By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I should know more than I do about the late evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer. I have been coming across his name for decades now in various conservative Christian publications, usually in a favorable light. If I remember correctly, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, during his years as editor of First Things, was especially complimentary of his work in laying the intellectual groundwork for the religious right in the 1980s. But I never got around to reading anything by Schaeffer. Maybe someday. It is on my “to do” list. It was for that reason that I went out of my way to read a column about his son Frank Schaeffer, written by Nick Tabor on the August 3 edition of the web site The Daily Beast.
According to Tabor, Frank Schaeffer has spent much of his adult life separating himself from his father’s Christian beliefs. In his 2011 book, Sex, Mom, and God, he writes of the “insanity and corruption” of the religious right that his father helped launch. He endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008. His newest book is entitled Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God.
An atheist who believes in God? Schaeffer is confronting what it means to reject his family’s Christianity. He is trying to find meaning in life if there is no God, no objective right and wrong, no afterlife. It was Macbeth’s problem too, you will recall: What do you do after you have concluded that life is nothing more than a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?
Tabor writes of Schaeffer’s belief that “brain chemistry undermines” the Christian understanding of “free will and personhood,” and “that psychology explains away love and altruism.” He rejects “the easy comfort” he once took “from believing in eternal life,” calling it an “increasingly foolish” superstition. The problem is that these conclusions lead to an emptiness that he finds troubling. He is left searching for a way to satisfy his need for “something beyond the material, beyond the scope of empirical observation.” He writes of his belief in a “spiritual reality hovering over” life.
“It seems to me,” Schaeffer explains, “that there is an off-stage and an on-stage quality to my existence. I live on-stage, but I have another crew working off-stage.” He has been searching through “various mystical traditions” for an answer to the puzzle, exploring the Chinese understanding of the “eternal Tao” that cannot “be marginalized by quantum physics,” the “Hindu chant ‘neti, neti’ — ‘not this, not this’,” which instructs us “that whatever the divine might be, we limit our experience of it when we try to describe it.” He ponders the implications of the theories of a 17th-century mystic who describes God as “pure nothingness,” the “source of being and life,” who “cannot belong to the realm of being as such.”
He examined the work of Anthony Bloom, a Russian Orthodox bishop who died in 2003. Bloom wrote of God as an experience that is “like hearing notes from a violin and knowing that it’s music rather than simply noise, as a scientific hypothesis that helps us hold together our bits of knowledge . . . always limited and inadequate. Just as the scientist doubts his model while knowing there’s a stable reality behind it, the believer trusts that God is there, however ridiculous and anthropomorphic our notions of God might be.”
Schaeffer writes of his need for “a new category other than theism, atheism, or agnosticism that takes paradox and unknowing into account.”
Whew! Aren’t you glad you have Jesus’ words to live by so that you don’t have to muddle through this gobbledygook?
Perhaps I should take back that last sentence. We don’t want to appear flippant about this. The struggle to answer the ultimate question about our existence is no joking matter. We have no answer for why some accept Jesus and why some do not. Still, it has to be said: Jesus came to earth to give us the answer to Frank Schaeffer’s questions about the “crew working off-stage.” It is why the “Word was made flesh, and came to dwell among us; and we had sight of his glory, glory such as belongs to the Father’s only begotten Son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Jesus revealed to us the nature of what Frank Schaeffer calls the “spiritual reality hovering above us.” It is not “pure nothingness.” It is a Father in Heaven, who “loves his Son, and so has given everything into his hands; and he who believes in the Son possesses eternal life” (John 3:34).
Jesus taught us that God is not “neti, neti,” but a loving Creator who will care for us with greater attention than the “lilies of the field,” which He has “arrayed beyond Solomon in all his glory.” Jesus instructed us not to be preoccupied with the questions, “What are we to eat? or What are we to drink? or How shall we find clothing? It is for the heathen to busy themselves over these things.” We have a Father “in heaven who knows that you need them all” (Matt. 6:31-33)
Frank Schaeffer is drawn to the notion “that whatever the divine might be, we limit our experience of it when we try to describe it.” I’ll have to think about that a bit more. But the point is we don’t have to “describe it” on our own. Jesus teaches, “Are not sparrows sold two for a penny? And yet it is impossible for one of them to fall to the ground without your heavenly Father’s will. And as for you, he takes every hair of your head into his reckoning. Do not be afraid, then, you count for more than a host of sparrows” (Matt. 10: 28-32).
We are to forgive those who trespass against us, not because of our rumination about that which “holds together our bits of knowledge….always limited and inadequate,” but because the Father who gives us our daily bread will forgive us our sins if we do so. “Absolute nothingness” can’t do these things.
Jesus warned that “whoever acknowledges me before men, I too will acknowledge him before my Father who is in heaven; and whoever disowns me before men, before my Father in heaven I too will disown him” (Matt. 10:32-33). I don’t want anyone to think that I am placing Frank Schaeffer is in that category. I haven’t a clue to the state of his soul and what motivates him to live his life trying to escape the dreariness of atheism by redefining the meaning of the word. But I will say that Jesus offers answers to the questions that vex him.
Too simplistic? Maybe. Then again, perhaps that is what Jesus was warning us about when He said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress