Here are my notes from our continuing discussion on How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer where he makes the ultimate point that the Enlightenment was an attempt at a Reformation without the biblical worldview. What resulted was about what you would expect.
From what stream did the Enlightenment develop, the Reformation or the Renaissance? Was there a lesser desire for freedom, harmony, knowledge? Why do you say it was the Renaissance?
The utopian dream of the Enlightenment can be summed up by five words: reason, nature, happiness, progress, and liberty. It was thoroughly secular in its thinking. The humanistic elements which had risen during the Renaissance came to flood tide in the Enlightenment. Here was man starting from himself absolutely. And if the humanistic elements of the Renaissance stand in sharp contrast to the Reformation, the Enlightenment was in total antithesis to it. The two stood for and were based upon absolutely different things in an absolute way, and they produced absolutely different results.
Schaeffer makes the point that the religion of the Renaissance, if any, was deism. Why do you think that is where they landed?
If these men had a religion, it was deism. The deists believed in a God who had created the world but who had no contact with it now, and who had not revealed truth to men. If there was a God, He was silent. And Voltaire demanded no speech from Him—save when, after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, Voltaire illogically complained of His nonintervention.
Schaeffer, F. A. (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 5, pp. 148–149). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
Without an appeal to the biblical God Who has spoken, what options remain for those seeking to transform their society?
As in the later Russian Revolution, the revolutionaries on their humanist base had only two options—anarchy or repression.
Schaeffer, F. A. (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 5, p. 150). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
In crude geopolitical terms, there is a contrast between the north of Europe and the south and east. Allowing for local influences, it would seem that the inspiration for most revolutionary changes in the south of Europe was a copy, but often in contorted form, of the freedoms gained from the Reformation in the north.
Schaeffer, F. A. (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 5, p. 150). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
What argument does Schaeffer make that humanistic based governments never allow for human flourishing and freedom?
And what the Reformation produced—by native growth as in England or by borrowing as in Italy—is all in gigantic contrast to what Communist countries continue to produce. Marxist-Leninist Communists have a great liability in arguing their case because so far in no place have the Communists gained and continued in power, building on their materialistic base, without repressive policies. And they have not only stifled political freedom but freedom in every area of life, including the arts.
Schaeffer, F. A. (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 5, p. 150). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
Elites always look out for themselves. They play golf in their comfortable retreats when it hits the fan.
Solzhenitsyn says in Communism: A Legacy of Terror (1975), “I repeat, this was March 1918—only four months after the October Revolution—all the representatives of the Petrograd factories were cursing the Communists, who had deceived them in all their promises. What is more, not only had they abandoned Petrograd to cold and hunger, themselves having fled from Petrograd to Moscow, but had given orders to machine gun the crowds of workers in the courtyards of the factories who were demanding the election of independent factory committees.”
Schaeffer, F. A. (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 5, p. 151). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
The “temporary dictatorship of the proletariat” has proven, wherever the Communists have had power, to be in reality a dictatorship by a small elite—and not temporary but permanent. No place with a communistic base has produced freedom of the kind brought forth under the Reformation in northern Europe.
Schaeffer, F. A. (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 5, p. 152). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
Example of arbitrary morality when a society is intentionally humanistic in its base:
A good illustration [of arbitrary morality when we start with man] is that at first in Russia, on the basis of Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) teaching in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, marriage was considered a part of capitalism (private prostitution, as he expressed it) and the family was thus minimized.
Later, the state decreed a code of strict family laws. This was simply an “arbitrary absolute” imposed because it worked better. There is no base for right or wrong, and the arbitrary absolutes can be reversed for totally opposite ones at any time. For the Communists, laws always have a ground only in the changing historic situation brought about by the ongoing of history.
Schaeffer, F. A. (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 5, pp. 152–153). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
Reformation Response:
Therefore, because God exists and there are absolutes, justice can be seen as absolutely good and not as merely expedient.
Schaeffer, F. A. (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 5, p. 153). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
Does this have any relevance to what we are seeing in the U.S. today?
Everywhere we see a jettison of objective truth in Scripture, we see encroaching and increasing chaos which destroys freedom through anarchy (each man does what is right in his own eyes) or repression (every man does what is right in the eyes of a few), rather than a people self-governed (each is responsible to do what is right).
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