How Are We Living Now?

Fifty years after its publication, How Should We Then Live? reads less like a cultural critique and more like a prophetic warning fulfilled. Schaeffer recognized that ideas shape civilizations, worldviews determine moral vision, and abandoning biblical truth ultimately erodes human dignity and freedom. The title is taken from Ezekiel’s watchman passage (Ezek 33:10). The question remains ours: How should we then live?

If I didn’t know any better, I would think this book was written yesterday. The argument it makes may be more relevant now than it was then. In the half century since, many of Schaeffer’s predictions have come true. When it was published in 1976, most evangelicals were reading the moment very differently. Churches were growing, evangelical publishing was booming, and America still looked like it had enough moral capital to coast on. Schaeffer saw beneath the surface. He recognized that the foundations were already shifting and that forsaking biblical truth would eventually reshape every institution of society.

I encountered Schaeffer well into my Christian walk. But because my formation was largely shaped by those he influenced, he is an upstream presence in my thinking. His reach across modern evangelicalism is difficult to overstate. What he handed down to figures like Albert Mohler and Tim Keller meant that, without my even realizing it, Schaeffer had already shaped my life. Later I learned that it was Schaeffer who convinced Jerry Falwell to get involved politically, specifically in light of evangelicals’ passive response to the abortion decision handed down in Roe v. Wade.

Much of Schaeffer’s argument is summarized by the subtitle: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. He spends most of the book weaving through various strands of thought, but this is no mere philosophy textbook. By linking those ideas to their downstream effects in culture, Schaeffer brings home to the reader the importance of ideas and their consequences. He says multiple times that people act in accordance with their worldview. While worldview terminology is now commonplace among evangelicals, this was not the case in Schaeffer’s day. His point was never that people ought to have presuppositions but that they ought to choose them:

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of which worldview is true.

By demonstrating the causal link between culture and its philosophical underbelly, Schaeffer awoke a slumbering generation of evangelicals to live for Christ, no matter the cost.

Though some of his arguments and historical connections may be overstated (e.g., Aquinas is the gateway to modernism), his greatest contribution was never as a historian but as a Christian interpreter of history. His historical sketches are broad, and later scholarship has refined portions of his analysis. History has shown over the last fifty years that Schaeffer’s prophetic words were not alarmism. Abortion, the sexual revolution, decadence, moral decay, and the ever-growing threat of authoritarian regimes pressing in from both the left and the right have not left the scene. Schaeffer saw where that road ends:

It seems that there are only two alternatives in the natural flow of events: first, imposed order or, second, our society once again affirming that base which gave freedom without chaos in the first place—God’s revelation in the Bible and his revelation through Christ.

Fifty years later, we must ask ourselves: How are we living now?

Do we affirm the propositional truth claims of Scripture? Do we live as though moral absolutes exist? Or have we fallen in with the humanistic spirit of the age, the spirit of pragmatism, utilitarianism, hedonism, and moral relativism? Are we willing to push back against those “acceptable” gods, peace and affluence, that render our gospel salt tasteless (Matt 5:13)? Schaeffer will not let us mistake passivity for neutrality:

Here is a sentence to memorize: To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.

And notice what that humanism finally costs us. Schaeffer traced the irony to its end:

The ironic fact here is that humanism, which began with Man’s being central, eventually had no real meaning for people. On the other hand, if one begins with the Bible’s position that man is created by God and in the image of God, there is a basis for that person’s dignity.

Human dignity is not a courtesy we extend to one another and can withdraw. It is secure because man is made in the image of God (Gen 1:27), and it is secure on no other ground.

The book refuses to end in cultural pessimism. Schaeffer never called Christians merely to lament decline; he called them to faithful living:

We are not only to know the right worldview, the worldview that tells us the truth of what is, but consciously to act upon that worldview so as to influence society in all its parts and facets across the whole spectrum of life, as much as we can to the extent of our individual and collective ability.

And he reminds us that Christians need not be a majority for their influence in society to take root. He points us to the apostle Paul speaking on Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17:22) and later his words to the Romans (Rom 12:1), words from the very Spirit of God that so moved the transformed hearts of their hearers that they were willing to be literally set on fire for Jesus. For a moment they were dim lights illuminating the blood-stained streets of Rome; for eternity they are now blinding lights reflecting the source of all light as they worship around the throne of Almighty God, the maker of heaven and earth (Rev 21:23).

The fact that God exists and has not been silent but has stooped down to speak to his people through Christ and his Word (Heb 1:2) is the ground of a full-throated biblical Christianity that brings the gospel to bear on every sphere of life, the same ground the Reformers stood on. Schaeffer puts it this way:

That this God exists and that he has not been silent but has spoken to people in the Bible and through Christ was the basis for the return to a more fully biblical Christianity in the days of the Reformers. It was a message of the possibility that people could return to God on the basis of the death of Christ alone.

Christians, we have access to that Word. Do not neglect it. Unleash it on the world and let the results be the Lord’s (1 Cor 3:7). Fifty years after Schaeffer woke evangelicals from their slumber, we had better stay awake and keep watch (Ezek 33:7), no matter how droopy our tired eyes become. Jesus is Lord. And he is coming back to make all things new (Rev 21:5).