Towards the end of the book, Schaeffer directs his attention to the matter of sexual immorality. He bemoans the breakdown of standards in that area within the evangelical church. Even as we observe the obvious breaking of the moral law of God, there are those who would consider themselves as evangelicals who make excuses. “Well, you know, after all, we’re all human. What can you expect?” they say. “After all, we must be loving, and therefore it must be alright.”
As disturbing as that kind of attitude is, if there is anything which is even more disturbing than the situation that Francis Schaeffer describes, it is the reaction in the evangelical churches to the description of the situation. On one occasion I was at a meeting with some well-known evangelical leaders, and the name of Francis Schaeffer came up because he had written the book I mentioned at the beginning. Some of the people who were there at the meeting said, “Well, you know, Francis Schaeffer is getting old, and he is getting kind of narrow and legalistic in his old age.” But that kind of criticism failed to get to the heart of the issue. The important thing was whether or not Schaeffer was speaking the truth. And if he was speaking the truth, as I believe, then what are we going to do about it?
The apostle Paul would have understood that, except it was not as bad in his day. Oh, it was bad because the world of Paul had this same accommodating spirit. The world does not have any objective standard for right and wrong. The world suppresses, and in some cases is ignorant of, the fact that God has given a moral law which is embodied in the Scriptures and does not change. Consequently, it is no wonder that the world shifts from one moral viewpoint to the next. But that accommodation was not present in the Church then as much as it is now. What is a tragedy is when the shifting takes place in the Church of Jesus Christ, who knows there is a God who has revealed Himself in the Bible and who does have an objective moral standard that is true for all people at all times and in all places.
How did this happen? In order to answer that question, we have to understand that in the Western world, there has been an enormous change that has come in with what we sometimes call “modernism” or which we sometimes call “secular humanism.” Such remarkable change has occurred in at least three areas.
The first area is that the intellectual community of the modern world has moved from belief in an “open system” where God, though invisible, is nevertheless acknowledged to exist, to what you would call today a “closed system” in which all we see is all there is. The only thing that exists is the matter in the universe of which we are a part. There is no spiritual dimension, at least not one that is taken very seriously and makes demands on your life. In the past, there was the idea of God; and from God came nature because nature was made by God, and the laws of nature which could be discovered reflected in some real and true manner the nature of God. And man fit within that pattern as one who was able to know that he had been created by God and was therefore accountable to Him. There was an established order in the universe because it went back to the God who both made it and sustained it.
