Book Review: How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer

Pages: 265
Pub­lisher: Cross­way
Year: 1976 (2005)
Author: Fran­cis Schaeffer

I wasn’t intro­duced to Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer until a few years ago, when on a par­tic­u­lar forum his name was brought up with a rec­om­men­da­tion to read the The Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer Tril­ogy, even­tu­ally lead­ing me to read How Should We Then Live? I sus­pect I’ll review the for­mer even­tu­ally, and prob­a­bly book by book, but need­less to say How Should We Then Live has been an invalu­able book, espe­cially in any course I’ve taken deal­ing with his­tory and mod­ern thought.

Schaeffer’s objec­tive in this book was to out­line how thought and idea shaped and molded cul­ture, from Rome all the way to our present day (or, rather, his present day), pre­sent­ing his­tory as a con­tin­u­ous and uni­fied flow. He then warns us where he sees our soci­ety head­ing and attempts to give us a solu­tion, a way to change course. This is a fairly tall order in my eyes, but Scha­ef­fer has in large part suc­ceeded. The only com­plaints I have heard about this book have been in that Scha­ef­fer talks in gen­er­als so broad that his his­tor­i­cal divi­sions aren’t as accu­rate as they could have been (or he glosses over some things completely)–this is true. How­ever, it’s a small com­plaint con­sid­er­ing the mon­u­men­tal effort and suc­cess of this book. As said above,  Scha­ef­fer begins by ana­lyz­ing Roman cul­ture and their failed attempt to build a soci­ety based upon finite, lim­ited gods; an enter­prise which suc­cumbed to the abso­lutism claimed by the early Chris­t­ian church due to their belief in an immutable God.  From here he ana­lyzes the flow and thought of the mid­dle ages, Renais­sance, Ref­or­ma­tion and Enlight­en­ment; the rise of mod­ern sci­ence and the break­down “in” phi­los­o­phy and sci­ence (which, con­ve­niently enough, are the chap­ter head­ings, so you can know and expect exactly what you’re going to be read­ing). In deal­ing with recent his­tory (20^th cen­tury), he takes an extended look at mod­ern art, music, lit­er­a­ture and films and how our soci­ety shapes and has been shaped by these things.

Pri­mary of Schaeffer’s con­cerns is the lib­er­al­ism that was / is becom­ing preva­lent in the church and the destruc­tive nature of deny­ing the truths of scrip­ture. Scha­ef­fer is also very con­cerned with how the media is able to eas­ily manip­u­late us (which he aptly demon­strated in his video series of the same name), pre­sent­ing to us images which have been inter­preted (inten­tion­ally or not) and may present a par­tic­u­lar angle, whether accu­rate or not.

Over­all, this is a book I think every Chris­t­ian should read if they get the chance. It’s well writ­ten, clear, has good flow and mostly achieves what it set off to do. Unfor­tu­nately, Scha­ef­fer was also right in his predictions–we’re liv­ing in the soci­ety he fore­saw at the time of this books orig­i­nal pub­lish­ing. So two things to end this review. Schaeffer’s con­clu­sion to his book and Schaeffer’s video demon­strat­ing media manip­u­la­tion.¹

This book is writ­ten in the hope that this gen­er­a­tion may turn from that great­est of wicked­ness, the plac­ing of any cre­ated thing in the place of the Cre­ator, and that this gen­er­a­tion may get its feet out of the paths of death and may live ².

Related posts:

1. Scha­ef­fer
2. Book Review: Liv­ing As A Chris­t­ian by A.W. Tozer
3. Book Review: Doing Phi­los­o­phy as a Christian
4. Book Review: The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley
5. Book Review: Redis­cov­er­ing Holi­ness by J.I. Packer