Why would a thirty-something, Arminian Baptist care about a Calvinist Presbyterian who died forty years ago today? The answer: plenty. The life of Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) has affected my own life, affecting the entirety of my worldview, as well as the lives of countless evangelicals. I consistently find myself reflecting on his life and ministry of Schaeffer, including how he ministered in his own context and how his work and ministry can be a model for us today.
Forty years ago today, May 15, 2024, Schaeffer died from cancer. While he has been gone for four decades, Schaeffer’s influence consistently ripples through evangelicalism and beyond. His impact is felt in the areas of apologetics, worldview, and cultural engagement more broadly. During his life, everyone from Larry Norman to Jack Kemp interacted with Schaeffer. Many point to him as the gateway into a Christian way of thinking about art, creation care, and psychology. Moreover, notable cultural thinkers like Os Guinness, William Edgar, and Nancy Pearcey point to Schaeffer as a significant influence in their own lives.
I am in the process now of writing my dissertation on Schaeffer. Many times over the past few years, people have asked me some form of the same question: what do you like so much about Francis Schaeffer? In some ways, my various writings on Schaeffer have sought to explore that singular question. But to be brief, I think the answer is twofold, and I think I can summarize my interest in two words. He is pastoral and prophetic, and both in incredible ways.
Pastoral
While most associate Schaeffer with the L’Abri ministry he started in Switzerland in the mid-1950s, he served as a pastor for three different churches in the United States for about ten years. Even while he led L’Abri, he also preached and pastored at the local Independent Presbyterian Church down the hill. Schaeffer thought of himself first and foremost as an “evangelist” and not as an apologist, theologian, or philosopher. But Schaeffer’s approach to people was unmistakably pastoral. Bryan Follis notes that while Schaeffer’s approach to apologetics and ministry was not person-centered, it was person-sensitive.[1] Schaeffer constantly stressed the importance of centralizing the infinite-personal God Who is there.[2] He constantly brought his writing and ministry back to this central truth. And yet Schaeffer sought to make sure that the human person—often the individual to whom he was talking—was considered when stressing the reality of God’s existence and its meaning for life.
Schaeffer’s emphasis on the “final apologetic” is a great example of this person-sensitive concern. This final apologetic is grounded in John 17:21 and is concerned with demonstrating the visible unity of the church. This visible unity necessarily includes sacrificial, Christ-like love toward others, especially other Christians.[3] This doctrine was not a hypothetical concept for Schaeffer but a practice he embodied and exemplified. In his work at L’Abri, he ensured that “grace [was] extended to everyone there. It was not a formless grace, but one structured by the intellectual and biblical teaching that pervaded.”[4] This final apologetic is mentioned throughout Schaeffer’s corpus and fleshed out more fully in The Mark of the Christian. Echoing the sentiments of 1 Corinthians 13, Schaeffer argued that apologetics is useless if it is not driven by love—specifically a love for God and our fellow man.
Jerram Barrs describes Schaeffer’s pastoral balance of truth and compassion incredibly well: “The truth that we are the image of God, a truth that is at the heart of all his apologetic work, was for Schaeffer, a reason to worship God. This conviction of the innate dignity of all human persons had many consequences for Schaeffer. He believed, and he practiced the belief, that there are no little people.”[5] Schaeffer’s commitment was demonstrated practically through his ministry and throughout his lifetime. He invited people into his home, consistently emphasizing and exemplifying grace-filled community. The many accounts of visitors to L’Abri, specifically during the early days, speak to a deeply sacrificial practice of hospitality. Because of their committed work, one of Schaeffer’s greatest legacies is his establishment of the L’Abri community. As Barrs himself observed, Schaeffer “took a conversation with one damaged and needy young person as seriously as when he was talking with the president or lecturing before an audience of thousands.”[6]
Prophetic
Schaeffer was also prophetic; he was often prescient on socio-moral issues but also—like an Old Testament prophet—willing to speak to the moral ills both inside and outside of his camp. He rightly criticized evangelicals but also spoke with conviction to the broader culture. And Schaeffer was constantly on the right side of socio-moral issues. In 1943, in the middle of World War II, Schaeffer wrote a pamphlet entitled, “The Bible-believing Christian and the Jew.” Speaking directly to the evils perpetrated by the Nazis, Schaeffer contended with clarity against antisemitism, grounding his moral argument in the Bible.[7] During this same time, over twenty years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Schaeffer told his church’s session of ruling elders “that if any black person came to [his] church and was not only rejected but [even] made to feel unwelcome, he would also resign.”[8] Udo Middelmann, Schaeffer’s son-in-law, believes his moral convictions against antisemitism and the mistreatment of African Americans were directly drawn from Schaeffer’s study of the Bible.[9] Schaeffer was both convictional and prophetic on these issues, willing to speak against these evils of racism before others.
During the latter part of Schaeffer’s life, his concern about moral issues facing the culture did not diminish. Instead, he spoke resolutely against the issues of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. His work arguing against legalized abortion was essential in bringing evangelicals into the fight that, up until that point, Roman Catholics had fought nearly alone. Much of the positive post-Roe v. Wade influence from evangelicals flows from Schaeffer’s writing and teaching ministry. Garry Wills is right to argue that on the issue of fighting abortion, “One man deserves more credit than anyone else—Francis Schaeffer”[10]
Schaeffer’s books Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and A Christian Manifesto both deal clearly and carefully with the topic of abortion, though they engage other ethical issues as well. Schaeffer does not mince words concerning abortion. He states unequivocally in his last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster,“You cannot be faithful to what the Bible teaches about the value of human life and be in favor of abortion.”[11] Furthermore, he touches on implications with abortion still prevalent (if not more prominent) today. He discusses abortion-on-demand, abortion techniques, live births after abortion, child abuse, and much more in Whatever Happened to the Human Race?[12]
Schaeffer’s prophetic concern extends even to creation care. Schaeffer’s focus in Pollution and the Death of Man, published in 1970,is ecology. He issues a clarion call for action: “The simple fact is that if man is not able to solve his ecological problems, then man’s resources are going to die. It is quite conceivable that man will be unable to fish the oceans as in the past, and that if the balance of the oceans is changed too much, man will even find himself without enough oxygen to breathe.”[13] He develops this concern, again with theological grounding, emphasizing man’s important relationship to the natural world.
Remembering for the Future
As we think about, and thank God for, Francis Schaeffer’s pastoral and prophetic ministry, we would do well to think forward to other areas over which Schaeffer expressed concern. There is no shortage of prophetic truth communicated with pastoral compassion in his writings. To name a few, Schaeffer was critical of the middle-class obsession with personal peace and affluence.[14] He also decried the danger of wrapping “Christianity in our national flag” and the problems produced by such a synthesis.[15] Middelmann stated that Schaeffer had his sights set on emphasizing Christian care for the poor at the end of his life and addressing injustices in immoral economic practices.[16] No matter the issue, we should read Schaeffer’s work and reflect on his exhortations and example. Schaeffer was pastoral in his approach and prophetic in his message. I believe he continues to be so for us now and into the future.
Schaeffer certainly wrote on a wide variety of issues and sought to extend the lordship of Christ into all areas of our culture. But what may be his most unique contribution is the harmony between what he taught and what he did. He rightly balanced truth with love, as Bryan Follis realized when he titled his book on Schaeffer’s apologetics Truth with Love. Schaeffer saw people as God’s image-bearers, which not only informed how he interacted with individuals but also drove his larger cultural engagement. Moreover, he held to the truth of Scripture—true Truth!—with conviction and clarity.
[1] Bryan Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 154.
[2] Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, xx vols. (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1982), 1:291.
[3] Francis A. Schaeffer, The Mark of the Christian, in Complete Works, 4:189.
[4] William Edgar, “Francis A. Schaeffer,” in The History of Apologetics: A Biographical and Methodological Introduction, ed. Joshua D. Chatraw, Benjamin K. Forrest, and Alister E. McGrath (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 518.
[5] Jerram Barrs, “Francis Schaeffer: His Apologetics,” in Francis Schaeffer: A Mind and Heart for God, ed. Bruce Little (Phillipsburg, N.J: P & R, 2010), 36.
[6] Barrs, “Francis Schaeffer,” 36.
[7] The piece seems to have been published under two titles: “The Bible-Believing Christian and the Jew” and “The Fundamentalist Christian and Anti-Semitism.” Schaeffer, in the conclusion of the piece, writes, “And if this is not enough for those of us who are Bible-believing Christians, let us note the command of God in Romans 11:31. It tells us clearly what our attitude in this age should be to natural Israel. We should have mercy unto them. And, my friends, mercy and anti-Semitism in any form do not live in the same household. We cannot seek to win them individually to the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour if we despise them as a people in our hearts” (“The Fundamentalist Christian and Anti-Semitism,” The Independent Board Bulletin, October 1943).
[8] Interview with Debby and Udo Middelmann, 2007, quoted in Colin Duriez, Francis Schaeffer: An Authetic Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 55.
[9] Personal email from Udo Middelmann to Christopher Talbot on February 16, 2022.
[10] Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007),320.
[11] Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster, in Complete Works,4:346.
[12] Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? in Complete Works,5:281–308.
[13] Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man, in Complete Works, 5:5.
[14] Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster, 4:383.
[15] Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, in Complete Works, 5:485–86.
[16] Udo Middelmann, “Francis A. Schaeffer: The Man,” in Francis Schaeffer: A Mind and Heart for God, ed. Bruce A. Little (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2010), 22.
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