the New Pantagruel

The God Who is Where? from My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion

by Patton Dodd

This is an excerpt from “The God Who is Where?” in Patton Dodd’s forthcoming book, My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion. Scheduled for publication by Jossey-Bass in November, 2004, another excerpt from Dodd’s book has appeared online at Killing the Buddha.

y favorite course in my first semester at Oral Roberts University is Humanities I. It is exhaustive—a “bird’s eye view,” the professor reminds us regularly, of Western Civilization. Said professor is the female component of a husband-and-wife team who have been teaching the course since the beginning of said civilization. Their lectures are, if sluggish, consistently interesting and challenging. Their primary pedagogical method, however, is not to lecture but to show a series of films starring Francis Schaeffer, the quasi-godfather of modern evangelical apologetics.

ISBN: 0-7879-6859-5
Hardcover
208 pages
Jossey-Bass
November 2004

A Presbyterian convert as a teenager, Schaeffer was a Christian public intellectual in the 1970s, and he was largely responsible for whatever popular intellectual engagement was happening in American evangelicalism at the time. Schaeffer was a highly regarded lecturer and author who argued (persuasively for many) for the reasonableness of Christianity via historical/cultural analysis—scanning Western cultural artifacts from Rome forward to suggest the progression toward the problem of modernity and to explain how Christianity (specifically Reformation Christianity) can provide the answer. He was, at bottom, an evangelist, as he would have been the first to tell you. He authored books such as How Should We Then Live? (a reading of Western cultural history that essentially blames the disorientations of existentialism on a philosophical misstep by Thomas Aquinas) and Escape From Reason (a tract on worldviews that summarizes the presuppositions of a Who’s Who list of important thinkers and daringly dissects them to reveal their inherent illogic).

By the time I arrive at ORU in 1994, Schaeffer is long dead, but his teaching lives on not only in his books but also in a series of documentary-pedagogical films directed by his son, Franky, who put his father’s oeuvre of research on celluloid in the mid-1970s. The films, which are meant to be a cinematic companion to How Should We Then Live? (with which they share a title), document not only the World According to Schaeffer but also the sensibilities of the 1970s and Schaeffer’s idiosyncratic chic, complete with a fantastic Dress Code-breaking goatee and even more fantastic knickers. Much of the class sleeps through How Should We Then Live?, but those of us who remain awake are overjoyed. We love the Schaeffer films, applauding them for both their cultural enrichment and their fashion anachronisms. Schaeffer is infectious. He pays attention to everything, seeing the artifacts of human civilization—paintings, statues, literature, film—as always containing eternal repercussions. The whole of Western artistic and philosophical production is assessed in light of a Christian worldview. It’s fascinating. Two thumbs up.

For me, the films are an introduction to a thinker who will loom large in my understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Like much else in my faith experience, Schaeffer’s ideas are something I will first embrace fully, then reject absolutely, then recover piecemeal. I dig Schaeffer initially because he immerses me into a study of social customs and philosophy that I might have avoided otherwise. So concerned about secularism and its rampant deceptions, I need a Christian doorway to walk through into an exploration of the World of Ideas. Schaeffer gives me license to achieve a kind awakening to film, literature, and art because he offers a Christian posture, a way of study that says it is okay to investigate the world around me and see how it fits and does not fit with what I believe. I do not realize that I need this license, but I do. The secular/Christian music dichotomy has implicated non-musical mediums, too, and the limiting paradigm, though unarticulated, works the same way. With this license in my pocket, I begin to turn my attention to the non-Christian world more and more, watching movies and listening to music and reading literature always with an eye toward what the appropriate Christian response might be.

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