Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the [White] Queen.

"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ..."

Through the Looking Glass
by Lewis Carroll

A powerful movement is underway to place a "Biblical worldview" squarely in the courts, the White House, the academy...even in your home. It is not monolithic, it is not inhuman, it is not evil, but it is well funded and powerful and it will be heard. It condemns cosmology, evolution, gay rights abortion and the empirical foundations of science..

The spiritual father of this movement is, or was, an odd, charismatic and brilliant evangelical theologian named Francis A. Schaeffer. In mid-life, Schaeffer found himself caught between the strict apologetics of the Presbyterian Evangelicals and the sincere seekers of the 1960's. To reconcile both, he established a retreat in Switzerland which proved to become a training ground for many of the leading lights in contemporary Protestant theology.

"Today's humanists control nearly all media by dominating a few wire services and a handful of major television networks."

Schaeffer focused on two issues in a novel way: the choice of worldviews, called Presuppositionalism, and the need for a "Second Reformation" to break the grip of humanism on western culture.

Presuppositionalism

Christian apologists have occupied themselves for centuries with arguments for the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, and the inspired, if not inerrant, character of the Bible. This arguing from "evidences" of these things has been termed "evidentialism"; the presuppositionalists, instead, contend that concept precedes percept-that we choose what is true and what is real, and that the choice of the "Biblical worldview" is the only one which is consistent with reality, truth and happiness. This may appear to be an irrationally subjective stance, but it has come to be the most powerful new movement in Christian apologetics. Although Schaeffer borrowed the concept from Cornelius Van Till, Schaeffer popularized it.

The Decline of Western Culture

In his most popular work, How Then Should We Live? Schaeffer purports to document the decline of western civilization from the time of Thomas Aquinas, when churchmen departed from Biblical models of logic for those of the pagan Greeks and Romans. What followed was, according to Schaeffer, the contamination of the Catholic Church by "humanism" in the power of the pope and the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

Little of the book dwells on theology, but instead catalogs the growing secular influence on art and literature and the general culture, culminating in the nihilism and existentialism, the Dadaism and Surrealism, of the twentieth century. Schaeffer claims that such humanistic thinking made Hitler and Stalin possible:

"Modern men, in the absence of absolutes, have polluted all aspects of morality, making standards completely hedonistic and relativistic."

Although Schaeffer often referred to a "Biblical worldview" as the preferred alternative to humanism, he was unable to explain why the "Biblical worldview" has produced so many sects and denominations with a great variety of beliefs.

Schaeffer's horror at the popularity of abortion after Roe v. Wade led him, along with C. Everett Koop, to produce a film, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? This work, and his books, seminars, and exchanges at his retreat, allowed Schaeffer to profoundly influence later fundamentalists such as Tim LaHaye, Randall Terry (of Operation Rescue) and Charles Colson. Schaeffer's protégés would become the nucleus of the twenty first century Christian fundamentalism that we will examine next month. Almost twenty years after his death, they carry on a crusade against empirical science, mixing the incompatible methods of Presuppositionalism and Evidentialism in what they hope will be a "Second Reformation."

--Richard Garrard