“Christianity is not just a series of truths in the plural, but Truth spelled with a capital ‘T’—truth about total reality, not just about religious things.
— Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There
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The God Who is There
I was just entering my teens when the hippie movement swept into town. I began to hear strange new phrases — “Make love, not war,” “Back to the land,” “Free love.” I didn’t yet have the understanding to grasp what was really happening, but I sensed that the world was shifting, and beneath the colour and music, I felt a quiet despair. People were reaching for something, freedom, meaning, transcendence, yet finding only confusion in their search.
It was into this restless period, before and beyond that world that Francis Schaeffer spoke. When he first published The God Who Is There in 1968, the cultural ground was already trembling with revolt, doubt, and disillusionment — the aftermath of two world wars, the rise of existentialism, and the dawning of a post-Christian West. I was still in school when it appeared and I am just reading the book now, and though its language was aimed at the intellectuals of its time, its message has proven strikingly prophetic. Schaeffer’s book has not simply survived the passing decades; it has continued to interpret them. His analysis of truth, meaning, and the human condition speaks with a relevance that modern readers cannot easily ignore.
At the heart of Schaeffer’s argument lies a concern that Western civilization has crossed what he famously called the “line of despair.” By this he meant that modern thought had abandoned the idea of absolute truth; truth that exists independently of our opinions and emotions. Beginning with philosophers like Hegel and Kierkegaard, Schaeffer traces a slow but decisive shift: reason and revelation were separated, faith became detached from fact, and knowledge itself became fragmented. What was once a unified worldview rooted in the reality of a personal God had broken apart into pieces. For Schaeffer, this wasn’t a purely intellectual tragedy; it was a human one. The denial of truth leads inevitably to despair, because without a foundation, meaning and morality collapse. People may still talk about love, purpose, or beauty, but those words lose their coherence when detached from the reality of a Creator who defines them.
To make this change visible, Schaeffer introduced his memorable image of the two-story universe. In the lower story, modern people retain what can be evaluated by science — the realm of facts and reason. In the upper story, they place things like faith, morals, and meaning — matters that, they claim, cannot be known but only “believed.” This division, Schaeffer argued, results in an incoherent existence. Faith becomes a blind leap into the dark, not an encounter with reality. In such a divided world, people live paradoxical lives: rational in one area, irrational in another. Schaeffer saw this not only in philosophy but in art, music, and literature. Picasso’s distorted figures, Beckett’s absurd plays, and Sartre’s existential novels all testify to the same loss — the abandonment of unity and purpose. Culture, for Schaeffer, is the mirror of philosophy. It reveals what a society genuinely believes about the world and about itself.
What makes The God Who Is There prophetic is not only its diagnosis but its accuracy. Schaeffer wrote before the full flowering of postmodernism, yet he foresaw its contours with remarkable precision. Today, when truth is often treated as personal preference and moral boundaries are considered oppressive, his warnings seem almost clairvoyant. He understood that the denial of truth would not produce freedom but fragmentation, not enlightenment, but loneliness. Schaeffer’s analysis anticipated a time when people would feel alienated not only from God but from themselves as they sojourned as restless wanderers in a world stripped of meaning. In this sense, The God Who Is There is not merely a book of apologetics but a work of cultural prophecy.
Despite his intellectual rigor, Schaeffer’s tone is never cold. His critique of modern thought is driven by compassion. He writes as one who has looked into the abyss of meaninglessness and found, not despair, but the steady presence of the living God. “He is there,” Schaeffer insists, “and He is not silent.” This simple affirmation grounds his entire worldview. God has spoken — in creation, in Scripture, and ultimately in Jesus Christ. Truth is not an abstract concept but a Person who entered history. Because God is both real and communicative, knowledge is possible. Meaning is possible. Love is possible. Christianity, for Schaeffer, is not a blind leap but a coherent and comprehensive explanation of reality — the only one that fits the world as it actually is.
Reading The God Who Is There today, feels like hearing an echo that has grown louder with the years. The cultural fragmentation Schaeffer described has deepened, but so too has the hunger for what he proclaimed: a truth that unites heart and mind, a faith that makes sense of both the cosmos and the soul. His invitation is as relevant now as it was then — to cross back over the line of despair and rediscover the God who is not silent. Schaeffer’s book stands, therefore, not only as a defence of Christianity but as a call to intellectual and spiritual integrity. It reminds us that reality has structure, that truth is not a relic of the past, and that hope is grounded in something more solid than shifting opinion. It is, in every sense, a prophetic voice still calling out in the wilderness of modern doubt.
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.”
Isaiah 5:20 (ESV)
Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968).
