Rapture Fever

A Commitment to Cultural Irrelevance 93
Schaeffer got the core of this idea from his professor of
apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, Cornelius
Van Til, although you would not suspect this by reading any of
Schaeffer’s footnotes. Van Til argued throughout his long career
that all non-Christian philosophy from the Greeks to the
present is dualistic: a war between the totally rational and the
totally irrational. Creating a memorable analogy, Van Tll said
that the irrationalist and the rationalist are like a pair of washerwomen
who support themselves by taking in each other’s
laundry. The intellectual problems created by each school of
thought are unresolvable in terms of its own presuppositions,
and so the defenders of each system seek temporary refuge in
the very different but equally unresolvable problems of the rival
school.
Why do they do this? Because non-Christian man prefers to
believe anything except the God of the Bible, who issues His
covenant law and holds all men responsible for obeying it, on
pain of eternal judgment. They would prefer to dwell in an
incoherent dualistic universe of their own devising rather than
in God’s universe, dependent on His grace.
The Two-Storey World of Orthodox Christianity
The New Testament teaches that there are two realms of
existence in this world: the eternal and the temporal. Each of
these realms is itself divided: life vs. death. Jesus said: “He that
believeth on the Son bath everlasting life: and he that believeth
not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on
him” (John 3:36). The person who in history rejects Jesus
Christ as Lord and Savior is already dead. He shall not see life,
either in this world or the next.
These two realms - time and eternity – are linked together
by the sovereign God of the Bible, who created all things. They
are connected by the sovereignty of God and His covenant: a