comparison to these I pale. I am smart enough to question and look at issues from many angles when I don't understand, which is often. I believe asking questions leads to answers. (And just because I admire those guys and learn from them doesn't mean I agree with everything they believe. I examine them, too.)

Biographical background about the religio-cultural atmosphere of my formative years (fundamentalist), but not in words like that, which would be boring...

Beginning with my dad because he will serve, usually, as a negative illustration: Dad was ga-ga over Francis Schaeffer who was a new phenomenom back then(1960s-80s). I didn't know what to do with Francis Schaeffer books at the time. I certainly couldn't really read them. My dad, an inconsistent romantic, yet cynical fundamentalist academician gave all Schaeffer's books to each of his four children like they were great gifts. And Schaeffer's high-pitched voice from the tapes Dad would play at family Bible studies is an indelible memory for me. But it was a good time for family rest. (My mom hardly ever rested except at Bible studies, because she was trying to be like the Proverbs 31 "virtuous woman," sans servants like that wealthy Hebrew. Dad read Proverbs 31 at Mom's memorial service.)

Anyways, Schaeffer and Co. were the Protestant evangelical intellectual, culture dabblers who made forays into culture via the L'Abri seekers and hippies who plied Schaeffer, Rookmaker, Os Guinness...with questions in the Swiss chalet. Schaeffer was and is an intellectual giant in the evangelical community simply because they haven't many to brag about. Even Chuck Colson in his new worldviews book, "The Good Life", cites great early Catholic thinkers for his basic arguments about reality, not Protestant thinkers. After all, Christians were mostly Catholics before the Protestant reformation. (Martin Luther remained Catholic.) Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are foundational to a Judeo-Christian worldview based on moral absolutes, with Thomas Aquinas explicating. Why haven't we had many Protestant intellectual giants like C. S. Lewis and Ravi Zacharias? (Though Zacharias is in the Reformed camp and staunchly evangelical, some debate whether Lewis is an evangelical but since most evangelicals claim him, he's included.) That's for another blog posting though the short answer is that I believe many Protestants have been anti-intellectual (so naturally Schaeffer made a big splash in the evangelical community).

Anyways, although I got more out of Os Guinness than Schaeffer and was awakened to art through Rookmaker while stumbling over Schaeffer's philosophical jargon...and although I think C. S. Lewis (borderline evangelical), Peter Kreeft, Edward Feser, N. T. Wright, Alistair McGrath--all Catholic intellectual Christians are deeper thinkers and better writers, I still think Schaeffer and his group woke up the evangelical community to the culture. And I was impressed by certain sermons like "Ash-Heap Lives" (which was one you could totally understand)about the dangers of our consummerist society.

But while Schaeffer thought most hippies were sincere seekers, another guy Dad had us listen to on tapes, R.B. Thieme, thought hippies should be punched out (if he could have gotten away with it)--or at least kicked out of church: In one R.B. Thieme sermon my dad played for us, all long-haired guys were actually escorted from the service as unAmerican. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't but it occurred to me this was unchristian. Wikipedia quoting Thieme: "1. No believer can attain spiritual maturity and become an invisible hero or glorify God apart from postsalvation epistemological rehabilitation." (hmmm-mm...somebody should have reminded him to "eschew obfuscation and espouse elucidation"--he could have related to the pretentiousness of those words!)(back to Thieme)"a. This means that no believer can read the Bible and attain spiritual maturity. The Bible is our textbook, but the gift of pastor teacher is designed to communicate the specifics of the mystery doctrine that cause spiritual growth. Doctrine must be learned under authority, and that authority is vested in the spiritual gift of pastor teacher, b. No believer can read the Bible daily for himself and discover and learn the mystery doctrine for the Church Age, and understand the mechanics of the protocol plan of God. It must be taught through authority. Authority is always the key to teaching..." (On top of all that authority stuff and being a narcissistic bigot, Thieme was not even pro-life on the abortion issue because he knew that the soul entered the body at the moment of birth.)

Nonetheless, anyone labeled a Protestant fundamentalist or evangelical was embraced in our home. Dad, however, wasn't necessarily a bigot and he did try to think for himself occasionlly; but he didn't question a bigot if he was a fundamentalist or an evangelical. For instance, Dad thought David Duke was probably getting unfair press regarding his racist views just because he was conservative and that Bob Jones University with it's segregationalist policies is just fine. Also, I remember going door to door helping him campaign for Nixon, seeing Nixon and Agnew close up on at beach rally in California, and look where Nixon got us.

Schaeffer was cool to me compared to R. B. Thieme but Schaeffer and Co. was still way over my head at the time I was encouraged to read them, in junior high and high school. When I actually started taking religion and philosophy courses in college, I realized Schaeffer could have expressed the same content with some clarity. I realized I was not the dense one. Too bad Schaeffer and Company's answers were usually obfuscated by abstract philosophical jargon, because he made some accurate cultural observations. But Schaeffer was such a hero to my dad that I used to think L'Abri was Mecca and wondered if I should become a hippie seeker just so I could hang out there and ask questions (plus the Alps would be great to climb). Schaeffer did broaden the narrow evangelical horizon, even if he dictated how to think about more subjective areas, like art. (Many evangelicals, just like today, hadn't evolved into thinking for themselves, but at least Schaeffer permitted them to know something about the culture.) Schaeffer said, "brains are good. You can ask questions. Art is good except modern art, which is very, very bad indeed. Jesus was the real flesh-and-blood incarnated God, not some mystical religious figure; God existed and communicated ("He is there and He is not Silent" --a title of one of his books); religion is not 'an upper story experience'--Schaeffer's words so you can see the difference, (Bible stories really happened. Love is the mark of the Christian." I mostly paraphrased him out of respect for any possible reader of this blog. (Someone should rewrite him like it was just stated for you, so he would be understood, but now you have all his arguments and don't have to read the books like I did. Again, somebody might have reminded him to "eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation"--he would have liked the hundred dollar words!

But Schaeffer like so many others who still believed in the concept of truth went too far and decided to interpret everything for you. (In his case truth was "true Truth"--redundancy never getting in the way of making a point.)

So I was fed a steady diet of evangelical Christian writers, some weirdly fundamentalist, to the exclusion of all others Christian thinkers. My point here is that if your going to encourage your kids to think, get them books they can enjoy and let them actually think for themselves. My point is also that if you're going to be a dad who extols a Schaeffer who exonerates thinker-seekers, don't castigate your child and burn I Ching, for instance, if that child brings a book with a contrary viewpoint into the house to read. (Yes, this really happened to my little brother. I don't know if Dad did actually burn the book but it certainly disappeared fast after a lecture on appropriate reading material whereas it could have led to an edifying discussion.)

What I learned was that Schaeffer can entertain seekers but they were not welcome in our chalet. The way "Modern Art and the Death of a Culture" (hmm-mm. I wonder how we are supposed to think about modern art!) reminded me of a book we used in a Bible class I once took entitled "Decide for Yourself" which more aptly could have been titled, "We Decide for yourself." "Decide for Yourself" had divergent doctrinal issues but the one with the most words was always the one you were supposed to pick as correct. (For instance, a Neo-orthodox like Karl Barth was given two sentences while an evangelical was given ten.) Although I saw the value of such a book, I thought they could have at least pretended to be fair. They could have pretended that we had brains and heart enough to have picked the right answers for ourselves based on fairly-presented information.