How Should We Then Live?

This is a "deep" post, so I apologize to anyone looking for some light reading. This is not light, so proceed at your own risk. :-)

I finished the book, How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer a few days ago. This is a difficult book to summarize, but I'll try.

The subtitle of the book is "The rise and decline of western thought and culture", and that is the book in a nutshell. But that encompasses so much! The author writes about art, music, philosophy, literature, and theology, and how each became "religion externalized" during each age, from the Romans to the present (I guess that would actually be 1976, when this book was published). What a huge task! On the surface, you might think it would be a dull and dry book to read, but it was excellent as far as causing you to think more carefully about history and what impact each era in general had on future times.

What I found most interesting was the way Schaeffer compared the Reformation (based on the Bible) with the Enlightenment (based on humanism). The two time periods took place at virtually the same time, but the Reformation was concentrated in the northern European countries, while the Enlightenment was more in southern Europe. I never realized that the great scientific advancements of this time were more the consequence of the Reformation than the Enlightenment, and the great scientists of the Enlightenment actually made scientific advancements as a result of the trailblazing of the Reformation-related scientists.

Schaeffer also asserts that the current legal systems of Britain and the U.S. were born of the Reformation. I recently read an article in which the author stated that the U.S. came out of the Enlightenment, not the Reformation, so I suppose some might disagree with that statement. Schaeffer points out, however, that this is the reason that the U.S. government has remained stable over its first two-hundred years. It is now becoming less and less stable, though, because the general consensus does not support a morality based on the Bible. Most people have taken on humanism as their "religion", with no basis on which to call anything right or wrong. This philosophy's highest aim is personal peace and prosperity.

As our society drifts more deeply into humanism, the results likely to come about at some point are either anarchy or a manipulative, authoritarian government.

Key quotes:

Let us hasten to say that freedom of the individual is not magic in the countries with a Reformation background either. As the memory of the Christian base grows ever dimmer, freedom will disintegrate in these countries as well. The system will not simply go on, divorced from its founding roots. And the drift will tend to be the same, no matter what political party is voted in. When the principles are gone, there remains only expediency at any price.

The danger in regard to the rise of authoritarian government is that Christians will be still as long as their own religous activities, evangelism, and life-styles are not disturbed....But let us be realistic....If we as Christians do not speak out as authoritarian governments grow from within or come from outside, eventually we or our children will be the enemy of society and the state. No truly authoritarian government can tolerate those who have a real absolute by which to judge its arbitrary absolutes and who speak out and act upon that absolute....To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.

Let me just say that this book is not easy reading, especially at the beginning, but it gets more and more engrossing as you go along. At the end you can so easily see how each part of history relates to each other. It should be a core reading for any upper-level world history course. If history interests you, you might like to read it too! What a classic! And congratulations if you read all the way to the end of this post (I'm not sure how many will). :-)