By the end of his life, Francis Schaeffer had come full circle. A ministry born in the ecclesiastical battles of the early twentieth century now completed its course by urging evangelicals on to another round of internecine warfare. And when all was said and done, evangelicals still did not know what to make of him. Commentators struggling to characterize him adequately have tried to attach a number of labels — pastor, evangelist, pre-evangelist, apologist, missionary to intellectuals, guru to fundamentalists, philosopher, prophet.
There is an element of truth in all these labels; each, by itself, reduces him beyond recognition. Clearly he was evangelicalism’s most important public intellectual in the 20 years before his death. Ideas were to him literally matters of life and death. History, thought Schaeffer, taught that the intellectual base on which a people build their society will determine that society’s laws and character:
There is a flow to history and culture.
This flow is rooted and has its wellspring
in the thoughts of people.
His singular message was that a society cannot hope for righteousness and justice without thinking the thoughts of God from the bottom up.
Despite Schaeffer’s errors of detail, some critics have recently allowed that his big picture has proven durable. The conceptual centerpiece of Schaeffer’s historical view is the triumph of relativism in the modern post-Christian world:
Modern men, in the absence of absolutes, have polluted all aspects of morality, making standards completely hedonistic and relativistic.
He would not have been surprised by the advent of “postmodern” thought, which has built countless altars to relativism across the intellectual landscape. Nor would he have been surprised by the resultant moral vacuum that characterizes much contemporary academic thinking. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban agonized over the fact that her discipline’s prime directive — cultural relativism — left her with no rationale for opposing rape or racial genocide in other cultures. One can almost hear Francis Schaeffer saying, “I told you so.”
In particular, he appears to have been prescient on the issue of human life. In 1976 he observed that
in regard to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated “aliveness” from “personhood,” and if this is so, why not arbitrarily do the same with the aged? So the steps move along, and euthanasia may well become increasingly acceptable. And if so, why not keep alive the bodies of . . . persons in whom the brain wave is flat to harvest from them body parts and blood?
Schaeffer’s bleak vision is now daily news. “Cadaver Jack” Kevorkian has already killed more people than Ted Bundy, but the state of Michigan cannot muster the political will to stop him. A federal court has forbidden the state of Washington to pass laws preventing doctors from killing their patients, while the University of Washington is permitted to scavenge and sell the body parts of thousands of aborted children every year.
In Francis Schaeffer’s later years, he seemed to act as though the social order perhaps could be reformed from the top down, beginning with laws and proceeding toward intellectual foundations. This is almost certainly due to the fact that he was thoroughly radicalized by the merciless killing of millions of unborn children. If his later actions were inconsistent with his philosophy, they were certainly understandable. To echo pro-choice historian Garry Wills, if one really does think that abortion is the taking of innocent human life, surely Schaeffer’s response makes sense.
In trying to assess the meaning of Francis Schaeffer, it is instructive to compare him to Billy Graham. Both reached the peak of their influence at about the same time, and both had an immeasurable impact on American evangelicalism. Graham in many ways represents the moderate middle of evangelicalism — defusing controversy, wishing the best for everyone, friend of both Republicans and Democrats, slow to disturb middle-class conventions, willing to cooperate with anyone who will let him preach the gospel. As historian Grant Wacker once wrote, “When Graham spoke, middle America heard itself.” It was just as natural to see Graham and the President on the fairway together as to see Graham on a platform with a Bible in his hands.
But one can no more imagine Francis Schaeffer playing golf with the rich and famous than one can imagine Mother Teresa shopping for furs in I. Magnin. If Graham represents evangelicalism’s smooth center, Schaeffer represents its crushed-glass edges. Evangelicalism by its nature blurs denominational distinctions, but Schaeffer’s own version of Christianity was tightly sectarian. Graham lent his name widely and welcomed allies from all corners, but Schaeffer refused all alliances. Those who were not his followers but believed in his aims he categorized as cobelligerents in the war against the secularizing and dehumanizing trajectory of modern culture. While Graham appealed to the majority in the middle, Schaeffer attacked the middle for failing to see the direction it was headed. It is no accident that his strongest impact has been among those who have a bone to pick with the middle class — dropouts, intellectuals, and that remarkable recent phenomenon, formerly respectable citizens who have begun to perceive the American judiciary as a refuge for scoundrels.
In short, Francis Schaeffer represents that part of evangelical Christianity that has always been ill at ease with the world in which it finds itself. He once said,
In my teaching, I put a great deal of weight on the fact that we live in an abnormal world. I personally could not stand this world, if I did not understand it is abnormal — that it is not the way God made it.
Perhaps, then, this is his most enduring legacy — his crystalline vision of the vast difference between the world God designed and the world that is the work of our hands.
Michael S. Hamilton
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Francis August Schaeffer was an American Evangelical Christian theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor. He is most famous for his writings and his establishment of the L'Abri community in Switzerland. Opposed to theological modernism, Schaeffer promoted a more traditional Protestant faith and a presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics, which he believed would answer the questions of the age. A number of scholars credit Schaeffer's ideas with helping spark the rise of the Christian Right in the United States.
Covenant Theological Seminary has established the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute directed by a former English L'Abri member, Jerram Barrs. The purpose of the school is to train Christians to demonstrate compassionately and defend reasonably what they see as the claims of Christ on all of life.
Schaeffer popularized, in the modern context, a conservative Puritan and Reformed perspective. He is credited with helping spark a return to political activism among Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially in relation to the issue of abortion.
Christian Right leaders such as Tim LaHaye have credited Schaeffer for influencing their theological arguments urging political participation by evangelicals. Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, also acknowledged the influence of Schaeffer.
Francis A. Schaeffer wrote twenty-two books, which cover a range of spiritual issues.
Francis August Schaeffrer was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and became a Christian in 1930 at the age of eighteen, and graduated magna cum laude from Hampden-Sydney College, VA in June, 1935. Schaeffer entered Westminster Theological Seminary in 1935 and transferred to the newly formed Faith Theological Seminary in 1937, graduating from there in 1938.
Following graduation, he was by some accounts the first person ordained by the Bible Presbyterian Church and became pastor of the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Grove City, PA. In 1941 he was elected moderator of the Great Lakes Presbytery [BPC] and began serving as associate pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church in Chester, PA. From 1943 to 1947, he pastored First Bible Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, MO, and served as moderator of the Midwest Presbytery [BPC].
During this time Schaeffer and his wife founded the Children for Christ ministry in St. Louis, which soon became widely adopted by other evangelical churches. In 1947 he traveled throughout Europe as a representative of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions and as the American Secretary for the Foreign Relations Department of the American Council of Christian Churches. In 1948 he moved with his family to Lausanne, Switzerland to begin mission work, and moved the following year to Champery, Switzerland, where he wrote Basic Bible Studies.
In 1953 he returned to the United States on furlough and began an extensive speaking tour. Later that same year, he returned to Switzerland and moved to Huemoz, Switzerland. By 1955 he had resigned from the mission board and began L'Abri Fellowship, which became the primary focus of his life. In 1971 he received the honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Gordon College, Wenham, MA.
In 1981 he reedited and pubished The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer. The Simon Greenleaf School of Law awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1983, but he was forced to return in critical condition from Switzerland to the Mayo Clinic. Despite the debilitating illness, he was able in 1984 to complete The Great Evangelical Disaster and a seminar tour. On May 15, 1984, he died at his home in Rochester, MN and was buried at Oakwood Cemetary in Rochester.