Francis Schaeffer: a mind and heart for God

Perhaps the best way I can begin to speak about the legacy of Francis Schaeffer is to tell a brief story about the founding of the Francis Schaeffer Institute at Covenant Theological Seminary, where I have been a professor for the past 20 years.

It is a story that could be multiplied many times around the world, and each story would give another facet of the legacy of Francis and Edith Schaeffer.

I first met Francis Schaeffer when I was an undergraduate. I had gone to university to study English literature, optimistic that I would find answers to my questions about life at this famous centre of human learning and wisdom. How na•ve I was! Within a few weeks of attending classes I discovered that my professors were completely uninterested in my questions.

Most of them seemed completely unconcerned about the author’s interactions with the most basic challenges of human life. This arid approach to the great works of literature led, first, to deep disenchantment, and then very quickly to a sense of despair and absurdity and a readiness to kill myself.

Around this time friends at the university introduced me to an audio recording of one of Francis Schaeffer’s lectures. I was a non-Christian who was just beginning to wake up to the amazing answers the Christian faith gives to the questions of life. I will never forget that evening. It involved an overview of Western thought and culture — a two-hour sketch of the history of ideas about God, about human life, about meaning and moral order.

Schaeffer took the ideas of literature and the arts with the utmost seriousness. I was riveted and enchanted. He pointed to the questions that all literature and art raise about human life here in this world. The answers, he claimed, were to be found in God’s revelation of himself to us in creation, in his Word, and through his Son.

Hitchhike to Switzerland

It was a few months after hearing this lecture that I became a believer in Christ. I had no idea what to do with my life, for God had turned my life completely around — I had become a new creature and the whole world was a new creation and had become full of meaning to me. The day after my graduation I started hitchhiking my way to the Schaeffers’ house in the Swiss Alps. I had no money, so as I left home I prayed that if God wanted me to go to L’Abri I would get good rides.

The first person to offer me a ride turned out to be a Christian who had just heard Schaeffer giving a lecture at the University of Cambridge. He was heading to Vienna, so I travelled with him for a full two days to Basel in Switzerland. From there it was just a few hours by courtesy of three quick hitched rides up to the village of Huemoz not far from Lake Geneva. I was a very young believer and I had a strong sense that God clearly had something in mind for me getting me there so easily.

Raids and rapid retreats

My life, like the lives of countless thousands of other people, was profoundly impacted by the work of Francis and Edith Schaeffer. My initial two-week stay at L’Abri turned into a year and eventually led to my marriage and a teaching position at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. By this point I had observed that the evangelical movement was, as much of it still is, in a general retreat into its own subculture, due to a widespread fear of secularism and postmodernism. The result of this retreat is that we create not a genuine counterculture, but a Christian ‘corner culture’. Non-Christians perceive us as ‘religious’ and many Christians are left unprepared to lead distinctively Christian lives at home or in the workplace. One of the most destructive consequences of all of this is the ‘us versus them’ mentality that many Christians have towards unbelievers, which means that evangelism becomes a series of raids from behind our walls followed by rapid retreats.

Starting the Institute

I had a longing to live and teach some of what I had seen in Schaeffer and learnt from him — particularly to those going into the ministry. To my delight, shortly after arriving at Covenant Seminary, I was asked if I would start the Francis Schaeffer Institute. Obviously the Institute had to be shaped by the ministry of Francis and Edith rather than just new programs and techniques. So I asked myself what the main things were that I’d learned? And then I came up with a basic statement which my former colleagues in L’Abri helped me to develop. This was adopted by the seminary and by L’Abri Fellowship itself and I set it out here in eight simple points.

1. Devotion to Christ and a reality of prayer as we live in daily dependence upon the Lord

The heart of Christianity is the love that Christ has shown us in giving himself up to death on the cross as the substitute for our sins and, in turn, the love we ought to show him as our hearts are overwhelmed by gratitude for all he has done and continues to do for us. We are called to live with this love as the motivating force of our inner being. Francis and Edith believed that L’Abri should be a demonstration of God’s existence and of the truth of Christianity as those in the work depended on him day by day and as he graciously answered their prayers.

2. Confidence in biblical truth

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments describe themselves as revelation, ‘communication in language’, from the infinite personal God to us, his creatures. The Bible claims divine inspiration and therefore to be infallible and inerrant in its teaching. Although written by human authors, it is the living Word of God, able to make us wise to salvation and sufficient to teach us all we need to know for life and godliness.

3. The reality of the Fall

The disobedience of Adam and Eve brought the whole human race, as their physical descendants, into a state of sin and judgment. This resulted in a number of separations — from God, from other human beings, from our own inner selves and from nature. Death, our final enemy, manifests this reality most fully as it tears apart our body and spirit and brings our bodies down to the grave. Christ, through his triumph on the cross and in his resurrection, has overcome, is overcoming, and will overcome fully all of these separations.

4. Commitment to genuine humanness expressed in servanthood and love, and displayed in supernaturally restored relationships

Within the Trinity there have been love and personal communication through all eternity. We humans have been created in the likeness of this personal God, although our humanness has in every aspect been flawed by sin and its effects. Christ is at work restoring us to true humanness as we become conformed to his likeness by the power of the Spirit. This supernatural restoration of relationships ought to be realised wherever there is true Christianity.

5. Commitment to apply God’s truth to the whole of life and to encourage Christians to make a contribution to the wider culture

Scripture does not encourage us to think that some activities, such as prayer or evangelism, are more spiritual than other activities, such as caring for children or manual labour. Rather, we are taught that Christ is Lord of all of life. Christians are called by the Lord not to withdraw from the world — developing our own corner culture — but to be in it, living as salt and light in it, rejoicing in all that is good in human society, and committing ourselves to make a difference in our own small way in whatever calling we are placed by the Lord.

6. The appreciation of God’s gifts in all of life

God is the maker and giver of every good gift in life. We are called to enjoy God’s creation, and we should honour and be thankful for the depth and richness that art brings to our lives. We are called to enjoy God’s creation and to delight in using body, mind and imagination to express our own creativity and to enrich the lives of others as we do.

7. The need to understand the culture we live in and communicate to it

On every page of the Gospels we see Christ’s deep knowledge and understanding of the times in which he lived. To resist the ideas and practices of the culture in which we live, we have to understand them and bring them before the bar of Scripture. To communicate faithfully we have to work at understanding the intellectual climate of the times in which we live, and we need to give ourselves to people in love if we want to know what idols captivate the hearts of our contemporaries.

8. The preparedness to give honest answers to honest questions in such a way that the unbeliever may be faced with the truth claims of Christianity

Because Christianity is the truth, people should be encouraged to ask the questions that trouble them. In Scripture there will always be good and sufficient answers available for those who seek with an open heart and mind. But because evangelism is not simply the task of persuading people of the truth of the Christian message, we must at the same time pray for the Holy Spirit to humble the heart and mind of the hearer in order that he or she might be open to and convinced by the truth.

These points are of course not original to the Schaeffers, for they are simply an elaboration of some of the most basic elements of faithful biblical Christianity. But that is why these points are so significant and that is why the Schaeffers’ legacy is one that we can cherish.

Everywhere I travel in the world I meet people and have the privilege of seeing ministries that owe a debt to the faithful teaching and lives of the Schaeffers. It is the profound indebtedness of many to the Schaeffers’ grasp of foundational biblical truth that is their most significant legacy.

This article is an extract from Francis Schaeffer: A Mind and Heart for God, edited by Bruce A. Little, in which two chapters are by Jerram Barrs (P&R Publishing), abridged by Rachel Thorpe.

Francis Schaeffer: a mind and heart for God

Second of two extracts

Hitchhike to Switzerland

Raids and rapid retreats

Starting the Institute

2. Confidence in biblical truth

3. The reality of the Fall

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