There are a handful of books that don’t merely inform you — they reorient you. How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture is one of those books. Francis Schaeffer wrote it in 1976 as the companion to a ten-part film series, and between them they sparked something of a Christian intellectual awakening among a generation of evangelicals who had largely retreated from cultural engagement.
What strikes you first is Schaeffer’s treatment of beauty. He understood, long before most evangelical thinkers would acknowledge it, that art and architecture and music are not decorative extras — they are theological statements. The art of a civilization reveals what that civilization believes about God, man, and meaning. Schaeffer traces Western art from its Christian foundations through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and into the catastrophic fragmentation of the modern era — showing how each philosophical shift produced corresponding shifts in aesthetic expression.
When Schaeffer walks through the Sistine Chapel, he isn’t giving you an art history lecture. He’s showing you what happens when a civilization believes that man bears the image of God — the dignity, the grandeur, the reach toward transcendence that characterizes the greatest works of Western art. And then he shows you what happens when that foundation erodes.
The book culminates in a warning about authoritarian control as a logical consequence of moral relativism — a warning that reads today less like prophecy than like a current events report. Schaeffer saw where the trajectory was leading, and he called the church to resist it through a recovery of biblical truth and genuine Christian culture.
This is not just a book. It is a vision. Read it.
📚 Purchase: Available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
Book Details: Publisher: Fleming H. Revell (original); Crossway (current) | 1976 | 288 pages | ISBN-13: 978-1581345360