Schaeffer's close friend Hans Rookmaaker once remarked that ‘Escape from Reason is Schaeffer's version of what Dooyeweerd develops in. His analysis is often derivative of the Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. This book provides an excellent introduction to his ideas, though it shows its origin in the lecture format: there are few footnotes and references. He awoke his generation to the presence of secular humanism and showed that it was possible to think and be a Christian at the same time. Schaeffer had a way of communicating Christianity to modern culture – we need more like him today. This despair is revealed first in philosophy subsequently, it spreads to art, then music and general culture, before reaching theology. Western society has gone below this line and it has led to despair. Yet a ‘line’ or ‘gap’ exists between the supposed upper realm of grace and the lower realm of nature. He argues that nature has slowly been ‘eating up’ grace. In EfR Schaeffer he examines the relationship between ‘grace’ and ‘nature’. This assumption, once popularised, provided the fertile soil for the belief that humans could become independent, autonomous.

According to Schaeffer, Aquinas claimed that the human will but not human intellect is fallen. It was Aquinas that opened the way for autonomous rationality. He sees the most crucial problem facing Christians today as being rooted in the Middle Ages and in Aquinas in particular. Nevertheless, Schaeffer does highlight the problems scholastic dualism has caused Christianity. It’s perhaps an understatement to say that Schaeffer is a little hard on Aquinas a better Reformed analysis of Aquinas is found in Arvin Vos’s Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought. I rejoice at his desire to see the lordship of Christ expressed over every area of life, but get frustrated at his broad brush strokes that often over-simplify.

Reading Schaeffer is a bitter sweet experience. EfR is the shortest of the two and has sometimes been mistaken for the introduction to the trilogy. Schaeffer's books have been incredibly influential, not least his trilogy of which Escape from Reason (EfR) is the second part – the first being The God Who is There and the final part He is There and He is not Silent. He has been described as a (compassionate, inconsistent and modified) presuppositionalist, an inconsistent empiricist and a verificationist– this is, I suspect, because he is more an evangelist and apologist than an academic philosopher. Schaeffer is incredibly difficult to pin down.

Escape from reason book