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April 16, 2003
Hello everyone,
I have done some spiritual housecleaning since my send last week. There is a situation in my life that has been eating at me, causing me to feel a sense of disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration. When I wrote The Pagan and Philosopher: Meeting over a Cup of Tea last week, a certain sense of negativity had been gnawing at me throughout my day, which explains in part the re-creative nature of the visit to the Student Exhibition Center as well as why the send bordered dangerously close to a one-sided or jaded perspective of both the world of Christian art and evangelism: a sort of semi-conscious scapegoatism that camouflaged the real issue that was bothering me. Most of my thoughts this week will flow from certain things I have realized while grappling with my thoughts and my lack of perspective in this unnamed situation.
The current series of lessons in the Sunday School class I attend deals with identifying and answering various worldviews with the truth of Christianity, the writing and thought of the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer playing no little part in this process. Loyal, the facilitator of the class, gave me two books by Dr. Schaeffer; my friend Ed, knowing of the class, gave me another. For this reason, my own thoughts and writing have been influenced by this reading, so it should come as no surprise that the name Schaeffer has been coming up rather frequently as of late. This week will prove no exception, as I have jumped ahead to the second section in Schaeffer’s book True Spirituality to the part that is most relevant to me at this point in time in my life.
The subtitle of this section is “Freedom Now from the Results of the Bonds of Sin.” The chapter titles (to follow) should give you some idea of the nature of the topics highlighted, though Schaeffer, being an intellectual, naturally addresses these issues in ways that seem more relevant to my world, shaped in large part by what I learn at the university as well as my natural propensity for thought. I am not sure he would necessarily identify himself with the intellectual “nametag”; if so, his own words at the very beginning of the first chapter of the book demonstrate how much credence he likely would have lent the matter:
As the kings of the earth are born in exactly the same way physically as the simplest man, so the most intellectual person must become a Christian in exactly the same way as the simplest person. This is true for all men, everywhere, through all space and time. There are no exceptions.
The chapter titles in the second section include “Freedom from Conscience,” “Freedom in the Thought-life,” “Substantial Healing from Psychological Problems,” “Substantial Healing of the Total Person,” “Substantial Healing in Personal Relationships,” and finally “Substantial Healing in the Church.” I particularly like the no-nonsense line of thought he outlines in these chapters, so I will provide my own brief summations and then relate how this book has helped me: how God has spoken to me through the writing of this remarkable thinker.
First he addresses the internal divisions within our inner psyche, which we will discuss more fully in a moment. He then goes on to speak of how all things start within our thought-life, and, much like God Himself creates, we make them tangible in the reality around us. Conversely, when things go badly and drag us down, the only reason they affect us emotionally is because they are filtered from the external world back into our thought-life. He is not implying, as some do, that the material world is merely illusionary—quite the contrary—but is instead suggesting that an aspect of being created in the image of God is this ability to conceive in the mind first that which is ultimately given birth into external reality through our mouths, hands, and feet. Therefore, the first line of defense is always our minds—this is the first area to slide before the superstructure comes crashing down around our ears. Conversely, the transformation the Holy Spirit renders always begins within and is made manifest outwardly. This is where the concept of the fruit of the Spirit is born: with the embryonic seed planted in our hearts and growing into increasing maturity through our thoughts, words, and actions.
I mentioned a moment ago the internal division of humanity. Schaeffer hammers out a framework by suggesting that most of our problems stem from our false perception of the universe. Some day we will all stand before God and will have already condemned ourselves—regarldless of our knowledge of the cross—because we tried living a lie, striving to be something we were not.
For Schaeffer, this shows up in the three philosophical areas of metaphysics (existence), epistemology (knowledge), and morality. Because of what man is (metaphysically), his thoughts (epistemologically) are necessarily limited by this awareness, and when he ignores this, pretending he is more—or less—than what he truly is, his morality is also affected. Whether he knows how he got that way or not, he knows he is a rational creature with real feelings: that he is somehow different from the animals in that he is personal, yet that he is also finite, which predicates the logical realization that there must be something more: a “First Cause,” a something that, or Someone Who, is infinite. Though man knows he is not infinite, yet he acts as though he were the center of the universe. In reality, he can never be more than finite and the only change he can make in himself is to further debase and reduce himself to a schizoid animal operating in the realm of instinct, suppressing his deeper self. He cannot erase his existence—Schaeffer points out that even suicide will not erase the fact that he was: he can never “uncreate” the fact that he was: the fact is, is that he did indeed exist. Schaeffer continues:
[M]an falls crushed within himself at every turn. At that point, he has two possibilities, and just two, if he is going to stay in the circle of rationality. He can return to his place before the personal Creator, a personal creature before a personal Creator. Or else he can go lower than his place. [. . .] So sinful man takes his place among the lower circles of existence; he moves from being man into the lower existence of the animals and the machines. Man is thus divided against and from himself in every part of his nature. [. . .] By rebellion he is divided from God by true moral guilt, and he is damned by what he is, by wanting to be God and not being God because he is finite. He is also damned because he cannot hide among the animals and the machines, where he would try to hide. He still bears the marks of the image of God. He is damned on both sides, in both directions, simply by what God has made him. Every part of his nature speaks and calls out, “I am man.” [. . .] (127, 128)
So therefore, man is damned because he tries to live in a world of unreality: to be either more or less than who he is: a creature finite on the one hand, personal on the other. He either tries to be infinite, placing himself at the center of the universe, or else he pretends to be impersonal, denying his thoughts and emotions. In either case, he has exchanged the truth of God (which has been made plain to him by the reality he finds in his own very existence) for a lie; he has served the creature rather than the Creator and therefore debased himself. The lie starts in his thought-life and then the fruit of the lie reaps its own destructive ends, made manifest through his mouth, hands, and feet into the external reality he finds around him. Other men take this lie into themselves and therefore perpetuate and corrupt themselves by planting the lie into their own thought-lives.
Schaeffer also expresses this caution:
Let us be clear about this. All men since the fall have had some psychological problems. It is utter nonsense, a romanticism that has nothing to do with biblical Christianity, to say that a Christian never has psychological problems. They differ in degree and they differ in kind, but since the fall all men have more or less a problem psychologically. And dealing with this, too, is a part of the present aspect of the gospel and the finished work of Christ on Calvary’s cross. (132)
The latter sentence ties in with his distinction between true guilt and psychological guilt.
[. . .] Real guilt is placed in a completely rational framework, and it is met within the framework, with intellect and feelings of morality meeting each other, without any fracture between them. With all rationality in place, and consciously in place (on the basis of the existence of God and the finished, substitutionary work of Jesus Christ) my real guilt now is not overlooked, but is accepted as my responsibility because of my own deliberately doing what I know to be wrong. Then it is reasonably, truly, and objectively dealt with in Christ’s infinite substitutionary work. Now I can say to my conscience, be still! Thus real guilt is gone and I know that anything which is left is my psychological guilt. This can be faced, not with confusion, but to be seen as part of the misery of fallen man. (131)
From here, he goes on to speak of the fact that nothing here on earth, no matter how good or beautiful it may be, can ultimately fill us inside without a proper relationship with our Lord. We were created to serve Him and He alone can fill us fully, which goes back to the concept the famous French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) introduced of the “God-shaped vacuum.” Since nature abhors a vacuum, “searching for an image of the divine that will fit,” people “paw over various options as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, matching them successively to the gaping hole at the puzzle’s center. . . . They keep doing this until the right ‘piece’ is found” (Huston Smith, qtd. in The God-Shaped Hole). Marriage (as beautiful as it can be), friendship, love in and of itself: these all have their very valid place, but none of things will satisfy us totally; only God can fill the vacuum that has been shapen in His image.
Moving over to the aspect of healing in personal relationships, Schaeffer reminds us that there is a legal aspect to all relationships, including the relationship with God. There is the legal aspect of headship in marriage, the home, the job, the church, the government: in a fallen world, we cannot get away from law and order. There is also a legal relationship between penitent sinner and God, satisfied by the shed blood of the Lamb. With these precautions to be kept in mind, Schaeffer suggests that our relationship with God is primarily personal, even though it exists between creature and Creator. Our relationship with our fellow man is that of an equal to an equal, whether the other be Christian or non-Christian. Our relationship with fellow believers, even if we be married to them, even if they be our children, even if we be their pastor or leader, is still that of brother or sister to brother or sister. We may be called, as a leader and the legal figurehead, to correct and admonish, but under it all, it is still one equal to another—within Christianity, relationship is always familial: a brother or sister to a fellow brother or sister. The legal aspect, which must be in place, does not diminish the primarily personal relationship between creature-creature and creature-Creator. Schaeffer writes: “Man is a rebel and there needs to be order in this poor world, but when I use whatever office God gives me, whether it is in the State, the Church, or the home, or as an employer, it is to be for God’s glory and the other person’s good” (156). A few pages earlier, he says:
Every time I see something right in another man, it tends to minimize me, and it makes it easier for me to have a proper creature-creature relationship. But each time I see something wrong in others, it is danger, for it can exalt self, and when this happens, my open fellowship with God falls to the ground. So when I am right, I can be wrong. In the midst of being right, if self is exalted, my fellowship with God can be destroyed. It is not wrong to be right, but it is wrong to have the wrong attitude in being right, and to forget that my relationship with my fellow man must be personal. If I really love a man as I love myself, I will long to see him be what he could be on the basis of Christ’s work. And if it be otherwise, not only is my communication with man broken, but my communication with God as well. For this is sin, breaking the second commandment to love my neighbor as myself. (153)
Beyond this, another point on which he speaks (before we move on to applicational aspects) is that of our fallenness: we often forget that we are co-equal before the foot of the cross. When we strive to be something we are not—when we try to make a creature-creature relationship more or less than it is—a strain results, much like over-inflating a tire eventually causes a blow-out at the weakest point. When we try to be superior and lord it over another, we set ourselves up for a fall (hence the resultant mirror of inferiority), for we are not made in this way and we are spurning reality as surely as the man who plunges to his death while attempting to defy gravity. The only superior force in the universe is the Personal, Infinite God; He alone can satisfy. We cannot expect other things—even the deepest of human relationships such as a fully committed marriage—to be able to give us all that we need. No human being can totally fill us and to expect him or her to do so sets us both up for a fall, creating a strain that was never intended to be, for it ignores reality and operates under the guise of a lie. With God at the center, however, such relationships can be beautiful and tremendously more satisfying, for we appreciate what they can offer, not what they cannot and never could. Two persons trusting in God have a depth of communion not otherwise possible: no less here than elsewhere, where two or three gather in His name, He will be there.
After reading these words and many others Schaeffer wrote, my tidings last week were drawn up short. Not all of them, of course, as there was much good in last week’s newsletter and God can still use it for His glory. But I could tell that in my feelings of disillusionment and frustration, I had forgotten my place in the universe. I realized that one of the things I could do, knowing that God is both sovereign and that He loves me unconditionally, was to pray and ask Him to open my eyes in this situation: to teach me what He would have me to learn through it. I tried to channel my negativity last week in a constructive way, and while such was not my intention, it still spilled over into more an expression of Eric at the center of the universe—with all his opinions, likes, and dislikes—instead of totally recognizing that God lives there, regardless if I acknowledge it or no.
I have not told you what my situation is, nor do I intend to; I have my reasons and that is that. Do know, however, that life will not always work out as we hope, that sometimes our greatest fears will be realized at the expense of our deepest longings. Throughout it all, we must never, ever lose sight of the fact that God is sovereign. If any man had a right to complain, it was surely Job. Not only did all his crops, herds, and dwellings disappear, but all his sons and daughters died, his health suffered greatly, he was in much physical pain, and his friends were of little consolation to him. Yet what does he do when he comes face to face with God? He repents in dust and ashes. There is no way finite man will ever be able to reach the sheer and utter perfection of an infinite God. We simply have to remember that, as Isaiah 55:8–11 bears out:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.
We can nurse our wounds and feel sorry for ourselves; in fact, we are called to cast our cares and sorrows on Him. But ultimately we have two choices: we can either (1) live in reality or (2) live a lie. We can either acknowledge that God is sovereign or we can sulk and blame Him for what happens. But refusing to surrender control to Him is totally foolish, for what control do we ever have over the future to begin with? I can believe I hold control over my own destiny till the day I die, believing that I can still the hand of fate, but this is illusionary. I don’t have any control over life and its circumstances and I never did. When I surrender to God, all I am doing is admitting the truth. My other choice is to live in a delusionary world of my own manufacture, for the future will still not be mine to control.
Have you ever stopped and considered how illogical our thoughts can be at times? We think we know what will make us happy, and when things don’t turn out the way we “know” they need to, we “just know” our happiness is going to be eternally compromised. But what if things did turn out exactly like we wanted? Would we then be content? Or would there simply be the next new thing that must turn out exactly as we wanted? True contentment is not found anywhere else but in serving God and surrendering to Him. I have often said that we can only serve one of two masters: either (1) God, or (2) ourselves. I submit to you today—though I am ultimately stating the opposite side of the same coin—that when all is said and done, we can only serve (1) God, or (2) a lie. There simply is no other choice and it is time that we realized this, picked ourselves up out of the dust, and moved forward once again.
Are we going to be hurt again? Of course. Will things turn out exactly like we hope? Not always. Will we ever be disappointed again, upset, frustrated? Certainly. We will not always be balanced psychologically, we will not always enjoy perfect health, all people must die, and we will not always remember the simple truth of “God or a lie,” though as soon as the Holy Spirit convicts us, we have but one real choice, and that is to pick ourselves back up out of the dirt and repent, with Job, in dust and ashes. This is the only way our feet will ever touch the earth: you cannot long worship a lie but what it will not be made manifest destructively in reality around you. Only truth answers to reality truly.
Am I pleased with everything that has happened in my life? No, not really. But for this moment in time, I have surrendered it to God, and I must continue to keep surrendering it to Him, going back again and again if I need to. I may not always be as psychologically balanced as I think I ought to be; I may not always be as emotionally contented as I’d like, but in the end, my present troubles will have all seemed so insignificant in light of the thing “which no eye has ever conceived nor ear ever heard.” Eternity awaits us and the best thing we can do in this life is to live in reality, making the most of every opportunity in preparation for the eternal kingdom to come. It is as Dr. Grace Adolphsen Brame writes concerning late author Evelyn Underhill: “In some of her most touching writing, Underhill notes that the Christian story begins with: ‘Lo, the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to Thy will.’ It ends with: ‘Not my will but Thine be done’” (Evelyn Underhill and the Mastery of Time). Or, if you prefer more abstract terms, it is as Arthur Custance writes, “Since the temporal order is framed within the eternal, only by a measure of comprehension of the eternal can a man hope to interpret the temporal correctly” (qtd. in The Doorway Papers).
God bless,
Eric
“For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart. I will let you find me, says the Lord.”
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