God Who Is There

Francis Schaeffer wrote The God Who Is There as a comprehensive response to what he saw as the philosophical crisis engulfing Western civilization in the 1960s. Drawing from his experience establishing L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, where he engaged with skeptical intellectuals and university students, Schaeffer crafted this work to address the growing influence of secular humanism, existentialism, and relativism that he believed were undermining the foundations of rational thought and meaningful communication.

Schaeffer's central argument traces what he calls "the line of despair" through modern philosophy, art, music, and theology, showing how Western thought abandoned absolute truth and rational discourse in favor of relativistic systems that ultimately lead to meaninglessness. He contends that this philosophical shift created an unbridgeable chasm between the upper story of values and meaning and the lower story of facts and reason. Against this fragmentation, Schaeffer presents Christian theism as the only worldview that provides a unified field of knowledge, accounting for both the existence of absolute truth and the possibility of genuine human knowledge. He argues that the infinite-personal God of Christianity offers the necessary reference point for logic, ethics, and meaning, and that biblical revelation provides the foundation for rational discourse about ultimate questions.

The book became foundational for evangelical apologetics and helped shape a generation of Christians who sought to engage secular culture intellectually. Schaeffer's analysis of cultural trends and his method of presuppositional apologetics influenced numerous Christian thinkers and institutions. His emphasis on the necessity of absolute truth as the basis for meaningful communication continues to resonate in contemporary debates about relativism and postmodernism.

Who should read this: Christians seeking to understand how to engage secular philosophy and defend the rationality of faith, particularly those interested in cultural apologetics and presuppositional approaches to Christian thought. This work is less suitable for readers looking for purely devotional material or those seeking detailed exegetical studies of Scripture.