I recently listened to these lectures delivered by Francis Schaeffer at Wheaton College. (I think they were delivered in the early 1970’s).
I can’t recommend these highly enough.
Schaeffer walks you through the development of Western thought, starting in the early Middle Ages and going all the way up to the second half of the 20th Century. Along the way he explains why people in our day think the way they do by exposing the roots of our modern culture and the underlying assumptions that go (mostly) unspoken, but daily determine the way people around us look at the world.
If you:
- are going back to school in the fall and should bone up on your apologetics and Christian worldview…
- regularly talk to people who think totally un-biblically…
- get confused by why the world speaks so differently than the Bible…
- wonder if the world’s way of thinking has crept in to your thinking…
- or just want to “gird up” your mind to be ready to answer people about why you think the way you do…
…then these lectures are for you. Click on the links below to download the mp3 of each one.
(By the way, if you don’t know, here’s a helpful trick on a PC: right click on the link and then select “save target as” and you’ll be able to throw the file right onto your hard drive.)
The Development of Modern Thought (by Francis Schaeffer)
- Part 1- Introduction: Aquinas to the Renaissance
- Part 2 – The Renaissance and the Reformation
- Part 3 – The Development of Modern Science
- Part 4 – From Modern Science to Modern-Modern Science
- Part 5 – The Shift in Philosophy; Rousseau, Kant, Hegel
- Part 6 – The Spread into Other Disciplines; Art, Music
- Part 7 – The New Theology and Higher Criticism
- Part 8 – The Forms of Existentialism
- Part 9 – Contemporary Results of Berkeley 1964
- Part 10 – Limits to Possible Christian Answers
- Part 11 – Society After The Loss of Absolutes
- Part 12 – The Silent Majority and the Elites
- Part 13 – What is Needed to Speak to Our Age?