This is just a wee transcription of some of my journaling as I was leaving Thailand and heading home the other day:

I've finished Francis Schaeffer's Trilogy while being out here, so my mind has been challenged and I've thought through and processed a fair amount of what he has been communicating his books. He has a lot of good hings to say. The Trilogy lays a foundation for the rest of his books. Now he could go much more in depth in his discussion of the progression of thoughts from Greek philosophy to today- post-modern, irrational man- but the overview he takes his reader through lays the groundwork for further discussion in his later books.

His general layout is as follows:

Philosophy|

           |__Arts|

                  |__Music|

                          |__General Culture|

                                            |__Theology

This is the progression of how ideas infiltrate culture. He would say that Kierkegaard, with the help of Karl Barth and Immanuel Kant, pushed the theological culture into existentialism, but the birth pangs were mainly felt by Jean-Paul Sarte in the "secular" world. He refers to this final "jump" into irrationality as the jump after the line of despair. Rational thought could only take men so far and when they came up bankrupt and devoid of meaning, purpose, knowledge of truth, morality, etc. the only answer they could come up with at this point of despair, was to just believe for the sake of believing.

PersonalInfinite

-------------God------------

       __________

Man       | Man

________________________________|Nature

NatureMachine

MachineCreation

Creation

This is the chasm we face. Only God is infinite, but man is unique in the fact that he was also created in the image of God and this is personal, or he has personality. Man is unique compared to the rest of creation in regards to being personal, but on the same level in regards to his finiteness.

The traditional tension has always been between:

Grace___

Nature [man/nature}

The Judeo-Christian tradition is comfortable with this tension and diversity and finds unity in the two as God created nature and is the ultimate, un-created One who has always and will always, existed. God gives us this revelation and though creation is good, but fallen, we can have unity on both sides of this line.

As man grew more autonomous and his thinking began to change (starting in many ways with Thomas Aquinas and his incomplete view of the fall [mind is still good and we can use it to figure God out] and mixing of theology with classical Greek thought and literature), nature began taking a more prominent view. This began as man recognized nature as good and part of God’s creation and we can enjoy it, but soon nature began to take on an equal to man:

Grace____

Nature [man-nature]

As this progressed, man started to close the system and God became distant (Deism) and uninvolved in our day to day lives. This quickly led into not need God at all and nature became the absolute (naturalism). As nature and man (man at the top of nature [humanism]) took center stage, they became autonomous from God. Whenever this happens, nature “eats up” grace, as Schaeffer points out. If God isn’t absolute any longer, we still “need” something higher than ourselves. Thoughts began changing. “Freedom” began to replace “grace” as the highest goal:

Freedom

Nature- man’s ability to think used to KNOW

This expanded the chasm even more and prepared the way for modern existentialism. Reason was bound up in the lower-story part. Man’s ability to reason and use rational thought was part of nature, and we begin to see non-reason take on the characteristics of the upper story. As man continued to look to his own ability to take thought and use reason as his epistemological base, he quickly began to see that this was not sufficient to provide a solid base. If man’s ability to reason wasn’t sufficient in itself, then true freedom most come from somewhere else:

Non-reason

Reason

This opened the door for Sarte, Kierkegaard, Barth and Kant (among others) to make their irrational jump into non-reason. This came at the heels of men like Heidegger and Hegel changing the entire way of thinking away from antithesis to synthesis. It used to be that “O” represented a system of thought as a whole, a unity. When someone found this lacking, they would cross it out “Ø” and start over with a new “O”, or a new system. “O” represented a unity of a thought system, everything that can be known. This would continue on and on and on, grounded in antithetical thinking that if A, then A is not non-A. So we see this:

ØØØØØØØO

Hegel, followed by Heidegger, blasted this away and introduced the idea of dialectical synthesis. The previous way of using antithetical thinking used the idea of Thesis (T) and Antithesis (A). Hegel proposed that instead of starting over (as he saw that within this closed-system universe there will never be an adequate system of thought encompassed in an “O”) he saw the answer lies in a synthesis (S) of T and A. It’s not either T or A, but an arbitrary combination, or synthesis, of both T and A:

S

|

   T-----A

This goes on and on as the synthesis becomes the new thesis, etc. Marx and Engels applied this epistemological structure to the realm of society, politics and economics and birthed what we know today as Marxism, carried out in the form of Maxist-Leninist Socialism (typically categorized as a more violent attempt of reaching pure communism) and Fabian Socialism (popularly defined as reaching the same goal- a classless, utopian society or community- but the attempt to achieve this is a bit more diplomatic than it’s counterpart).

This dialectical thinking then paved the way for relativism and the total absolvement of truth. Kierkegaard and his company wouldn’t have been able to take hold and shift thought, had there not been Hegel or Heidegger. Since there was no longer any foundation for truth and we were only left with arbitrary, relativistic synthesis (which is where REASON brought us), our only hope to find truth, purpose and meaning was to make the “leap of faith” into the area of non-reason and irrationality. Thus, existentialism. Life has no inherent meaning, so we must create our own meaning. How we do this, is the process which tkes us from Kierkegaard (Freud, Jung, Jaspers, etc all give us more detail in what specifically brings meaning, along with Cage, Leary, Alduous Huxley, etc) towards our current “post-modern” trend towards mysticism, which is even more irrational thought.

This is just some thoughts on the plane and so I am sure I am off on some of this and open to correction. I also had the opportunity to process some more of this while I was still Thailand, so hopefully I will be able to take some more time now that I am home to clean up the thoughts and present it in a more coherent form.