The Books #4

I seem to have slipped into some kind of chronological list at the moment - each of the 4 books so far are in the order I read them , with a year or three in between.  Won't last.

Anyway, for some reason I cannot remember (did we have lecture on him?) I bought this volume:

Schaeffer has tended to polarise people:  he has fans with such enthusiasm to rival even members of the Inklings Club, and others who say he wasn't anything to write home about.  All I can say is The God Who Is There was pivotal for me (it's one of the few books I have read twice).  Why?

Well for a start it was the first Christian book I had read which actually dealt with major cultural trends and schools of thought.  Of course it predated the rise of post-modernism so could not be expected to deal with it head on but, like Lewis, Schaeffer clearly sees something like it coming.  But taking a step back: it dealt with culture.  It didn't treat church as one thing and culture as another - it turned out we could interact with it AND there was a biblical way of viewing it that held water.  Blimey.  No one had told me.

Second it dealt with issues of doubt that, it transpires, were common for many Christians  - and plotted a way to think through them.

Third it took seriously the emptiness of modern man and that saying "Jesus loves you" would not be enough to tear down barriers to the gospel.  It was here I first saw the logic of "push their presuppositions":  that if you had arguments against the reality of God, you must be to some extent 'suppressing the truth in unrighteousness', and to do that you must be making certain assumptions on which to build your argument which simply aren't true (or not entirely so).  You could shout at them - or you could push the logic of them.  His point was that most people have not taken their presuppositions to a logical extreme because if they had their weakness would be seen.  So instead of arguing, why not gently lead them further along the path of their logic until the uneasy feeling crept in that something was wrong somewhere...then n that uncertainty point out a better way.  (Discerning readers will be thinking of certain Keller-phrases like "plausibility structures", and really the whole first section of The Reason for God).

Plus a supersonic overview of the development of post-enlightenment thought.

What a book.