Finally he gets to his oft-discussed “line of despair” which “arises from the abandonment of the hope of a unified answer for knowledge and life.” Of course, autonomous Nature soon ate up Freedom as well, and he illustrates this as he runs quickly through the philosophies of Kant, Rousseau, de Sade, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. In Chapter 3, he notes that following the Renaissance-Reformation period, the problem of Nature and Grace turned into a problem instead of Nature and Freedom. As time went on, autonomous Nature began to eat up this Grace and, in Chapter 2, he states: “thus art and science themselves soon began to be meaningless.” In Chapter 1, Schaeffer suggests that all present-day philosophic trends began with Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between “Nature” and “Grace,” a move which made man’s intellect autonomous with no relationship to Scripture. This review will briefly summarize Schaeffer’s key points and then point out just one intriguing and applicable thought besides. Building upon similar threads of reasoning that he developed in his monumental work, The God Who is There, Francis Schaeffer in his follow-up work Escape from Reason delivers a most challenging decree to true believers not only that we must all understand the thought-forms that permeate our time periods and cultures, but that we must also engage those thought-forms in honest debate, pitting such ever-evolving philosophies against the ever-stable Word of God.
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