By Lane T. Dennis
Few Christians have had greater impact during the last half of the twentieth century than Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer. A man with a remarkable breadth of cultural interest and with penetrating insight into post-Christian, postmodern life, Schaeffer was also a man who cared deeply about people and their search for truth, meaning, and beauty in life. If there is one central theme throughout Schaeffer’s twenty-four published books (all of which are still in print), it is that “true truth” exists as revealed in the Bible by “the God who is there,” and that what we do with this truth has decisive consequences in every area of life.
This book, Death in the City, was Schaeffer’s third published book and is foundational to his thinking. It was written against the backdrop of the 1960s counter cultural upheaval, but it reads today (nearly forty years later) with a prophetic ring of truth concerning the personal, moral, spiritual, and intellectual upheaval of our own day.
What place does Death in the City have in Schaeffer’s thinking and among his published works? Schaeffer’s first two books, The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason, are widely regarded as a watershed critique of Christianity and culture. But in Schaeffer’s view there was also an essential relationship between his first two watershed books (first published in 1968) and Death in the City (published a year later in 1969), in which Schaeffer set forth the biblical basis for his critique of culture as presented in his two earlier books. For the person, then, who has never read Schaeffer before, Death in the City certainly provides a good point of entrée into Schaeffer’s work. For those who have read other books by Schaeffer, Death in the City will provide a new depth of understanding concerning the biblical foundation for all of his work. In either case, the reader will encounter a prophetic voice from the past (almost four decades ago) who speaks today with arresting understanding of our post-Christian, postmodern world.
Why would an author title a book “Death in the City”?Conventional publishing wisdom says that people want something upbeat and positive—not to be confronted with the reality of death. Again, in light of 9/11, Schaeffer seems disturbingly prophetic as the world watched terror and death unfold in shocking reality before its eyes. But the death that Schaeffer writes about is more than just physical death; it is the moral and spiritual death that subtly suffocates truth and meaning and beauty out of the city and the wider culture.
This new edition of Death in the City uses the definitive text of the book, as edited by Schaeffer shortly before his death in 1984, appearing here for the first time as a single volume.In addition, this volume also includes a highly insightful introduction by Schaeffer’s son-in-law, Udo Middelmann, who shows the ongoing significance of Schaeffer’s key insights from our own time and culture. Lastly, the cover features the Gauguin painting titled “Whence Come We? What Are We? Whither Do We Go?”—a painting that Schaeffer saw as a brilliant work of art, but equally as a painting that epitomized the death, cruelty, and despair of modern life.
What then is the answer that Schaeffer offers in response? It is a commitment to God’s Word as truth. It is a compassion for a world that is lost and dying without the gospel. It is a commitment to the costly practice of truth in the midst of the intellectual, moral, and philosophical battles of our day. It is yielding our lives to the God who exists and allowing Him to bring forth His fruit through us. Thus Schaeffer writes in closing his chapter on “The Persistence of Compassion”: “My concluding sentence is simply this: The world is lost, the God of the Bible does exist; the world is lost, but truth is truth. Keep on! And for how long? I’ll tell you. Keep on, keep on, keep on, keep on, and then KEEP ON!”
Few have demonstrated this commitment to truth and “persistence of compassion” as consistently as Francis A. Schaeffer. And because of this, few who begin reading these pages will come to the end without having their life profoundly changed.
Lane T. Dennis, Ph.D.
President and Publisher
Crossway Books
January 2002