* A selection from Francis Schaeffer on the "point of tension" in every person's thinking.
Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There in Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1990 [1968]).
Let us remember that every person we speak to, whether shop girl or university student, has a set of presuppositions, whether he or she has analyzed them or not. The dot in the diagram represents a person’s non-Christian presuppositions; the point points to what would be the logical conclusion of those non-Christian presuppositions.
If a man were completely logical to his presuppositions, he would come out at the line on the right. If he arrived there in thinking and life, he would be consistent to his presuppositions.
But, in fact, no non-Christian can be consistent to the logic of his presuppositions. The reason for this is simply that a man must live in reality, and reality consists of two parts: the external world and its form, and man’s “mannishness,” including his own “mannishness.” No matter what a man may believe, he cannot change the reality of what is. As Christianity is the truth of what is there, to deny this, on the basis of another system, is to stray from the real world:
Every man, therefore, irrespective of his system, is caught. As he tries intellectually to extend his position in a logical way and then live within it, his is caught by the two things which, as it were, slap him across the face…. Non-Christian presuppositions simply do not fit into what God has made, including what man is. This being so, every man is in a place of tension. Man cannot make his own universe and then live in it. (132)
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Torn by Two Consistencies
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Every person is somewhere along the line between the real world and the logical conclusion of his or her non-Christian presuppositions. Every person has the pull of two consistencies, the pull towards the real world and the pull towards the logic of his system. He may let the pendulum swing back and forth between them, but he cannot live in both places at once. He will be living nearer to one or to the other, depending on the strength of the pull at any given time. To have to choose between one consistency or the other is a real damnation for man. The more logical a man who holds a non-Christian position is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world; and the nearer he is to the real world, the more illogical he is to his presuppositions. (133-134)
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The Tensions Are Felt in Differing Strengths
We have said that every person, however intelligent or lacking in intelligence, has stopped somewhere along the line towards the consistent conclusion of his own position. Some people are prepared to go further from the real world than others, in an attempt to be more logical to their presuppositions. The French existentialists Camus and Sartre exhibited this:
Sartre said that Camus was not sufficiently consistent on the basis of their mutual presuppositions. The reason for this was because Camus never gave up “hope,” centered in random personal happiness, though it went against the logic of his position. Or, as was stated when Camus received the Nobel prize, because he never gave up the search for morals, though the world seemed to be without meaning. These are the reasons why, of the two, Camus was more loved in the intellectual world. He never go the real world sorted out, as we have seen from his book The Plague, but he was nearer to it than Sartre.
Sartre was correct to say that Camus was illogical to their presuppositions; but, as we saw before, he could not be consistent either. When he signed the Algerian Manifesto, taking a position as though morals have real meaning, he too was being inconsistent to his own presuppositions. Thus Sartre was also in tension.
Each person may move up or down the line at different times in their lives, according to their circumstances, but most people more or less stabilize at one point. Every non-Christian, whether he is sleeping under the bridges in Paris or is totally bourgeois, is somewhere along the line.
This is not an abstraction, for each of these persons is created in the image of God, and thus is in tension because within himself, there are things which speak of the real world. Men in different cultures have different standards for morals, but there is no one who does not have some moral motions. Follow a modern girl through her day. She may seem totally amoral. But if you were to get to know her you would find that, at some point, she felt the pull of morals. Love may carry different expressions, but all men have some motions of love. The individual will feel this tension in different ways—with some it will be beauty, with some it will be significance, with some it will be rationality, with some it will be the fear of nonbeing. (134-135)
