Schaeffer and the Escape from Reason

I have recently completed reading through Francis Schaeffer’s magnificent Escape from Reason. The book is an examination of the progression of philosophical thought in the west since Aquinas and man’s subsequent pursuit of autonomy from God by it. As one of my greatest mentors once said, “The world of philosophy is predominately the pursuit of truth apart from God.” Schaeffer elucidates this truth masterfully.

First published in 1968, Escape from Reason was an attempt to get Christians to understand that they must try to understand the current trends of philosophical thinking and contemporary worldviews if they were going to be strategically wise in communicating the Gospel and the wisdom of the Bible to the larger society. The young are always conditioned to believe in the prevailing winds of the culture and those winds are always flowing from somewhere. People have not always thought and believed the way they do in the present time. The ideas, conceits and presumptions of whatever modern moment a person happens to belong to are the results of a continual progression and never completely original.

To that end, I want to share a quick passage from the book given our own current cultural situation. In it, Schaeffer discusses Michel Foucault, considered by most to be the father of queer theory and the progenitor of the notion of sexuality as a social construct:

“In a review of Madness and Civilization in The New York Review of Books (3 November 1966), entitled “In Praise of Folly,” the reviewer… comments, ‘What Foucault is finally against, however, is the authority of reason… In this Foucault represents an important tendency in advanced contemporary thought. In his despair of the transcendent powers of rational intellect he embodies one abiding truth our time - the failure of the nineteenth century to make good its promises.’ In other words, the heirs of the Enlightenment had promised that they would provide a unified answer on the basis of the rational. Foucault maintains correctly that this promise has not been fulfilled.

“[Foucault] is not to be thought of as too isolated to be of importance in understanding our day and in understanding the end of duality and dichotomy. The logical end of the dichotomy, in which hope is separated from reason, is the giving up of all reason.”

Schaeffer wrote this in 1968, remember.

As we consider the world around us and what can only be described as the decay of western civilization, it would do us good to realize what Schaeffer tried to tell everyone 55 years ago: that we are at the end of a long trail of thought experiments which sought to separate God from reason and truth. Enlightenment man decided he did not need the transcendent wisdom of God to understand reality. Our grey matter alone was enough to figure everything out and centuries of continually worsening folly have shown us the error of our ways.

But still we refuse to see. Instead of turning back and taking our rightful place in submission to the wisdom of the transcendent, we continue on, farther and farther down the path of illogic, despair and “the giving up of all reason.”

In short, the irrationality, the insanity, the madness, the complete and utter lack of reason is the point.



“But this doesn’t make any sense!”

 Exactly. It’s not supposed to. In fact, it’s supposed not to. We have dug ourselves into such a deep hole of rebellion that we are rejecting the very notions of coherence and reason in order to simply continue digging.

I wholeheartedly commend Schaeffer’s book to you. It is a short, deep read. Realize that all of what we are now facing was inevitable not because we never had the opportunity to repent and change our ways, but because the pursuit of autonomy from God only ever leads in one direction and to one place.