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Francis Schaeffer

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Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer

Francis A Schaeffer (January 30 1912–May 15 1984), an American Christian theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor, is most famous for his writings and his establishment of the L'Abri community in Switzerland. Opposed to theological modernism, Schaeffer promoted an orthodox Protestant faith and a presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics, which he believed would answer the questions of the age.

Contents

Education and Early Career

Schaeffer grew up in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He married Edith Seville, the daughter of missionaries to China. In 1935 he graduated from Hampden-Sydney College (VA) and then enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary in the fall and studied under Cornelius Van Til, but after a year's study he left to complete his studies at Faith Theological Seminary and graduated in 1938. This seminary was newly formed as a result of a split in the Presbyterian Church of America (now the Orthodox Presbyterian Church) and the more conservative Bible Presbyterian Church. Schaeffer was the first student to be ordained in the Bible Presbyterian Church and served in pastorates in Pennsylvania and Missouri. In 1948 he moved to Switzerland and in 1955 established the L'Abri ("the shelter") community.

Schaeffer's approach to cultural apologetics was primarily influenced by Herman Dooyeweerd, Edward John Carnell, and Cornelius Van Til. He is generally understood to be a "combinationalist" or "verificationist" in apologetics rather than a strict presuppositionalist in the Van Tillian tradition, however.

In 1982 John Warwick Montgomery nominated Schaeffer for an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, which was conferred by the Simon Greenleaf School of Law, Anaheim, California, in recognition of his apologetic writings and ministry.

Legacy

Today, more than twenty years after his death, his teachings continue in the same informal setting at the Francis Schaeffer Foundation, led by one of his daughters and sons-in-law as a small scale alternative to the original L'Abri Fellowship International still operating in nearby Huemoz-sur-Ollon. Covenant Theological Seminary also has established the Francis Schaeffer Institute directed by a former English L'Abri member in order to train Christians to model Schaeffer by compassionately demonstrating and reasonably defending what they see as the claim of Christ on all of life.

Schaeffer and the Christian Right

Part of the series on
Dominionism
Ideas

Theonomy
Reconstructionism
Church-state separation

Figures said to advocate Dominionism
R. J. Rushdoony
Greg Bahnsen
Gary North
Gary DeMar
Kenneth Gentry
David Chilton
Paul Weyrich
James Kennedy (televangelist)
Marvin Olasky
Groups said to advocate Dominionism
Chalcedon Foundation
Family Research Council
National Religious Broadcasters
Eagle Forum
Free Congress Foundation
Figures said to influence Dominionism
Abraham Kuyper
John Cotton
Francis Schaeffer
Figures involved in defining and tracking Dominionism
TheocracyWatch
Chip Berlet
Edmund Morgan
Political Research Assoc
Figures involved in financing Dominionism
Howard Ahmanson Jr
[http://encycl.opentopia.com/ [edit]]
Schaeffer is credited with helping spark a return to political activism among Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially around the issue of abortion. By popularizing, in the modern context, a conservative Puritan and Reformed perspective, he is considered by some critics to be the godfather of contemporary Dominionism. Schaeffer argued that Christians have a duty to "live Christianly" in every area of life and to challenge encroaching secular humanism. Christian Right leaders such as Tim LaHaye have credited Schaeffer for influencing their theological arguments urging political participation by evangelicals (LaHaye, Battle, p. 5). But it is possible that LaHaye and others who cite Schaeffer's influence are extending their ideas well beyond what Schaeffer himself suggested.

Irving Hexham of the University of Calgary, for example, argues that Schaeffer's political position has been misconstrued as advocating the Dominionist views of R. J. Rushdoony, who is a Reconstructionist. Hexham indicates that Schaeffer's essential philosophy was derived from Herman Dooyeweerd, not Rushdoony, and that Hans Rookmaaker introduced Schaeffer to his writings. Dooyeweerd was not a Dominionist or Reconstructionist. Rushdoony, although another admirer of Dooyeweerd, rejected the pluralist implications of his philosophy.

Indeed, the arts and cultural program of Schaeffer's L'Abri, and particularly his association with Rookmaaker, sits poorly with the Christian Right's view of the arts. Artists who came out of L'Abri include Steve Taylor, known for his sharp criticisms of the American Right and promotion of the Christian Alternative music scene.

It should also be noted that well before Schaeffer started his work at L'Abri and advocated activism in the public square, many American fundamentalists and evangelicals were already committed to both a social and political form of conservatism. One of the earliest post-World War II texts that urged evangelicals to re-engage American culture was Carl F. H. Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947). Other writers who contributed to this process included the evangelical sociologist David Moberg's Inasmuch (1965) and The Great Reversal (1972), and the evangelical historian Richard Pierard's The Unequal Yoke: Evangelical Christianity and Political Conservatism (1970). Robert Booth Fowler in his study of the socio-political views of evangelicals between 1966-76 demonstrates quite clearly that a diverse spectrum of attitudes existed before the Moral Majority was organized by Jerry Falwell. Fowler charts the political attitudes of evangelicals, based on their books and periodicals, as ranging from ultra-conservative anti-communists all the way over to progressive and "left-wing" standpoints emerging before the election of Jimmy Carter as President. Moreover, even within evangelical conservative political thought, it was possible to distinguish between moderate and reform-oriented attitudes on church-state issues.

A Christian Manifesto

Critics such as Sara Diamond and Frederick Clarkson have traced the activism of numerous key figures in the Christian Right to the influence of Francis Schaeffer. According to Diamond: "The idea of taking dominion over secular society gained widespread currency with the 1981 publication of...Schaeffer's book A Christian Manifesto. The book sold 290,000 copies in its first year, and it remains one of the movement's most frequently cited texts."

Diamond summarizes the book and its importance to the movement, which she and Clarkson call Dominionism:

In A Christian Manifesto, Schaeffer's argument is simple. The United States began as a nation rooted in Biblical principles. But as society became more pluralistic, with each new wave of immigrants, proponents of a new philosophy of secular humanism gradually came to dominate debate on policy issues. Since humanists place human progress, not God, at the center of their considerations, they pushed American culture in all manner of ungodly directions, the most visible results of which included legalized abortion and the secularization of the public schools. At the end of A Christian Manifesto, Schaeffer calls for Christians to use civil disobedience to restore Biblical morality.
The name of the book is intended to position its thesis as a Christian answer to The Communist Manifesto and the Humanist Manifestos of 1933 and 1973. Although A Christian Manfesto does not mention immigration as an issue, critics infer this from his diagnosis that the decline of Western Civilization is due to society having become increasingly pluralistic, resulting in a shift "away from a world view that was at least vaguely Christian in people's memory ... toward something completely different."

In a sermon also titled "A Christian Manifesto", Schaeffer defines secular humanism as the worldview where "man is the measure of all things," and in the book he claims that critics of the Christian Right miss the mark by confusing the "humanist religion" with humanitarianism, the humanities, or love of humans. He describes the conflict with secular humanism as a battle in which "these two religions, Christianity and humanism, stand over against each other as totalities." He writes that the decline of commitment to objective truth that he perceives in the various institutions of society is "not because of a conspiracy, but because the church has forsaken its duty to be the salt of the culture." Finally, he describes Christian civil disobedience:

A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state and hidden his Jewish neighbors from the German SS Troops. The government had abrogated its authority, and it had no right to make any demands.

Frank Schaeffer

Francis Schaeffer's son, Frank Schaeffer, became a film director and successful author, writing several controversial novels depicting life in a strict, fundamentalist household. While Frank Schaeffer remains a committed Christian and political conservative (opposing abortion, homosexualitiy, and feminism, and supporting the war in Iraq), he has distanced himself from many of his father's views and publicly forsook the Reformed Presbyterian faith of his upbringing for the Greek Orthodox church, which he says allows for "paradox and mystery."

Frank Schaeffer also authored the nonfiction titles Faith of Our Sons, Voices from the Front, and, with his son John, Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps. Both books are autobiographical diaries dealing with his youngest son's enlistment in the United States Marine Corps and subsequent involvement in the Iraq War.

Writings

Francis A. Schaeffer wrote twenty-two books, which cover a range of spiritual issues. They can be roughly split into five sections, as in the edition of his Complete Works (ISBN 0891073477): In addition to his books, one of the last public lectures Schaeffer delivered was at the Law Faculty, University of Strasbourg. It was published as "Christian Faith and Human Rights", The Simon Greenleaf Law Review, 2 (1982-83) pp. 3-12.

Critical Assessments

References

External links

 

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