How Should We Then Live?

I just finished listening to an interview with noted Christian-turned-atheist Dan Barker who mentioned Frank Schaeffer, son of Francis Schaeffer, who's made some interesting decisions about faith. I haven't read Frank's books, but I watched his father's film series "How Should We Then Live?" as a teenager, both at Bethel Baptist Church on 736 E 26th Street in Erie, PA, and again at Bethel Christian School in that church (before it moved to the other side of town on West 38th Street), so I saw many segments twice.[1]

Francis Schaeffer was a colorful and soft-spoken person with a wealth of knowledge and insightful opinion on the decline of the West. I can't say I share his view, but it's intriguing. (Going by memory, but it often boiled down to "order is better than disorder in human expression and disorder heralds decline," hence Romanticism, rock-n-roll, expressionism, etc, are symptoms of decline and we will fall like Rome if we continue on this path[2]).

I love the 18th Century neo-classic wits (Pope, Dryden, et al) and a there was a similar criticism of the subsequent ages that saw departure from rigorous meter and elevated topics. I love it all, actually. I'm edified by Alexander Pope and transported by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and though I never experimented with recreational drugs (whether you believe that or not), I'm attracted to the image of the secluded poet discovering words and images under the influence; I'm a child of the 60s, I'm wired to be sympathetic to this picture.

The difference between the 18th Century and the 19th is very similar to the much more rapid back-and-forth in popular culture we see today, which bounces between order/familiarity and disorder/irreverence. The Cosby Show ushered in Married with Children, Leave it to Beaver led to The Munsters, the feel-good bubbly 30s and 40s gave us the Beat Generation, the hippies moved aside for the punks, etc. In other words, each "generation" rebels against the previous and creates something different with the same tools (which often includes anger).

I put "generation" in quotes because those changes could once be measured in hundreds of years, then dozens, then a few. It used to take a couple lifetimes to create towering figures like Milton or Pope that could define an era. We now tend to divide things by decades for the sake of convenience, but of course humanity changes at its own speed and pays no attention to the calendar. The dizzying ping-pong effect can be as short as a year.


Listen to the Interview
Dan Barker - U-Turn on the Road to Damascus
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/dan_barker_u-turn_on_the_road_to_damascus/

Books by Frank Schaeffer
http://www.amazon.com/Frank-Schaeffer/e/B000AP9HNQ/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1315875849&sr=8-1

How Should We Then Live?
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+should+we+then+live%3F&aq=f


[1]
I have very fond memories of watching Flame in the Wind (1971), a film out of Bob Jones University, shown at Bethel Baptist Church during Watch Night Service (which, to the uninitiated, is New Years Eve). We took friends with us, Rich Nickel and Dave Nickel, with whom I've lost contact now. The film was very powerful for my 9-year-old mind; some images stay with me still, including Mr Henry yelling at all us kids for leaving a trail of popcorn from the kitchen downstairs back up to the sanctuary where the film was shown. 9-year-olds aren't very concerned with those things, and we were treating the sanctuary like a theater, since most of us weren't allowed to go to movies and going to a movie at church where you get to see guys burned at the stake was like a birthday and Christmas all wrapped up in one. All that was missing was an alien and some pretty girls in shiny clinging costumes. By the way, the building at 736 E 26th Street was in fact designed to be converted to a theater in the event the owners or buyers ever wanted to do that. My Grandpa Cairns told me that. The sloping floor and vast interior would seem to confirm this.

Flame in the Wind
http://www.baptisttop1000.com/Video-Flame_in_the_Wind.html

[2]
All things come to an end, including countries. I recall reading in college accounts from the Roman countryside written only a few years before Rome was sacked. They wrote of their expansive beautiful vineyards and idyllic lives, completely oblivious to the changes that were coming.