By Udo W. Middelmann
When I walked into the large bookstore to select possible gifts for a friend, I found Francis Schaeffer’s Death in the City in the correct authors-in-alphabetical-order on the shelf. I was drawn to its familiar title but laughed out loud when I noticed that I had wandered over and now stood in front of the Mystery section. That was many years ago. I always wondered who might have bought it for a long reading during a winter evening in front of the fireplace. There was Francis Schaeffer right after Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Dick Francis, Stephen King, Dorothy Sayers, and before Simenon’s Maigret.
What company he kept!
Schaeffer did enjoy working out the truth behind the mysteries others wrote about. Any slice from real life was of interest to him. On days off he would often have his wife, Edith, read such mysteries to him. He would then evaluate them on the basis of whether they were true to real life or merely games authors played with their audiences.
But his concern in Death in the City was not a murder mystery to sharpen people’s analytical skills. Schaeffer presents a case closer related to suicide of an intellectual nature than murder. There is, he suggests, a necessary link between the intellectual and spiritual orientation of a society and its values and practices. He shows how a whole society is threatened by death because it has abandoned the philosophical and ethical foundation and practice, which had been adopted when people during the Protestant Reformation had turned to the biblical view of God and Man.
Schaeffer sees many parallels with an earlier time, when the prophet Jeremiah lamented that death had come to Jerusalem, the place of God’s choosing to put His name, His law, and His promises among the Israelites. While the rulers and the people continued to proclaim that all was well, that there was peace in the city, Jeremiah understood that the edifice would crumble and die once the intellectual and spiritual foundation of the people, on which it had been built, had been altered. He foresaw the destruction of the city by the hands of the Babylonians in the sixth century and the captivity of its inhabitants in foreign servitude for seventy years as a result of turning from the prior knowledge of God.
Francis Schaeffer then takes us to Paul’s letter to the Romans to explain the intellectual and moral consequences of the choices that both ancient people and our own countries face. Turning from the clear teaching of the Bible will not give us a vacuum to be freely filled with personal religious views or preferences. Instead there will be both the experience of the wrath of God and the experience of painful human and even stupid intellectual consequences. The removal of the biblical roots to our life and thought will necessarily dry up the many fruits we have treasured in the past in the form of a responsible, ethical, and creative society.
There is death in the city when the understanding of the human being about himself is no longer related to an actually existing God. For then human beings inhabit an impersonal world of their own shifting values and their own power plays. Without a knowable God in heaven, man is left without real meaning and morals on earth. He will think and act just like pagans, whose integration is with land, earth, and nature (Latin: pagus). The contrast between Jehovah and Baal is carried into our own times with significant practical consequences. The growth of a civil society from the teaching of the Bible in our own past history is not a natural phenomenon. It required self-discipline, grace, and love, together with the rule of law versus the rule of powerful men and women. That deliberate effort is now being reversed with the deliberate denial of God, of reason related to a factual world, and of intellectual integrity.
Civility in the biblical perspective does not only deal with law and social manners, as it did in Athens and Rome. It goes to the heart of the matter and demands personal choices and character development to limit evil while furthering the good. It includes a practice of life that acknowledges the Creator and is faithful to the instructions about how to love God and neighbor even at great personal cost. The existence of the God of the Bible is prerequisite for the value of each individual person. His personality alone and nothing in the impersonal natural universe around us is ground and orientation for our personal existence.
When the God of the Bible is denied, as is the case in pagan cultures, great inhumanity results for the most part.Romans chapter 1 gives a rich illustration of such a relationship between a denial of God and a denial of fundamental humanity. Both reasoning and practice are affected when men and women start only with themselves and nature to build a framework of answers to the basic questions of the origin of Man, the roots of meaning, and an ethic that gives intelligent ground for morals.
In Romans chapter 2 Paul shows how it is also not sufficient to acknowledge the God of the Bible in words alone but not in practice. An equal inhumanity will result. We may then be right about some things, but the life of the community itself will wither, there being no real or lasting meaning to anything but the pursuit of personal peace, affluence, and pleasure. That was the situation addressed in Romans chapter 2.
Jeremiah had faced the same social and intellectual situation in Israel over 500 years before. Without the practical affirmation of God and the determination to live in the reality of His existence with the explanations in His Word, there is no intellectually honest basis for what is Man, what gives meaning, or what are absolute morals. Without this God and man’s understanding of Him, the human being will always go for substitutes: idols as invented gods, ideologies as master plans for life, personal meaning for the moment, and relative morals to serve personal desires.
Schaeffer addressed Death in the City to a generation very much aware of real trouble in the foundations of our post Christian world. There were serious doubts about the survival of the culture that was largely born out of Judaism and Christianity. These doubts went so far that the question became a moral one: With what justification should the Western or European culture survive? Was it not declared to be the cause for so much inhumanity, for so many problems in the world?
There were fat cats who cared little about the poor at home and around the world. The pursuit of ever more things took more time away from human relations, from the family, and from reflection about the deeper things of life. The massive production of things was affecting negatively the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the communities we live in. The crime rate was on the rise. There were riots in Watts, Newark, and Detroit. In Roe vs. Wade a woman’s right of choice was protected against the state and neighbors, but at the expense of violating the right of the growing baby, who could now be killed openly for any reason. The pill gave greater sexual freedoms without the restraints inherent in love and commitment. Theological liberalism did away with a believable Word of God and invited people to see value in all religions . . . or in none. Rationality was readily sacrificed when the religious use of drugs was proposed in search of another reality; the general public followed suit when democratic pluralism was no longer a tool in a common search for wisdom and truth but became an instrument to justify competing rights and hostile reactions.
The death in the city that Schaeffer saw around him was the slowly spreading death of a society formerly based on God’s Word and moral law. People still celebrated, did well in their work, and had all kinds of relationships, and many prospered in material things. Their life was relatively secure, but more because of available capital from the past than from newly affirmed convictions and coherent moral practices.
Schaeffer’s understanding of death in the city was not tied to a particular set of historic circumstances but to the underlying flow from choice to consequences, from loss of the source of life to death, from walking away from God into a world of fragmented, lost, and disoriented individuals without a home.
More than thirty years after the first publication of the book, the title may reveal a pessimism that can easily be judged now to have been premature. From our hindsight the talk about death in the city was perhaps vastly exaggerated. Our cities are safer as the violent crime rate has come down over a good number of years. Much progress has been made in combating the environmental crisis. In fact I like to point out to people surrounded on all sides by the environmental catastrophes of the former Soviet Union or parts of the developing world how much the ecological problems stimulated in our countries a whole new science and industry and provided much employment for an increasing population. Here also Man continues to be not only a problem but also to invent and apply solutions. Life seems to be the winner as physical death is held at bay.
We hear much of the march of human freedoms around the world. They express themselves in greater participation of people in the decisions of their governments as democracies carry the day against the threat of totalitarianism. Markets are opening up around the world, and trade will bring people together in ways that require fast, individual, and rational decisions in response. Economic development has fueled the spread of personal freedoms and profits. Information is available in greater and speedier ways to more people through the printed word and electronic mail. We feel the pulse at a higher rate around the world, even in parts that were closed to us in the recent past. There seems to be so much more life. Even the cities are revitalized. Was Schaeffer then too pessimistic in his analysis? Do Jeremiah and Paul’s letter to the church in Rome address more their own situation and no longer ours?
Death in the City is not a book about economics or sociology. It challenges us to become aware on a much more foundational level of the basic biblical proposition that ideas have consequences. People act on the basis of their world view
Where there is no living God as the true beginning of the universe, affirmed in thought and practice, there would eventually be no safety, no court to appeal to, for the human being in thought and practice. Israel in Jeremiah’s time spoke much of peace in the city, while first the thought world and then the practices of the people hollowed out the intellectual and moral framework of what had been Israel’s strength and protection. When the moral fiber was weakened, the Babylonians came to conquer. The decadence of Jerusalem contained the seed for its eventual destruction. In Rome a similar scenario would be played out centuries later. There is not only a rise to civilizations, but also a falling down.
Schaeffer died before the demolition of the communist system from internal weakness. He had no reason for the optimistic assessment that followed the events of 1989 about amazing advances in personal freedoms, economic growth, faster access to information, and a weakening of central controls in favor of more individual decisions around the world.
There are, of course, tremendous advantages to this development. We should be thankful for the lifting of any burden. Yet with all the triumphal changes for the better, we must not shut our eyes to the continuing suffering, the growth of injustice, and the encouragement of extreme individualism as well.
Our city is for the moment perhaps not marked by an increase in physical death, though we are more vulnerable than ever before. Yet instead of the Babylonians during Jeremiah’s time or a communist threat to the city gates in our generation, we face a moral and ethical death in our city as a consequence of having widely abandoned the biblical moorings in thought and practice. Death now wears different faces but is just as deadly. It relates less to the physical body and more to the way we think and act. We still pump away in our body for our work, but we have lost the valuable life of individuals in daily community.
Our world faces a giant crisis in the city with the spread of AIDS. Twenty-five percent of the present African population is threatened to die of AIDS-related infections. The move of the male for the most part into the city for work and as an escape away from his tribal context makes fidelity a rare virtue. The immune deficiency is spreading even in formerly closed societies like China and Russia and Muslim countries. A greater sexual promiscuity is one aspect of greater freedoms advocated by our entertainment programs around the world. It has not only led to a breakdown of marriages but has adversely affected the very institution of marriage as a commitment to limit the roaming tendencies of human beings. We may know more about the technical aspects of sex, but far less about how to love, care for, and serve other human beings.
The acceptance of homosexuality as an alternate marriage with all legal and societal benefits has also contributed to this increasing focus of life on bodily pleasures and sexual needs. Our society at large has returned to one more form of pagan embrace of all things natural as good, at the expense of thought, rational considerations, and moral reflections. Paul’s warning to the Ephesians (4:17-19) applies to our generation just as much: We should focus on sensitivity rather than on sensuality in our understanding of the truth of Christianity.
Schaeffer would often suggest that our post-Christian society knows as its only limitation what cannot (yet) be done. The limit is set by capabilities. It has no place for the further consideration of what should not be done, which is a moral and transcendent consideration over and above the material and natural world. The rise of religion (Islam, New Age, Mormon, and Christian, to name a few) without a context of intelligent inquiry and the search for an objective truth is perhaps much more an indication of greater individualism and irrationality on the way to belonging somewhere than it is a longing to understand the world we live in. Little wonder that much of the church has become an alternative entertainment experience on the market together with Disney World, shopping malls, fast food, and other sensual happenings.
Conservatives and many Christians alike limit their response too often only to the moral discussion of such issues. They argue for their personal values and object when others act differently. They have their ideology without a foundation in the world of our common reality. The notion that Christianity is true to what is real is largely absent. Positions are taken by faith, not from insight or wisdom about the real world in time and space.
Here is another reason for the increasing death in our city:The city is much more fragmented into selfish individuals with little commitment to the whole. It is inhabited more often by commuters on the tracks to their own dreams than by citizens. They are concerned about their private spheres, their homes and property, their degrees and advancement. They have little interest in their community, their school, their public spaces, and the future of their neighbors. Their personal advance is inordinately more important than the life of their immediate neighbors or the moral and intellectual fiber of their own generation. This is a death of relationships, of common interest, of responsibility for others, of standing in the breach with neighbors next door or around the world. While voluntary help is often remarkable on the spur of the moment or in the face of a catastrophe, any burden to shoulder a responsibility as a matter of fact or ethics is seen as an impingement on personal freedoms and as carrying the stench of socialism.
Our community, our life in the city, is enormously fragmented. It encourages independence as first priority. Mobility, competition, material success, personal development, and the “right” to happiness all focus on the self without giving any awareness that we always live in a social context. We have parents, neighbors, and often siblings. We have not made ourselves and are not accountable only to ourselves. Yet, when the self-made man became the goal, normal human relationships lost the power to stay together. The high divorce rate among the religious and agnostic population alike is one indication of a lack of commitment to anyone other than oneself.
Another sign of fragmentation is the willingness of many parents to pursue their careers at the expense of real relationships between marriage partners and between parents and children, who need a stable home, a rooted life, and a shared identity. We are human by birth, but we become human in relationships of love and personal attention in a firm family identity. Such skills as language, patience, respect, discipline, concentration, or dealing with hardships are acquired best in that context. A caregiver is a poor substitute. It does not take a village (or a state or a system of social services) to raise a child. The large numbers of childcare centers for very young children is meeting a need created by an often very selfish shift in priorities on the part of parents. Yet the price paid in the loss of developmental skills is enormous in the next generation. We raise a generation of perpetual adolescents—petulant, always looking for a quick fix and instant gratification, an entitlement program or a way to sue for respect of their rights.
We should be glad for the flexibility of the workforce to adapt to new situations, to relocate when the need arises, to seek advancement in skill and responsibilities. On the basis of the biblical teaching we are individual persons with individual responsibilities. The Bible uniquely frees us from the idea of a determining fate or the inevitable will of a god. There is no room for the control of socialism, of tribal habits, or of natural conditions. But that does not place us in a vacuum, a space without boundaries. We are to love God with all our heart and our neighbors as ourselves. There are commands to honor parents, to provide for widows and orphans, to raise our children. This means at least that we are not merely to pay for them while we pursue our own selfish career goals. We are individuals but have no license to individualism.
Individualism, not individuality, has resulted in the accompanying dilemma of increased fragmentation from a loss of the sense of place, the experience of home, of loyalty, and of trust. Once abandoned they cannot be called in later. When everything has become so fluid, human relationships themselves also become experiences of strangers meeting in the night. Money and its economic power and, to a lesser extent, position on the job ladder have become the determining factors for values and priorities.
We cannot speak of global relations only when it is to our economic advantage. When true global interests are practiced, our neighbor’s city is also our own. Sadly, we theorize much about global community but turn our backs too easily on those parts we find a hindrance to our enjoyment of life. In addition we readily assume that all development is a matter of expanding material opportunities or democratic elections alone. We disregard the devastating effects of non-biblical religions and the resulting humiliations from gods, governments, and group dependencies.
Fragmentation in our city is widely the result of a lack of a sufficient world view Whether in the hands of the postmodernist or simply in a democratized world of private preferences and personal values, we no longer have a book, an overview, to explain the origin, purpose, and meaning of our existence. Our theologies have destroyed any notion of certainty. The old liberal theologian has denied revelation and thereby silenced God. The conservative has privatized faith into a personal relationship with his Lord. He judges the content and quality of faith by the quantitative growth of followers due to techniques. The educational content in schools has been left waiting to be defined by the study interests of untrained students. Their disinterest in reality is nurtured by stimulating their fantasy. Without our lives being explained in relation to the larger picture, we lack the glasses to see reality adequately, correctly, and coherently. The need for the sharper vision has been replaced by a concern for the sharper image: How do I look, feel, and come across?
The Bible gives a sharp focus on reality, and without excuses. It demands the intelligent participation of the reader and gives intelligent responses to valid questions about all of life. Without that Book we no longer know what to look for and where to look in order to find the basic answers to life’s first questions about Man, life, truth, justice, and beauty. Yet without an accessible answer to these questions each episode of experience, each individual person, each moment in time is separated from the bigger picture. We partake of fragmented bits and pieces without any framework to understand them, to examine them, and to reject the bad, the ugly, and the unjust.
A refrain in Jeremiah said that there was peace, that everything was all right, when there was in fact no peace. In Romans Paul informs us that our lives and society are a mess because we are under the wrath of God since we replaced knowledge of the living God by our own foolish ideas about God, Man, and nature. In our own day we sing the praises of economics, democracy, the growth of religion, and globalization. Yet on the sidelines, behind the stage of our time, wait the monsters of fragmentation and personal greed, and even dictators and their ideology elected by envy and popular will. Without the context of the biblical teaching about Man, meaning, and morals, such rightful insights and tools as democracy, economic interests, global relations, and techniques take on a life of their own. Fanatical religion will replace truth and commitment. They turn the human being into a little god with monstrous, because untrained, irrational and unrestrained intentions who has tools at his disposal to justify the most murderous competition, selfishness, and greed.
The painter Grosz suggested at the beginning of the last century that without God Man does not see himself anymore as the image of God, and so Man becomes a natural monster. Grosz lived in a century that gave us such monsters in the form of evil leaders. Hitler, Stalin, and their followers brought on massive death in pursuit of their master plans for the improvement of the human race.
In the new century just begun we may not face such recognizable evil . . . yet. But the worm is already much closer to the core of our lives. There is death in the city of our society, our relationships, our views on life, our human interests, when we have become the little dictators that determine how everything has to be crushed that does not revolve around our private, personal self-interest, economic advantage, or optimistic expectations. A private morality is related to a personal god, any god who meets my selfish expectations.
Schaeffer’s studies in Jeremiah and Romans will help us to critically appraise the direction of our culture as it distances itself more from its biblical moorings. They will shed light on the undercurrents of our thinking and our life. Hopefully such reflections will help us swim against the tide in the intellectual and practical whirlpools that continuously threaten life in the city.
Udo W. Middelmann
Director, The Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation
CH 1882 Gryon, Switzerland