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.

My 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.

I am not very good at it. Mostly, I cower in the face of secular wisdom. Brandon and I go to see Pulp Fiction and scurry to find the Christian angle but come up with nothing. All we can produce is guilt for having watched something that must displease God. Rather than discussing it on the drive back to campus, we pray together for forgiveness. I pick up The Grapes of Wrath, which I read adoringly in a high school English class, but now it gnaws at me as it references the Bible over and over again but rejects Christian theological possibilities and pokes at the Pentecostal preacher, Casey. In my interaction with these and other media, I cannot get much past overtly moral concerns—should a Christian let his mind reflect on sinful subject matter? Should a Christian be exposed to anything that does not affirm the lordship of Jesus and promote biblical values? I see from Francis Schaeffer’s work that he was reading Michel Foucault and watching Woody Allen and Federico Fellini movies and putting them to work for his overall Christian project. While I can’t get beyond simple guilt, Schaeffer sits atop the Fortress of Reason like a Christian sniper, his scope trained on everything in sight, taking down enemies with precision. Hegel, Picasso, Bergman, and infinite others receive the Schaefferian rapid-fire hit and, at least within the airtight pages of his books as I understand them, don’t get back up.

But I can’t climb the fortress, and I’m no sharpshooter. My instinctual intellectual reflex is not to offer a rejoinder, but to give the benefit of the doubt. I feel convinced by whatever I am reading or watching. Against my spiritual inclinations, I entertain the sinking suspicion that these secular stories and philosophies might be more accurate portrayals of the world than my own. At times, every other point of view—even Steinbeck’s, even Tarantino’s—seems more viable to me, like they know something I don’t know, like my Christian experience of the world has been too limited and maybe I should take their way of thinking into consideration.

I think these thoughts, then pray against them. I pray without ceasing as I read books and watch movies because I feel I cannot resist the onslaught of their influence. I ask for God’s guidance as the lights go down in a movie theater. I beg for insight, for some kernel of truth, for the key to unlock these misleading mysteries and expose them for what they are. I hope to one day be able to think through secular culture the way Schaeffer does, but for now I fear that secular culture is thinking through me.

The more I read Schaeffer and try to let him teach me how to locate and debunk secular presuppositions, the more I find that there is something inherently unsettling in one of Schaeffer’s own presuppositions. His square Reformation Christianity peg does not quite fit into my round charismatic Christianity hole. Francis Schaeffer’s working premise, which is reinforced for me and Brandon as we read and discuss Escape From Reason, The God Who Is There, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, and other Schaeffer books on our own, is that Christianity is imminently reasonable because God is the Author of all Reason. Schaeffer explains that there is a step-by-step logical progression that should lead one straight to Jesus, with the inherently true, verifiable, inerrant Scriptures paving the way. Any other way of arriving at belief in God, he says, is an irrational leap of faith, which equals existentialism, which equals despair.

According to this way of explaining things, me and my charismatic friends are all existentialist Christians, and therefore, if I understand Schaeffer, not really Christians at all.