So this hour what we're going to do is turn our attention to what I'm calling somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Schaefer's Hobby Horses. Just to give a bit of an overview of Schaefer and his work, some of the things that are what I would call recurring themes or big issues that he continually comes back to in his writing and in his speaking ministry. Let's first of all think of Schaefer as a polarizing figure. And here I'm doing something called pre-suasion. If you've ever heard of that technique. It's setting you up for what's going to come a little later. In other words, yes we're going to do a critique of Schaefer and it's going to be a fair critique, but Let's start out by thinking about who Schaefer was and why it makes him a little difficult to critique. And one is that he was a polarizing figure. And here I want to say that there are three types of people. Those who love Schaefer, present company included, those who hate him, and those who have never heard of him. And that's kind of how he goes. I think for most people, it's gonna be either you really, really like what he has to say, or you really don't like him. Either you don't like the way he says what he says, or maybe you don't like the message or some of both. Something I would encourage you to think about, especially those of you who are headed towards the work of the ministry, is that Schaeffer lived a life in full view of the public. I would say even more so than most men who were in the ministry. Because there were literally thousands of people who came and stayed with him either for a few days or a few weeks or a few months at Labrie. He constantly had people coming through his house. There were people in and out of his life all the time. It wasn't as if he could go off and live some kind of secret scandalous life by himself or keep parts of his self secret as it were. I think whatever we know about Schaefer, it's there. And we're not trying to idolize him. He was a man of clay feet, so to speak. But it's also the case that he also lived a life in view of the public. So it makes it a little easier for us to pick up on things that others we might not see, simply because they're not as public in their ministry. What do you mean by clay feet? Clay feet meaning that he wasn't perfect. Feet of clay, it's an expression that we have that just means that he was a fallen man like the rest of us. So he had his faults, his shortcomings, and we'll see some of that come out as we continue to look at his life. So what makes Schaeffer tick? This is where I'd like to start with the idea that he was evangelical, that it was his particular concern to reach the lost and to do that by answering serious questions. So we think in broad terms, what is apologetics about? It should be about answering questions. We think of the verse that says, be prepared to give a defense to anyone who asks you for the hope that is in you. And so in a very broad sense, apologetics is the ability to answer questions when people ask. And so people from literally all over the world, all walks of life, came to Schaeffer during his ministry to ask those kinds of questions. They knew that his ministry, called Labrie, which means the shelter, was a place where they could come and ask their questions and be taken seriously, have those questions answered seriously. So for Schaeffer, when we talk about his apologetics, we can't divorce that from evangelism, because for him it was not apologetics in the sense of simply being able to explain why Christianity is true compared to every other worldview. It was the goal to be able to reach the lost by answering their questions and even describing that as a kind of pre-evangelism. So that was a driving force in his ministry and throughout his life. He was a passionate defender of truth in an age dominated increasingly by humanism. Humanism being that idea that man is the center of all things. He is the measure of all things. By his own reason, or his own effort, or by his own experience, he can figure everything out for himself. There doesn't have to be anything or anyone outside of him who is a source of knowledge or authority. And that, of course, turns man into, frankly, a disaster because of the fall. Man in his fallenness is only going to lead himself into despair if he tries to reason or experience his way, so to speak, to the truth. So Schaeffer was fighting humanism not just in the culture, but also in the church. Because by the time Schaeffer comes along, in the 1920s, he's a teenager in the Northern Presbyterian Church, and he's seeing that, and this is before he's a Christian, But as a fairly discerning young man, he's noticing that the church is not giving any real answers. And then as we'll see a little later, he is providentially introduced to the world of philosophy and starts reading philosophy and finds it fascinating, but also quickly discovers that philosophy doesn't have the answers either. So, This is the kind of time that he lived in, where both in the church and in the society, whether you're taking a religious tack or not, you're not getting the answers to the big questions. Interestingly, that drove him, before he abandoned his religion, to pick up the Bible and read it. And a funny thing happened. Starting from Genesis, he realized that scripture had the answers. We could describe Schaefer as a thinker and as a generalist. He had very broad interests across many different fields of study. This will be a point of criticism later on because he wasn't always as precise in those other fields such as history and philosophy as the historians and the philosophers would have liked. But he was looking for the broad trends. He wanted to understand things from the big picture. So he was not an academic specialist. And part of what that means is that he's really difficult to categorize. It's almost endemic to academia that you have to categorize everything. You want to put a name and a word. Somebody classified him as a big bandit. Yes, and I think he would be comfortable with that label perhaps more so than any other, because for him it really was about reaching the lost with the gospel. All these other things were simply tools, so to speak, to help him do that, to accomplish that task. But of course if you're an academic, you have a specialized field, and you think everybody else should too, and you want to relate to everybody else according to how you classify them into those compartments. And I'm thinking of the example that Ken Ham, who is a creation apologist, likes to use. He likes to use the example of the duck-billed platypus. What is the duck-billed platypus? It's not a duck. It lays eggs, it's a mammal, it's an aquatic mammal that lays eggs and has a bill. What is it? How do we classify it? Well, I think it illustrates that God has a sense of humor in his creativity, that he's able to do something like that. But that gives us kind of an analogy for thinking of Schaefer because he was sort of like that. We might think of him as kind of a collection of odd parts that are hard to classify. But that's part of what made him interesting. He was an intensely curious person. I would say that he was both eclectic, meaning having broad interests, and iconoclastic, meaning that he was willing to challenge the establishment, whatever it was. He was naturally confrontational and controversial. And so any of those combination of things is going to make somebody a little bit irritating and even more so when you can't quite put a finger on what he is. Now here's what I think of Paul again saying that he's all things to all men. And that doesn't mean giving up your beliefs, but it means being able to adapt yourself to the person that you're talking to. And I think we see in his ministry at Labrie, his ability to sit down and ask questions and listen, and to be able to craft a message in the language of the person that he's speaking to, to be able to answer him in his own, what he calls his own thought forms. He was certainly not inclined to entertain his critics. That can be kind of an annoyance if you're criticizing somebody and they don't respond. He was not interested in engaging in public debates. There are those today, I'm thinking of somebody like James White whose career seems to be engaging in public debates. I think hardly a week goes by that he's not debating one person or another. And perhaps there's some value in that, but that was not Schaeffer's thing. He was more interested in the ministry of working with individuals. We'll see that he was a man of enormous energy. He was somewhat noted in his college years for the amount of energy that he had. and also considerable intellect and someone who distinguished himself in his studies after his conversion. And he was converted around the age of 18. So just about the time that he's finishing high school and getting ready to think about what's next in his life. So in his case, his conversion gave considerable focus to his studies. I think we could describe him as a man for his times. one that we could regard as a modern prophet. In what sense? Not someone who is speaking inspired words from God, but a prophet in the sense of one who understands the times that he's living in and is warning both the church and the culture about what's happening. As we think about what we want to get out of our study, I would put it like this. that rather than thinking in terms of how do we imitate or duplicate him, let's think about how we can take what he's done and extend that work. I expect that that's what he would like for us to do. In fact, as I thought about it recently, you know the danger of studying somebody like this is that you get a reputation for being an expert on someone's life and ministry. And I wonder what Schaeffer would have said if he thought there were those in the present day who were studying his life and ministry for the purpose of being experts in his life and ministry. He would probably scoff at that idea. He would say, you shouldn't be trying to study my life just to know what I did. What you should be doing is take what I did, take what I said, and put it to use. So think in terms as we undergo this course, how can we take up where Schaefer left off? Because there's plenty of work to do. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Leland. I give kudos to his wife. Yes he did and we'll talk a little about that as well. We could make a study of Edith's life as well and she wrote far more than he did in terms of sheer volume. But I think it was she who said at one point that in their ministry they had to be prepared to lose everything that had been gifted to them in their wedding within like the first two or three years. A lot of stuff apparently walked out of the house with some of their guests. But it shows the kind of dedication they had to ministering to people of all kinds. And there's no question. I almost feel there's a sense of, how can I put this? It doesn't seem fair that in this class we're going to be putting almost all of our emphasis on Francis Schaeffer. Because if we could, we would probably want to balance that out with the life of Edith Schaefer as well, because they were certainly partners in their ministry. And even Fran has said, if you want to understand the work of Labrie, you need to read Edith's books as well, not just his own. So that's a good point. Appreciate you bringing that up. Any other thoughts there? Randy. It was one of the two books on the church. It was either Eli's book or the one that we're going to read as a class at the end of the 20th century or before the watching world. He challenged the church to be willing and ready to do the same, to open their home to strangers, unkept people. That's a hard pill to swallow. It is. They certainly lived a life of hospitality. They demonstrated something close to an ideal of Christian hospitality in their work at Labrie. That's one of the remarkable things about that work. Not just ministering to those who came, but showing hospitality to total strangers. And parenthetically, how could they do that? Can you think of what might be the secret to how they were able to do that? I think that they displayed a life of not only evangelism and hospitality, but discipleship. And I think my passion is discipleship, because I think that discipleship is as important as evangelism, because you can evangelize somebody, and where do they go from there if they're not discipled? Right. And they were willing to bring those people into their home and actually have them live with them and disciple them. Yeah, the hard work of discipleship. What I'm getting at, and I like to ask questions that you have no idea what I'm asking. It's just one of my unfortunate habits. Part of what animated their ministry from the very beginning was their total dependence upon God. And that included bringing those people to LaBrie who needed to come. They didn't advertise, right? So, yes, you're entertaining strangers, but if your confidence is in God to bring those specific people to you, then you're simply ministering to those, not who just showed up, but those whom the Lord has brought to you for that ministry. So that's something, if you study more about the work of Labrie, that that comes out very strongly, that from the very beginning, they founded that ministry with a dependence upon God to bring them the resources they need to run it, the people that they needed to run it, and the people that they needed to minister to. And they did that for decades. And Labrie still continues today. Okay, other thoughts? number of times in, in other, in other texts, he would say, here we were, down to the minute. We were going to be kicked out of Switzerland, or whatever, whatever the need was. And all of a sudden, a check shows up. Yeah, so they showed throughout the work of that ministry a dependence upon the providence of God. And they founded that ministry with the idea of demonstrating the existence of God. And so that was kind of an outworking of that. That dependence, that willingness to be right on the edge of having to close the doors or having to leave. and seeing how God worked in those circumstances and brought just the right people at just the right time and provided just the right place and just the right location. Those are all part of the back story of how God worked through that ministry and through their lives. include the ministry neo-caipiria Yeah, I was thinking about the same thing before class, that if we had to classify Schaefer, we'd probably put him sort of in the Kuyperian category, but here again, I'm sure he would scoff at us trying to categorize him in that way, but your point is correct. In fact, I'm suspicious that you're reading my notes. that he did see a unity in all of life between the spiritual life and the everyday life. All right, let's look at some recurring themes, and I may need to pick up the page just a little bit so that we have enough time. Whatever we may not finish, by the way, since you have in your printed notes, you can still expect to be included as material for the quiz, so just FYI. The one that I put at the top of the list here is the inerrancy of the scripture in all that it teaches, especially areas of history and science, because what were the higher critics trying to do in the early 20th century? They're trying to say the scripture has spiritual truth in it, but the historical parts are not necessarily true and we can ignore that. And yet you might notice that the book of Genesis is an historical book from start to finish, and yet it's a history that communicates a great deal of doctrine. So there's no disconnect between history and doctrine and scripture, unlike what the higher critics tried to do. Early 20th century was characterized by what we call the modernist fundamentalist controversy. We heard a little about that last week in our history of the American church class. The way Schaeffer describes it is the old liberalism the higher critics of the early 20th century versus the new liberalism, the neo-orthodoxy or existential Christianity of the mid 20th century characterized by men like Barth and Tillich. He was a very strong separatist in the sense of seeing the necessity of coming out from the liberal churches and the liberal seminaries. And we'll see that as we start to look at his life's work He changed his stripes on a number of occasions for that very reason. As Randy just mentioned, the integration of all of life, doctrine and practice, all spheres of life, including all of culture, nothing was excluded. He put a very strong emphasis on the importance of truth and love, and later in his life expressed regret that in some of the separatist movements of the earlier 20th century, that there was not the sense of love that needed to accompany those separations. So we could say that there can be truth without love, but not love without truth. You'll see him over and over again talk about God as both infinite and personal. He puts those together all the time when he says the infinite personal God. And here the contrast is with the Eastern gods who are infinite but impersonal and the Roman gods who are personal but finite. So he's making that contrast between both the Eastern gods and the Roman gods and saying that the God of the Bible is both infinite and personal. Is that synonymous with I'm not sure. I haven't seen it put like that. I'd have to think about that. I think there is a connection. We either think Revelation, or we think he is in the machine as well. So he did try to be clear on that. As you were speaking about that, I wrote something that Schaeffer's I think it's a good question. I'm not quite sure the answer yet because it seems to me that if you believe in a pantheistic God, God is about as imminent as he can be because he's in everything. But he's not knowable in anything like that. No, he's not personal. A tree may be God, but he's not personal. You can't have a personal relationship with a tree. some sort of knowability in the Christian mindset. I don't know how you can say you can't have intimacy with a tree when there's lots of tree huggers. Let me rephrase it then. I wouldn't try to argue that you could have a spiritual unity with a tree. How's that? That's better. Yeah, let's think about that a little bit more. Meanwhile, I'm gonna get back to my notes here so that we don't get too far off track. Another thing that we see in his work is the contrast between the infinite personal God who is there and what he refers to as the material dash energy, material energy chance view of final reality. And that's where you're at with materialism. That there's only material and energy and that everything that's here and everything in its various forms is the product of chance. Okay? He puts a heavy emphasis on the true moral guilt of fallen man, that man does not just have guilt feelings, but that he has true moral guilt before a holy God and he has to be confronted with that moral guilt before he can be presented with the gospel. There's really no salvation or make sense of salvation unless there's true moral guilt. He emphasized the necessity of preaching both apostasy and judgment. And of course, in a liberal church, the idea of judgment is becoming passe. In fact, some people get upset by that, so maybe we shouldn't mention it. He also saw a very strong connection between reformation and revival. And here's the connection, that the reformation comes through the word of God. That's our orthodoxy. And revival comes through the Spirit of God. And that's the manner of life that follows. It's not enough just to have one or the other, but we have to have both. He talks a lot about the idolatry of what he calls personal peace and affluence. And if I'm routinely referring to that, I'm gonna be abbreviating it PP&A. So you'll know that's what I'm referring to when I mentioned that. He talks about the importance of the compassionate use of wealth. And of course, in a materialistic culture, it's all about making ourselves comfortable and happy and not thinking about how to use what we have to help others in need. He puts a strong emphasis on the finished work of Christ And that means living in the reality of our justification moment by moment. I don't recall ever seeing him use this expression, but it was an expression that came out of the Reformation to live Coram Deo, before the face of God. And I think that's the gist of what he's referring to there. That we have a nearness to the spiritual reality that we don't realize, but that doesn't, doesn't negate it. So the present reality of the imperceptible supernatural realm, that we tend to go about our lives without thinking too much about that. We mentioned his reliance upon the spirit in all aspects of ministry, particularly as it relates to conversion and sanctification. He puts an emphasis on demonstrating love through forgiveness and reconciliation. We'll see that one of the points of criticism is that he will frequently refer to the importance of Christians demonstrating our love to the watching world. And he uses passages from John 13 and 17 to help support that. And Van Til takes him to task on that and says, Fallen man can't judge anything. So we'll see that that becomes a point of conflict in their views on apologetics later on. On the next page, and there is a break between those last four and the next three. Toward the end of his life, he was very involved in work regarding the sanctity of human life and the battle against abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. And it's interesting to listen to what he was saying back in those days, particularly about euthanasia, because his point was that it was already happening at the time. It may not have been legal, but it was already going on. And now fast forward to today, and look at some of the stuff that's coming out of Canada right now. Under their socialized health care system, they have something they euphemistically call Medical Aid in Dying, MAID. And they are pushing more and more people into choosing euthanasia for medical treatment. In fact, you might be backed up in the system for a couple of years if you need surgery or something like that, but we can arrange for your death pretty quickly as it turns out. You tell me if that's not an agenda. So besides that, and again, I think he was ahead of his time in saying these kinds of things 40, 45 years ago. We'll see that he was very involved in children's ministry. even during his college years, and then after he went into the ministry and ministered in the community of Grove City, Pennsylvania. The story is that he basically drove the wheels off his Model A Ford going around the town picking up children to bring them to church for Bible study. He also had a lot to say against racism and any kind of ethnic discrimination. Because of his views on man made in the image of God, it was unthinkable to him to suggest that some people were worth less than others. During his life, he had an amazing array of influences. He was certainly very familiar with what he refers to as the cultural thought forms. We saw that from an early age, he was interested in philosophy, He realized that it was asking the right questions, but it wasn't providing any answers. And then as you start to read his books, you'll see how he takes the flow of philosophy through the various social institutions. He points back to the enlightenment as that proximal source of humanism. Of course, there's nothing particularly new about humanism. Where did it actually start, Leland? There was a line of despair he talks about. Kierkegaard was the final one before the line of despair. That's what I remember. That's a good answer, but it was a trick question. I'm not good at tricks. Let me ask Randy. Let me see if Randy can answer a trick question. When did humanism start? No, the Garden of Eden. Yeah, didn't it begin in the Garden of Eden? Oh yeah. When Eve, on the basis of her own evaluation, decided that the fruit was not only good to look at, but it was good for food and desirable for making one wise, so she took an eight. Right. You know, man as the measure, as the evaluator, as the standard. It's been around for a long time. Well, I thought it was worth a try. It's always fun to throw out a question and see. So, Schaeffer may occasionally be criticized in his view of history as being overly cyclical. I'm not really sure yet why that constitutes a problem because when I read the Bible, I see cycles of belief and apostasy, belief and apostasy. Things get better, things get worse. It's all flowing towards a predetermined outcome, but there are still cycles. So, we'll consider that question a little more when we get to our critiques. Isn't that similar to Ecclesiastes? There's nothing new under the sun. Everything that is, was before and will be again. I don't yet see the problem, I'll put it that way, but I haven't gotten very far into the critique, so maybe I'll be convinced that there was something there. He talks about how humanism gave us rationalism that eventually led to mysticism, what he refers to as the upper story leap, We decided that when we used our own mind to evaluate our existence, that we were just part of the machinery of the universe and didn't like that answer. So we left rationality behind and embraced mysticism so that we could add some meaning to our lives. He's got an interest in things like science, especially as it bears on man and nature. And What I think was particularly of interest to him was the world of art, and especially the visual arts. And I think of how John Leaf is an example of somebody who has a love for the visual arts, and he and Schaefer would have had a lot to talk about in that topic. Schaefer makes a contrast between what he calls hot and cool communication. And I included this one because that language would sound a little strange to us and we might misunderstand it if we come across it. So when he refers to hot communication, he's talking about communication that's rich with content and meaning. Where cool communication is the kind of language that you use when you're being ambiguous and maybe you're trying to manipulate. So we see that he invents some interesting terms, things like true truth, things like the manishness of man. He uses the expression brute facts, which Van Til is going to take him to task on. He likes to refer to what he calls modern science. modern science being rooted in a Christian worldview and modern, modern science being rooted in nothing more than naturalism and rejecting any supernatural explanations. He likes to use the expression, taking the roof off of the unbeliever's worldview and showing that no man can live consistently with an unbelieving worldview. There will always... Yeah, I don't see the problem there. You're essentially challenging someone's ideas of reality. You're looking for where their beliefs about reality do not line up with reality itself. And that's going to be described as kind of an evidentialist approach. You're saying, consider the evidence, look at the evidence. And that's where Van Til would say, we don't like that because you can't expect the unbeliever to evaluate evidence in his fallenness. But I haven't yet seen the problem in that myself. I'll put it that way. Because we all have to deal with evidence. Everyone has some true knowledge, even if it's not correct in all of its aspects. you wouldn't be able to get out the door in the morning if you didn't have some grasp of the truth. So here's also where he says that as a church we should call on the world to examine our life and our doctrine to see if we're living consistently according to what we say we believe. Okay? Another thing you'll hear quite often in his work is this idea of the form and freedom balance. And Schaefer himself has very strong leanings toward individual freedom. And he also has a healthy fear of tyranny. We could say that in part, he has a healthy concern about organizational structures and what those can become over time. not just government structures but even structures such as the church. So part of what we see is that although he was affiliated with denominations from his ordination onward, and we could say that he was in the PCA before he died, at least briefly, so we can count him as one of ours, but He had a healthy respect and a concern about organizations and how the internal workings of organizations can go wrong. So in many ways, we would say that his ministry was, it might be pejorative to say that it was on the fringe, but it was certainly on the edge, let's say. And I think there are some advantages if you are someone who is wanting to change the system, you can't be too caught up in it in order to do that. He pointed to the loss of Christian consensus and the rise of secular humanism with its inevitable effects. And here he uses very strong language in saying that he's not warning us about what might happen or what could happen if we continue down the road of humanism. He describes it as a mathematical certainty. In other words, if he could see what was happening today, he would say, yeah, I told you. It's not where it might have gone or where it could have gone, but where it has to go. That's the only possible outcome. We're sorry for the oblivion here, but what particulars were we not, and I'm not saying we weren't, but just to hone in on it, what were we not in consensus about? The idea of at least a general agreement about the nature of truth and morality that was lost during the course of the 20th century. So that by the time of the 60s and the 70s, what we might have called a Christian consensus is gone. There's no longer a foundation for us to build on. Does that make sense? A little? OK. In the history, we learned that you can't have a, how did that go? The moral aspect is very important for a society that is... In other words, you can't have a... I forgot what the wording is, but without morals you can't have a society that's... I forget what the word is for it, but... Civilized? Civilized, I guess. So here's where we can refer back to the form and freedom balance. The idea that there has to be a form, meaning there has to be a structure. There have to be rules. If we have too many rules on the one hand, we end up with what, Randy? Security. Thank you. If we have too much freedom on the other hand, what do we end up with, Eli? Both the Wilsons got that one correct. So we think about the poles of form and freedom. Absolute freedom is anarchy on the one hand, absolute form on the other hand is tyranny. And if we're moving towards anarchy on the one hand, what's it going to bring on the other inevitably? In other words, if we say that there is no moral foundation, Randy, I don't care how moral you are, but you can't tell me what to do. I can do whatever I want to, as long as I don't hurt anybody else. That's the rationale, isn't it? Except it's a false assumption. I can do whatever I want to. And then we're back to the book of Judges, just as Kate was saying earlier, where every man does what is right in his own eyes because there is no king in Israel. In other words, there's no one to establish the moral standard. Yeah, and we see that happen over and over, and I think that is the age that we are moving into now. As we have more and more degradation of society, starting with the family, more and more people who are saying, I'm going to do my own thing and I don't care about anybody else, then we're losing the idea of form. And Schaefer's going to talk about how that shows up in the arts. How the arts, for example, get increasingly chaotic. that the rules that used to govern how you would paint a picture or write a piece of music are all gone and now what you're left with is just noise. So that's gonna be a constant theme through his writings. And I think a very important point for us. But his point was that by the time of the late 60s, early 70s, we have essentially lost the Christian consensus that gave the form to our society. And so we're starting to increasingly see things break down. Lastly, He says it's an inevitability. Civil disobedience is an inevitability in a humanistic culture. He also makes the argument that God does not intend for man to live under tyranny, and this is interesting, because tyranny represents the replacement of God with the state, that the state assumes, as it were, the role of God in society, and it was never meant to do that. The state was always meant to be bounded by God himself who established it. So what does that mean? We're going to be facing persecution. Why? This question came up in our last class, in our Christ and Culture class. Why does persecution come? Let me ask the question in a different way. How could we avoid persecution? By compromising. Yeah, going with the flow. Oh, yeah, just go along with everything. If we just go along with everything, then presumably we can avoid persecution or hardship. And yet, what do we end up bumping into that brings us back, that constrains us? What's the form that still constrains us? The law. That's a good question, a good answer, stated as a question, yes. We're still bounded by the law. It's like this, that it's been stated this way, that there are going to be times when obedience to God means disobedience to the state. And I think we're quickly approaching that kind of time. Okay? Well, we saw some of that during the pandemic. It's still going on. We haven't unwound everything that we wound up during that time. So, let's think about where we stand today. As I think about the work of Labrie back in the mid-fifties, at that time people were still asking good questions. And now I'm asking the question, have we stopped asking questions? Have we reached a point of resignation that we don't even bother to ask the questions anymore? Have we reached that point that Camus, the philosopher, said, where there's nothing really left to consider about the question, except the question of suicide? Should we all just kill ourselves and be done with it? That's the kind of despair where we find ourselves in. Nihilism has brought us to a purposeless existence that I would say is both boring and pointless. Why boring? Think about how people try to find their thrills these days by death-defying acts. Things like rock climbing, which is completely mind-boggling to me. Why would you do something like that? And then I thought of a movie, I think from the 90s. Remember that one, Flatliners? Oh, yeah. Keeper Sutherland was in that movie. Yeah. I think there were medical students who were taking turns killing each other and bringing themselves back from the dead in order to find out what's on the other side. That's just about where things are at at this point. Here's how we might summarize it. The Protestant work ethic that helped to build this country has now become the progressive entitlement ethic. that we now expect to have a reward without the effort. That doesn't bode well for our future. We see the rise of identity politics, especially in the last generation, but we're seeing that it's only adding to the despair because those who are pursuing this as far as they possibly can, with surgery and every other kind of medical intervention, are finding that they're not getting the answers. They're getting to that point and realizing that the answer was not there. We could put it like this, that today's progress, in air quotes, looks a lot like self-destruction. And then, if we throw in a little bit of earth worship, like you people out in California, Leland, Then it makes man worse than nothing because man is now a plague that must be destroyed. And what's that article I just sent you earlier today? Did you take a look at it? You know what? I've been a busy man today. I do apologize. What do you have to do besides get ready for our class? I spent the day at the booth. got a Dodger player coming. Okay, I'll let you off this week. Well anyway, when you look at that article, it's a very short article, it's a quote from the CEO of Pfizer who in 2019 was quoted as saying that by 2023 he would like to see the world's population reduced by 50%. That's scary when people are shooting people with vaccines that are making It makes you wonder if it isn't part of a plan, but hey, we have to preserve the earth and see how far you fall when you abandon a Christian understanding of creation and especially of man. Our modern apologetic, for those of us today living after Schaeffer, may require us to pose the questions and provide the answers. because I'm not sure a modern man even knows what question to ask anymore. Did your article cover the gain of function that they're practicing there too? No, I was reading that in a different article, but they were connected. Gee, our article had an accidental leak. Yeah, well, it wouldn't surprise me. And something that I was reading about Schaefer, I can't remember exactly when or exactly where now, but he was talking about an encounter he was having with someone, one of those personal encounters, face-to-face encounters, and he made this statement to this man who had come to talk to him who was at the end of his rope. He said, I know who you are. What does he mean by that? He understands who that person is as someone who's made in the image of God and the value that he has as an image bearer of God. So the challenge that we have is to recover the dignity of man created in the image of God. And that constitutes one of the big apologetic challenges for us today. Last questions. I am out of time. Well, you're asking us if we have questions. Yes, I'm already four minutes over time. I thought you were going to give us a question. No. I'll give you your questions on Friday, posted at noon in Canvas. You said we have no quiz this week. We have a quiz on Friday. The quiz on Friday covers the material we just covered this last hour. Got it. OK. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you very much. I would like to enlist someone to pray as we conclude our class tonight. Randy, would you like to do that for us? Sure. Great and mighty God, you are indeed the God who is there. You have made us and shaped us, mankind in your own image. incredibly humbling to realize that in the place and the responsibility that you've given us, our failure therein, and the redemption that you yourself have provided. As we close our first session this evening, thank you for JR and his passion and affection for Francis Schaefer and his apologetic. And we pray that we would continue to learn as we meet again. Take us home safely now or.