The Cross Section - RMB Blog

A Time Named By Its Detractors The years 500-1400 AD have been called different things, all of them dismissive.  They are called Medieval which conjures thoughts of mercilessness and savagery.  The saying "to go Medieval on somebody's..." refers more properly to the Paleolithic era before civilization not the time following the fall of Rome.  These years are also called the Middle Ages.  The thought is that it was merely a time between two others.  Apparently nothing important happened from the end of the last great Ancient civilization until the start of the modern world.  It says "nothing to see here, move along to the Renaissance."  The third name for these years was created by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the Dark Ages.  Of course they were biased.  According to them, they had to bring light to the darkness of the preceding years.  Those in the Enlightenment placed all their faith in reason.  To them anything else was ignorant religious dogma which

"For as a man  thinks within himself, so he is." - Solomon, 10th Century BC "I think, therefore I am." - Rene Descartes, 1637 AD "People are unique in the inner life of the mind - what they are in their thought world determines how they act." - Francis Schaeffer, 1976 AD Within "How Should We Then Live?", Francis Schaeffer explains the course of thought in Western Civilization, evaluates it according to his Biblical worldview, and clarifies how wisdom should guide us into the future.                " To understand where we are in today's world - in our intellectual ideas and in                   our cultural and  political lives - we must trace three lines in history, namely, the                   philosophic, the scientific,  and the religious." Schaeffer was a Christian theologian and philosopher who set up L'Abri in 1955 in the Swiss Alps, a community whose purpose was to study theology and elicit deep intellectual conversati