A Table Without Chairs

"You can't sell leaf-tables and no chairs. Chairs, you got a dinette set. No chairs, you got @#%^!" - Nathan Arizona

"Arrogant bastard!," "Glib!," "Arbitrary!," and "Hubris!" are labels I audibly threw at Francis Schaeffer while reading How Should We Then Live? To be fair, there were also times I thought "there's definitely some truth to that...you arrogant bastard." A credit to his career as a theologian and an intellectual seeker, Schaeffer has produced a very thought provoking, if at times not always thoughtful, thinkpiece that has kept me up at night in ways that seedy internet chat rooms and youtube clips of "Bas Rutten's Lethal Street Defense System" never could.

In my opinion, and I suspect the opinion of many others not named Chuck Colson, Schaeffer's work is going to accomplish little outside of either reinforcing a faith-centered declensionist view of Western history or making someone like myself fear the generations of home schooled children who's parents will teach the ideas in this book as actual history.
There have been several of discussions in the office over the accuracy and overall importance of Schaeffer's history-based methodology, anecdotes, criticisms, and observations (impressively, all of this discussion was done most efficiently during 15 minute breaks and the occasional lunch). And for the most part there has been a goodwill gesture (myself included) to let him off the hook because he's not writing a history book, he's writing a work of cultural criticism. Try as I might, I can't let him off the hook. If anyone sees a bus around please let me know so I can toss his carefully self-fashioned-bourgeois-fake-monk-bearded @#%^ beneath its front wheels. Sorry, that was harsh. I'm going to blame Dusty for encouraging a free-associational method of blogging.

On History, Presentism, Memory, and long German words: First, Scheaffer's declensionist narrative (tracing the disappearance of his "freedom without chaos" base) is only serving a means to a premeditated end. This is a blatant example of presentist history or just plain bias - Tom pointed out the same when he commented on Schaeffer's "Christian triumphalism," which is funny since given the pessimistic view of the present and the future, I kept wondering if Schaeffer died an optimistic man. It's unfair to confront his book strictly on the grounds of its history. I realize Schaeffer isn't a historian, but that doesn't excuse him from misrepresenting the past to reach his presentist conclusions. I have to justify years and years of college, so please bear with me as I point out a few of my favorite "Schaefferisms":

• As Dusty already said, there is no Thirty Years War in Schaeffer's Reformation. This is a bit like leaving World War II out of World War II. Furthermore, how about we just leave Germany out of the narrative of Reformation-based nations all together. Why? Because a discussion of Germany would force Schaeffer to view politics as paramount to the center of Luther's Reformation and not at the periphery as he does in daying England's reformation "began" as a political movement (e.g., no mention of the German territorial princes in the Reformation). He correctly says that England's Protestant base began as a political movement, he just doesn't bother to say that Luther's call for Papal reform became the Protestant reformation largely because of local and regional politics.
• The "Glorious Revolution" or the English Revolution of 1688 will only be referred to as the "Bloodless Revolution" when setting up a discussion of the bloodier French Revolution. Of course, the "Bloodless Revolution" and the securing of Parliament's authority would have been impossible had Parliament not beheaded a king 40 years earlier - and you might ask the Irish about that whole "bloodless" part. I'm not saying the French Revolution wasn't a political, social, and intellectual mess, it most certainly was. But, if you're keeping score on the beheading of divine-right kings, that's Reformation-based England: 1; Renaissance-based France: 1.
• Legislative bodies and revolutionary success: Apart from the ideological and philosophical difference that doomed France and Russia (the Reformation vs. Renaissance base), Schaeffer should also point out that the legislative responsibilities of the Estates General and Duma on the eve of their respective revolutions left them much more unable and unqualified to organize and direct a government than either the various legislative bodies in the American colonies or Parliament. A sudden transition to a legislature can be difficult, just ask Ira.....oh, let's not go there.
• Name drop as many social theorists as you can, dismiss their ideas and intellectual contributions, and last, don't discuss these ideas. Schaeffer throws out Freud's ideas of determinism as resting "upon a child's relationship to his mother" but never bothers to quote his influential work Society and its Discontents, a work that has much to say about the downward spiral of modern societies and very little to say about mothers. He mentions the "neo-Marxist" Frankfurt School, but lumps Marcuse, Adorno, Horkhheimer, and Jurgen Habermas together with complete disregard for the fundamental differences between their works and how they fit into the New Left. Poor Albert Einstein is reduced to his cliched quote "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos."

A second problem exists in his idea of a Christian consensus. Schaeffer laments the slowly disappearing "memory of the Christian consensus which gave us freedom within the biblical form." With this part I am in complete Fred Durst-like "agreeance" with Schaeffer: the Christian consensus is exactly what he says it is , a "memory." But this memory is a construction of the author's subjectivity as opposed to being any specific historical moment he can pull out of an archive, a contemporary memoir, or a textbook of "Western" thought and culture. This inability to point back to any specific example creates a narrative that inconsistently jumps from cultural history to political history to intellectual history looking for examples to support his teleological progression. I think this is the reason why his numerous art history lessons fail to advance his argument - the reader is never entirely sure what to do with them because they are largely presented without any real supportive context. Maybe I missed where he found this consensus? Would be more than happy to think about it if someone knows where it is.

Finally at the end we get prophecy, er predictions, um warnings. Most of these are vague descriptions that, given the rhythms of history, will happen somewhere at some time. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if you go back over the last 500 years you can probably find scenarios like the ones Schaeffer presents existing outside the realm of our current era of cultural depsair. I will say though that with these predictions Schaeffer demonstrates a real understanding of history and its cycles. Enough at least to scare the gay marriage out of people. That was a joke. It's a blog for God's sake.

So at the end the reader is left with 250+ pages of sketchy history, a glorified past, a pessimistic present, and a potentially pessimistic future that can only be undone if a certain group of people realize that society needs to unmask itself from the values that are rapidly eroding personal, civic, and cultural decency. Sounds like Marx to me. Which makes sense given that what Schaeffer is ultimately doing is writing a book that is most similar to philosophical works like those of Marx's Capital or Weber's The Protestant Ethic, in which history is simply a comparative means of advancing a specific "world view." The reader is invited to think, dissect, and decide which Weltanschauung is correct or most persuasive. So in some way, maybe we can forgive him for his shotty history because he's just doing what the other theorists do (note, you'd never know it from the book, but there are lady theorists out there). That being the case, his world view failed to be any more substative, any more realistic, and any more attainable than any of the modern theorists and philosophers he half-heartedly confronted.

A few questions/things to ponder:

1. How much credit should we give to the Cold War for shaping Schaeffer's view of the future/past?

2. Why doesn't Schaeffer discuss Islam? If you're looking for absolutes, monotheism, and god-centered people I'd think you might want to consider them. Not to mention that in its structure at least, Islam is more democratic than Christianity. (Note, I am not saying that Islamic society is more democratic! There's a profound difference between what a religious book says and how that religion is carried out in relation to societal norms.)