2 Arguments And Approach
2
ARGUMENTS AND
APPROACH
INTRODUCTION
This chapter will present a broad outline of Schaeffer’s apologetics and will consider how he sought to communicate the gospel in terms the present generation could understand. In view of the distinctive person centered approach taken at L’Abri, we will give attention not only to what Schaeffer said, but also to the why and the how of the way he conducted apologetics.
Francis Schaeffer wrote twenty-three books that have been translated into twenty-five languages and have sold three million copies. Not surprisingly, he was described as “among the most influential conservative evangelical leaders in recent decades.”1 He has been praised for helping make evangelicalism intellectually respectable through his analysis of contemporary problems, his evaluation of possible philosophical and theological solutions, and his presentation of a coherent Christianity. However, as James Packer has pointed out, it is wrong to think that Schaeffer was “trying to be a pioneer theoretician in philosophy and apologetics.”2 Indeed Schaeffer did not regard himself as creating an apologetic system and stated that he did not believe “there is any one apologetic which meets the needs of all people.”3
He saw himself as an evangelist who dealt with philosophical, intellectual, and cultural questions as part of his work in leading people to Jesus Christ. Harold Brown is right to suggest that
even when dealing with the big issues that were his speciality, Schaeffer treated them not as theoretical problems to be fitted into a comprehensive world view, but as questions that individual persons needed to answer in order to find meaning in their lives.4
Schaeffer had very little time for an academic apologetic that just seemed to argue a philosophical point for the sake of it. He directly linked apologetics with evangelism and felt that it was not really Christian apologetics if it did not “lead people to Christ as Saviour and then on to their living under the Lordship of Christ in the whole of life.”5
UNDERSTANDING THE TRUTH
Packer is correct in believing that Schaeffer perceived the primacy of thought in each individual’s makeup, so that “how we think determines what we are.”6 Schaeffer was convinced that because Christianity is a specific body of truth, “knowledge is needed prior to salvation.”7 Thus he maintained that “it must be the whole man who comes to understand that the gospel is truth and believes because he is convinced on the basis of good and sufficient reason that it is truth.”8
This does not, however, mean that everyone is to be treated as an intellectual nor that a person lacking in intellectual ability, as understood in an academic sense, is unable to understand the truth of the gospel. We should never confuse rationality with intellectualism, nor should we forget, as C. S. Lewis reminds us, that “uneducated people are not irrational people.”9 All people are made in the image of God, and rationality, as Chapter One demonstrated, is an expression of that. As human beings we are made for truth because we are made in God’s image. Schaeffer knew from his own life that it is not just academics who ask questions about Christianity and who need to be persuaded about its truth-claims. He noted that he had
worked with shipyard workers, mill workers, all kinds of people (as well as, when I was younger, personally working on farms, a huckster wagon, in factories, and so on), and I am convinced that these people often have the same questions as the intellectual; the only thing is that they do not articulate them, or if they do articulate them it is not in the same terminology.10
Given that God made the whole person and is interested in the whole person, his or her mind included, Schaeffer believed that true salvation is “a salvation which touches the whole man.”11 For Schaeffer, as already stated, that involved a person’s coming to believe the gospel on the basis of good and sufficient reason. Yet he recognized that in attempting to communicate the truth of the gospel, the Church was facing a rapidly changing historical situation. Thus if you wanted people to understand what you were saying, you needed to know their thought-forms and communicate accordingly. Schaeffer argued that unless Christians did this, “the unchangeable principles of Christianity will fall on deaf ears.”12 The change in thought-forms, and in particular the change in the concept of truth, made communication of the gospel to the younger generation extremely difficult. Indeed Schaeffer was convinced that this was the “most crucial problem” facing Christianity because before a man “is ready to become a Christian, he must have a proper understanding of truth.”13
The three books he was invited to publish in 1968, 1969, and 1972—The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason, and He Is There and He Is Not Silent—reveal Schaeffer to be someone with clear insight into the modern secular world and its thought-forms. Schaeffer felt that these three books “constitute a conscious unity” and contribute to the task of “speaking historic Christianity into the twentieth century.”14 Certainly they established him and his apologetics within evangelical Christianity. For example, The God Who Is There sold over four hundred thousand copies. Because Schaeffer is best known through these three books, and they are seen as comprising the core of his apologetical writing, I shall mainly concentrate on them in this section. However, as will later be argued, we need to move beyond these three books if we want to fully understand Schaeffer’s apologetics.
TRUTH AS AN ABSOLUTE
In The God Who Is There Schaeffer tackled the problem of how to communicate Christian truth to people who no longer believe in truth as an absolute or as an antithesis. Traditionally, people had believed in absolutes, and since absolutes imply antithesis, “they took it for granted that if anything was true, the opposite was false.”15 This meant that even if a person did not accept the truth of the gospel, he or she understood what you were talking about. Thus the change in the concept of truth away from absolutes and antithesis created major problems for the evangelist, given “that historic Christianity stands on a basis of antithesis. Without it, historic Christianity is meaningless.”16 Schaeffer believed that people in Europe prior to about 1890 and in America prior to about 1935 lived by presuppositions that in practice seemed to accord with the Christian’s own presuppositions. By presupposition he meant a belief held by a person that “often consciously or unconsciously affects the way a person subsequently reasons.”17 Although people may have disagreed as to what their absolutes were, nevertheless they agreed that there were absolutes, and so “they could reason together on the classical basis of antithesis.”18 With the shift to synthesis (i.e., the combination of the partial truths of a thesis and its antithesis), classical apologetics is no longer feasible because it fails to “understand the importance of combating a false set of presuppositions.”19
To explain how the shift in secular society took place, Schaeffer presented a historical sweep from Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) to the present day that sought to cover the key disciplines of philosophy, theology, and art. He traced the origins of the modern outlook to the teaching of Aquinas and his view of grace and nature. He believed that Aquinas had an incomplete view of the Fall, whereby while the will of man was fallen, the intellect was not. From this, as time passed, man’s intellect was seen as autonomous, and one result was the development of natural theology, a theology that could be pursued independently of the Scriptures. In Escape from Reason Schaeffer argued that this opened up an area of thought that became autonomous from God, and on the basis of this autonomous principle, “philosophy also became increasingly free, and was separated from revelation.”20 Indeed, the autonomous principle did not remain confined to philosophy or theology but soon entered art and began to influence general culture. Schaeffer believed that once nature (i.e., the created order) is made autonomous, it begins to “eat up” grace (i.e., God the Creator), and for him this reached a climax at the high point of the Renaissance. While he welcomed the correction from overemphasis on heavenly things that Renaissance thought provided, Schaeffer noted that there was much that was destructive—nature ate up grace until grace was dead.21
PARTICULARS WITHOUT MEANING
For Schaeffer another unfortunate consequence of Aquinas’s teaching was a dichotomy between universals and particulars. In nature you have particulars (i.e., individual things), while in grace you have the universal (i.e., that which covers all the particulars and gives them meaning).22 Schaeffer believed that Aristotle, whose philosophy influenced Aquinas, emphasized the particulars rather than the universal that gave unity to all the particulars. However, once you set the particulars free, how do you hold them together?23 Where do you find unity? Where do you find meaning? Schaeffer maintained that this marks the drift toward modern man and his cynicism.
[W]e are left with masses of particulars but no way to get them together. So we find that by this time nature is eating up grace in the area of morals, and even more basically, in the area of epistemology as well.24
Yet despite the lower elements eating up the higher elements, what Schaeffer calls the “lower story” and the “upper story,” man did not “abandon the hope of a rational unity between the particulars and the universal.”25 For this reason Schaeffer regarded Leonardo da Vinci as an important figure. He understood that if you emphasize the particulars and begin
on the basis of rationalism—that is, man beginning only from himself, and not having any outside knowledge—you would only . . . end up with mechanics . . . there were not going to be any universals or meaning at all.26
Leonardo realized that this would not do and tried to produce the universal by painting the soul. He failed but “never gave up the hope of a unified field of knowledge.”27
Schaeffer identifies a paradigm shift by the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)—from nature and grace to nature and freedom. Nature had totally devoured grace, and there was no concept of revelation in any area. What was left in its place in the upper story was freedom. Partly as a reaction to the determinism that began to emerge from nature’s being so autonomous, thinkers like Rousseau longed for freedom. It is a freedom that is in itself as autonomous as nature, and so “it means a freedom in which the individual is the centre of the universe.” Schaeffer believed that it is a freedom with nothing to restrain it, and “it is a freedom that no longer fits into the rational world.”28 Meanwhile, as scientists shifted their presuppositions to embrace a worldview that understands reality only in materialist and naturalist terms, they came to believe in “the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.”29 Indeed their naturalism was so closed and their system so determinist, Schaeffer suggests, that they treated everything as if it were a machine. However, given that they still insisted on a unity of knowledge, it was a unity achieved simply by ruling out freedom. The “upper story” completely disappears: neither “God nor freedom are there anymore—everything is in the machine.”30
THE LINE OF DESPAIR
The search of rationalism for an answer that would encompass all of thought and all of life did not prove successful. Throughout the Enlightenment people continued to think that they could construct a unified field of knowledge “by means of rationalism plus rationality.”31 By “rationalism” Schaeffer meant man beginning absolutely and totally from himself, gathering information concerning the particulars, and formulating the universal. For Schaeffer “rationality” means mankind thinking in a way that is not contrary to reason, or as he put it, “man’s aspiration of reason is valid.” He maintained that rationality always involves antithesis, for “that is the way God has made us, and there is no other way to think.”32 By the time of Immanuel Kant (1774–1804), the philosophers
came to the realization that they could not find this unified rationalistic circle and so, departing from the classical methodology of antithesis, they shifted the concept of truth, and modern man was born.33
Schaeffer believed that this set the stage for Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who opened the door to “the line of despair.” This was a “titanic shift,” for previously people above the line had been “rationalistic optimists” who sought an adequate explanation for the whole of reality “without having to depart from the logic of antithesis.”34 Now absolute truth was displaced, and “all possible positions are relativized and truth is to be sought in synthesis rather than antithesis.”35 Schaeffer argues that this move—whereby mankind retained his rationalism but at the expense of rationality—was made out of desperation, but that this is characteristic of sinful man. Placing himself, rather than God, at the center of the universe and making himself autonomous, man will give up his rationality so he can preserve his rationalism, his autonomy, and his rebellion against God.36 Schaeffer maintained that following Hegel, “truth as truth was gone, and synthesis (the both-and), with its relativism, reigns.” Schaeffer declared that a
central reason Christians do not understand their children is because their children no longer think in the same framework in which their parents think. It is not merely that they come out with different answers. The methodology has changed—that is, the very method by which they arrive at, or try to arrive at, truth has changed.37
THE LEAP OF FAITH
Although Hegel opened “the line of despair” (i.e., abandoning all hope of finding a unified answer for knowledge and life), Schaeffer held that it was Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) who was the first thinker to go below it. Hegel can be classified as an idealist, and certainly “he thought that in practice synthesis could be arrived at by reason.” However, this did not prove possible, and Kierkegaard concluded that you “achieve everything of real importance by a leap of faith.”38 With Kierkegaard, the line between nature and universals widened considerably, and indeed there was now no interchange. Below the line there is rationality and logic, while the upper story becomes the non-rational and non-logical. As Schaeffer noted, in the lower story, on the basis of reason, “man has no meaning, no purpose, no significance. There is only pessimism concerning man as man. But up above, on the basis of a nonrational, nonreasonable leap, there is a nonreasonable faith which gives optimism.”39 Thus, given the total separation of faith from the rational, if
rationalistic man wants to deal with the really important things of human life (such as purpose, significance, the validity of love), he must discard rational thought about them and make a gigantic, nonrational leap of faith.40
Schaeffer regarded Kierkegaard as the father of modern existential thinking in both its secular and theological forms. Given that existentialism was extremely fashionable in the 1960s when Schaeffer was speaking and writing, he looked at Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). Rationally, Sartre found the universe absurd, and so he encouraged people to “authenticate” themselves by an act of the will. Yet as Schaeffer explained, “authentication has no rational or logical content—all directions of the will are equal.”41 Jaspers spoke of a “final experience” that would be so big in your life that it would give you a certainty that you are there and that you have a hope of meaning. However, given that the “final experience” is “totally separated from the rational, there is no way to communicate its content either to someone else or to yourself.”42 Having helped a student who was close to suicide as he attempted to cling to the fading memory of his final experience, Schaeffer lamented, “how hopeless is hope based only on this final experience.”43 Yet because mankind is made in the image of God, he cannot live as though he is nothing, and so he will place all sorts of things in the upper story.
Drawing upon his experience of working with many people in the 1960s who were taking LSD, Schaeffer suggested that for many, drugs were an attempt “to have a direct mystical experience that has no relation to the world of the rational.”44 As Schaeffer perceptively observed, the rationalistic, humanistic man began by saying that Christianity was not rational enough, but he “has come around in a wide circle and ended as a mystic—though a mystic of a special kind. He is a mystic with nobody there.”45
Not only did Schaeffer reject secular existentialism, but he also had no time for its religious form. While he viewed Kierkegaard as the father of existential thinking, it was Karl Barth (1886–1968) whom Schaeffer blamed for opening the “door to the existentialistic leap in theology.”46 Although Barth held the higher critical theories that the Bible contains mistakes, he argued that a “religious word” comes through anyway. Thus “religious truth” is separated from the historical truth of the Scriptures, and as Schaeffer noted, “there is no place for reason and no point of verification. This constitutes the leap in religious terms.” To Schaeffer, Barth isolated faith from reason, and his approach was merely “the religious expression of the prevailing thought-form of modern man.”47
The appeal of Barth and neo-orthodoxy lay partly in the use of words that have strong connotations because they are rooted in the memory of people. Words like Jesus, crucifixion, and resurrection give an illusion of communication. Yet as Schaeffer pointed out, while one hears the word Jesus and acts upon it, the word is never defined.48 The use of such words is always in the area of the irrational because “being separated from history and the cosmos, they are divorced from possible verification by reason downstairs and there is no certainty that there is anything upstairs.”49
THE NEW THINKING SPREADS
Considerable space is devoted in The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason to explaining how the new way of thinking (i.e., the change of presuppositions and the leap from the lower to the upper story) spread by country, discipline, and class. Schaeffer noted that while it originated with the intellectuals, it was passed on to the mass of people who “received the new way of thinking through the mass media without analysing it.”50 He argued that BBC Television was “over-whelmingly” committed to the new thought-forms, and Christians were absorbing these “without being able to understand what is happening to them.”51 Rather radically for an evangelical minister, Schaeffer suggested that if he had to choose, he would prefer programs with swearing in them rather than those without swearing but that conveyed modern thoughtforms. As noted earlier, Schaeffer contended that society in Britain had shifted from presuppositions that accorded with a Christian outlook as early as the 1890s.
It was not until the 1930s that a similar shift took place in America, and the middle classes were the last to change. As most evangelical churches were middle-class, evangelicals had hitherto been largely unaffected by the new way of thinking. However, by the 1960s there was emerging a new generation educated in the new concept of truth—i.e., no longer thinking in terms of absolutes or antithesis. Schaeffer realized that it was “not merely that they think different things. They think differently. Their thinking had changed in such a way that when you say Christianity is true, the sentence does not mean to them what it means to you.”52
TAKING THE ROOF OFF
It was to reach such people that Schaeffer urged the church to teach and preach a clear grasp of presuppositions. He believed that “every person we speak to, whether shop girl, or university student, has a set of presuppositions, whether he or she has analysed them or not.”53 However, Schaeffer maintained that
in reality no one can live logically according to his own non-Christian presuppositions, and consequently, because he is faced with the real world and himself, in practice you will find a place where you can talk.54
Interestingly, when Schaeffer started his ministry at L’Abri in 1955, he only thought that “most people” could not live consistent with their non-Christian presuppositions. It was the experience of dealing with the many individuals who visited L’Abri that led him to conclude that “no one” can live according to the logical conclusions of their nonChristian presuppositions.55 This meant that “there is common ground between the Christian and the non-Christian because regardless of a man’s system, he has to live in God’s world.”56 Thus communication is possible and the gospel can be shared once the person is able to understand it.
Christianity, Schaeffer argued, is “the truth of what is there” in terms of the external world with its structures and those things within man that form his “mannishness” (i.e., his longing for significance, love, and beauty).57 To deny Christianity and live on the basis of nonChristian presuppositions is to stray from reality, and the “more logical a man who holds a non-Christian position is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world.”58 Schaeffer encouraged Christians to take into account the presuppositions of the non-Christian and push “him towards the logic of his position in the area of his own real interests.”59 As already mentioned, non-Christians do not live in consistency with their own presuppositions, and so there is within every person a “point of tension.” Schaeffer held that each person “built a roof over his head to shield himself at the point of tension.” Engaging in one-to-one apologetics affords the Christian the opportunity to find the non-Christian’s point of tension and then lift his roof off. This allows “the truth of the external world and of what man is to beat upon him. When the roof is off, each man must stand naked and wounded before the truth of what is.”60
Taking the person’s “roof off” and pushing him “off his false balance” would cause him pain. Schaeffer believed that the Christian must constantly remind himself or herself that this is not a game to be played, and the person with whom you are in conversation must be able to feel that you care for him or her. Otherwise, Schaeffer recognized, “I will only end up destroying him, and the cruelty and ugliness of it all will destroy me as well.”61 Thus it was important not to push a person any further than was necessary for him or her to see his or her need of the gospel. Schaeffer strongly believed that the first truth to be shared once a person’s roof is off is “not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the Scriptures, but the truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is.” This shows a person his or her need, and you then can share from Scripture “the real nature of his lostness and the answer to it.”62
Modern man hardly ever considers himself to be guilty, but he often acknowledges that he is dead, and for Schaeffer, that was the place to begin. While the Christian apologist is to begin with the lostness with which a person wrestles, the task is also “to tell him that the present death he knows is moral death and not just metaphysical lostness, and then to tell him God’s solution.”63 Schaeffer recognized that it often took much more time to press a person to his or her point of tension than it did to give him or her the Christian answer. However, in contrast to many evangelicals who would invite a person to “accept Jesus Christ as Savior,” he stressed that the first part of the gospel to be shared is the truth that “God is there.” Only then, he believed, was the modern person ready to hear God’s solution for his or her “moral dilemma in the substitutionary work of Christ in history.”64 Yet Schaeffer rejoiced that when a modern person reaches this point and sees his or her need, no matter how complicated he or she may be in his or her thinking under “the line of despair,” “the good news is the same as it had always been” and can be expressed in the same words to all people.65
A PERSONAL UNIVERSE
To help Christians communicate with modern persons and bring them to the point where they could grasp their need of the gospel, Schaeffer presented in He Is There and He Is Not Silent a cumulative argument for God’s existence. Starting with Sartre who said that the basic philosophical problem is that there is something rather than nothing, Schaeffer sought to explore the problem of metaphysics—the existence of Being—and to consider the dilemma of man who has no meaning. If the universe had an impersonal beginning, everything, including man, must be explained in terms of the impersonal plus time plus chance, and this, Schaeffer contends, could not explain the personality of man.66 Although all forms of determinism say man is not personal, Schaeffer believed he is personal and, while finite, is different from nonman. Mankind has what Schaeffer termed an essential “mannishness” (i.e., a longing for significance, love, and beauty), and this can be traced “through all the years, back to the cave paintings.”67
For Schaeffer, the answer was a universe with a personal beginning, and for this to have an adequate basis there must be a “personal-infinite God and a personal unity and diversity in God . . . and Christianity has this in the Trinity.”68 To Schaeffer the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was a “reasonable explanation,” and he even thought that without “the high order of personal unity and diversity as given in the Trinity, there are no answers.”69 Because this was the only answer to the question of existence (i.e., to man’s being finite and yet personal), Schaeffer felt that “we may hold our Christianity with intellectual integrity.”70
If a person refuses to accept that the universe had a personal beginning, then he or she has to face the problem that with an impersonal beginning, morals really do not exist as morals. Schaeffer maintained that “we can talk about what is antisocial, or what society does not like, or even what I do not like, but we cannot talk about what is really right and what is really wrong.”71 In an impersonal universe there is no standard that gives final meaning to such words as right and wrong. Yet the reality of life demonstrates that all people have what Schaeffer termed “moral motions.” That is, people have always felt that there is a difference between right and wrong. When Schaeffer talked about all people having moral motions, he meant “all people,” including the prostitute on the street who has her own sense of right and wrong.72
MORALITY THROUGH REVELATION
The question of morals also raised the dilemma of man: to explain his wonder and nobility and the problem of his horrible cruelty. Schaeffer suggested that
if we say that man in his present cruelty is what man has always been, and what man intrinsically is, how can there be any hope of a qualitative change in man? There might be a quantitative change—that is, he may become just a little less cruel—but there can never be a qualitative change.73
He contended that if there was to be a qualitative change, it could only be so if you accept that “man as he is now is not what he was; that man is discontinuous with what he has been.” In contrast to the non43 Christian philosopher who regards mankind as normal, the Bible teaches that he is abnormal and that, as Schaeffer put it, there “was a space-time, historic change in man.”74 Arguing strongly for a literal Fall in the history of mankind, Schaeffer warned about those “evangelicals playing games with the first half of Genesis. But if you remove a true, historic, space-time Fall, the answers do not exist.” Given that man has true moral guilt, he needs a solution for it, and “it is here that the substitutionary, propitiatory death of Christ is needed and fits in.”75
Schaeffer was realistic enough to recognize that some people would be unable to accept the biblical explanation and the Reformed position that involves verbal propositional revelation. However, he maintained that this resulted from their presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, whereby “any idea of revelation becomes nonsense.”76 In both The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason there was an underlying concern for the issue of knowledge, and in He Is There and He Is Not Silent Schaeffer dealt directly with epistemology.77 During the 1960s while many evangelical preachers regarded drugs or sexual immorality as the major problems to be tackled, Schaeffer argued that epistemology was the “central problem of our generation.” 78 It was a radical position to take up, and instead of appearing judgmental by criticizing the symptoms of the problem, Schaeffer went for the source: bad epistemology. It allowed him to come alongside those beyond the church who had been influenced by the new way of thinking. Schaeffer’s approach also reflected his conviction that you are what you think: change wrongful thinking, and wrongful living will be changed.
Schaeffer encouraged non-Christians to consider whether divine revelation was acceptable or “even reasonable, not upon the basis of the Christian faith, but upon the basis of what we know concerning man and the universe as it is.”79 Drawing upon the work of secular anthropologists who say that they do not know why man should be a verbalizer, Schaeffer asked:
[W]ould it be unlikely that this personal God who is there and made man in His own image as a verbalizer, in such a way that he can communicate horizontally to other men on the basis of propositions and languages . . . would communicate to man on the basis of propositions? The answer is, no.80
Unlike other Christian apologists who said people must “presuppose” the Bible as God’s authoritative revelation, Schaeffer used less dogmatic language. He just asked “why would it be unthinkable,” he invited people to “just suppose,” and he suggested that “there is no reason why He could not communicate.”81
TRUTH FOR LIFE
Schaeffer also argued that it would be very strange if God gave “religious truth” in a book in which the “whole structural framework, implicitly and explicitly, is historic, and yet that history be false or confused.”82 A strong supporter of biblical inerrancy, Schaeffer contended for a revelation that was without error in all that it affirms.83 Because the revelation of God in Scripture looked outward to the Christ who died in history upon the cross, Schaeffer accepted that this made the “Christian faith open to discussion and verification.”84 He believed that in the Bible you have two things: the didactic teaching of Scripture and also that “which makes us say, ‘Yes, God works that way.’”85 In other words, what God does in history and in the cosmos never violates what He tells us in His Word. In reply to the despair and cynicism of modern man, Schaeffer argued that Christianity had the answer, and he noted that
the strength of the Christian system—the acid test of it—is that everything fits under the apex of the existing, infinite-personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. No other system has an apex under which everything fits. That is why I am a Christian and no longer an agnostic.86
Seeing people come to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior was for Schaeffer, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, what Christian apologetics was all about. He was not interested in changing Christian teaching in order to “make it more palatable” to the modern person but in communicating the gospel “so that it is understood.”87 Certainly his ministry at L’Abri is proof that Francis Schaeffer was a highly effective apologist who succeeded in helping many young people grasp the truth of the gospel and receive that truth into their hearts. For Schaeffer a person did not become a Christian by just giving mental assent to certain truth-claims but by entering into a personal relationship with the God who is there. Nor did he teach that this relationship is to be understood only in terms of the once-for-all act of justification, important though that is. Schaeffer gave equal stress to the importance of a “continuing moment-by-moment proper relationship with the God who exists.”88 In his other writings, and in particular in True Spirituality, Schaeffer explained how a Christian should live out his or her life. However, it is important to note that even an apologetical book like The God Who Is There called people to a Christianity that not only speaks of the truth but “also exhibit[s] that it is not just a theory.”89
NO GRAND PLAN
The enormous success of his three books published between 1968 and 1972 meant that the apologetical arguments of Francis Schaeffer reached a much wider audience than he had ever dreamed of. However, for many people this was their only contact with him, and some tended to either emulate him or criticize him solely in relation to these books. In particular, many came to view Schaeffer primarily in terms of the importance he accorded rationality in these three books. Conscious of this, Schaeffer added an appendix to later editions of The God Who Is There in which he stated that he did not believe that “there is any one apologetic which meets the needs of all people.” Nor did he believe that what he wrote “should ever be applied mechanically as a set formula.”90 Indeed, it is important that we grasp that for Schaeffer how apologetics was conducted was as important as what was being said. For while Schaeffer is best known through his books, writing was never at the center of his ministry. His books on apologetics and evangelism emerged thirteen years after he had been conducting an apologetical ministry at L’Abri. To understand Francis Schaeffer’s apologetics, it is essential that we consider the way in which he carried out his ministry. Without doubt, his approach was as much a part of his apologetics as was his argumentation.
The core of his ministry at L’Abri consisted of personal conversations with the individuals who visited it, and from these various conversations evolved his writings. Following his spiritual crisis in 1951 and his self-imposed isolation in the Swiss Alps, Schaeffer was convinced that his calling was to help provide a demonstration of the reality of God’s existence. This led to Schaeffer’s decision to live by faith, to make himself available to whoever visited L’Abri, to listen carefully and then give some answers to those seeking “honest answers to life’s deepest questions.”91 A tape of these discussions and of his lectures to students at L’Abri developed gradually, and the book program (which started in 1968) came into being without conscious planning. Many of his books were based on transcripts of lectures he gave to Christian students in British and American universities and that had been captured on audiotape. And these lectures were in themselves the product of his discussions and lectures at L’Abri.
Thus while The God Who Is There is generally regarded as having emerged from lectures he gave in America during 1965, much of the material had already been worked out by him in 1963 when he addressed students at L’Abri.92 And the ideas expressed in that 1963 lecture drew directly from his discussions with individual visitors to L’Abri. There was no grand strategy in Schaeffer’s ministry, for everything was allowed to develop in a relatively haphazard way, and this reflected his view that quietness and peace before God are more important than any influence a ministry, position, or activity may seem to give. He warned that a Christian group “can become activistic and take on responsibilities God has not laid upon it.”93 Schaeffer’s great concern was not to build an empire but to help the individual, and central to the work at L’Abri was a “personal compassion, based on careful and sympathetic listening.”94 As Colin Duriez has observed, Schaeffer’s apologetics “was shaped in this context and hence was person-centred.”95
LEARNING THE LANGUAGE
To communicate effectively, Schaeffer argued that the Christian apologist “must take time and trouble to learn our hearers’ use of language so that they understand what we intend to convey.”96 Just as missionaries have to learn the language of the indigenous people they seek to reach, so the Christian church of each generation had to communicate in each setting the gospel with regard to “the language and thoughtforms of that setting.”97 To those who criticized his apologetics and suggested that he just preach the “simple gospel,” Schaeffer replied that you have to preach the simple gospel so that it is simple to the person to whom you are talking or it is no longer simple. He asked his evangelical critics, “Why have we as Christians gone on saying the great truths that nobody understands? Why do we keep talking to ourselves, if men are lost and we say we love them?”98 Thus he suggested that
if the word (or phrase) we are in the habit of using is no more than an orthodox evangelical cliché which has become a technical term among Christians, then we should be willing to give it up when we step outside our own narrow circle and talk to the people around us.99
Indeed Schaeffer argued that modern man does not even fully understand terms like salvation and guilt. He felt that when modern man thinks he needs salvation, “usually he is not thinking of salvation from moral guilt but rather relief from psychological guilt feelings.”100 Thus he was concerned that “many men who make a profession go away still unsaved, having not heard one word of the real gospel because they have filtered the message through their own thought forms and their own intellectual framework.”101 Schaeffer believed that much evangelism failed because Christians “had not taken enough time with pre-evangelism.” 102 He indicated that if he only had an hour to talk to someone about the gospel, he would spend forty-five minutes showing him his real dilemma—that “he is morally dead because he is separated from the God who exists. Then I would take ten or fifteen minutes to tell him the gospel.”103 Schaeffer maintained that it takes a long time to bring a truly modern man “to the place where he understands the negative.” But “unless he understands what is wrong, he will not be ready to listen to and understand the positive.”104 For Schaeffer this was best done through personal conversations because “each person must be dealt with as an individual, not as a case or statistic or machine.”105
A REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH
Schaeffer’s approach was quite revolutionary. It is important that we do not miss this. Not only was he urging evangelicals to be willing to give up cherished phrases so that the truth of the gospel could be communicated to those beyond the church, but he was talking about evangelism failing. For many evangelicals, the gospel was such a timeless truth that there should be no change in how it was presented. And given that the regeneration of a person flows from the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit, you could not talk in terms of evangelism “failing.” Schaeffer’s call for changes in language and style of evangelism (or at least, preevangelism) was strongly criticized by some. Some like Carl McIntire, Schaeffer’s one-time friend and mentor, argued that all you had to do was “to bring conviction to these sinners in our modern day, preach them under conviction and then change them.”106 But it was not only the fundamentalists who disagreed with Schaeffer’s approach. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a leading figure in British evangelicalism and someone with whom Schaeffer still enjoyed friendly relations, remained unconvinced about the value of apologetics.107 For LloydJones “there is no neutral point at which the Christian and the nonChristian can meet,” and what the non-Christian “needs above everything else is to be humbled.”108 Without criticizing Schaeffer by name, he opposed any debate or discussion with non-Christians that afforded them equal standing. Speaking in 1969 at Westminster Theological Seminary, Lloyd-Jones declared:
Truth is revealed to us in the Scriptures and by the illumination that the Holy Spirit alone can produce. I argue therefore that this whole notion of having a debate or a discussion or exchange of views concerning these matters is something that is contrary to the very character and nature of the Gospel itself.109
Schaeffer’s approach to apologetics in the 1950s and 1960s was ground-breaking. While Lloyd-Jones maintained that people can be brought “to a knowledge of the truth” by “preaching alone,”110 Schaeffer was attempting to explain the objective truth of Christianity through individual conversations and group discussions. Like any pioneer, Schaeffer’s approach was vulnerable to misunderstanding. However, it must never be thought that the style of apologetics he developed indicated that he had lost confidence in either Scripture or preaching. Schaeffer, as we discussed in the previous section, was—and remained—firmly committed to the inerrancy of the Bible.111 Nor did he ever abandon his preaching ministry. Sunday by Sunday he continued to teach the Bible in the Chapel at L’Abri. From the earliest days when he conducted Sunday services in Lausanne and in Chalet les Mélezes and had only his family or a couple of visitors for a congregation, Schaeffer preached a sermon.112 Individual conversations and group discussions or lectures were always conducted alongside his preaching ministry. Yet, as Schaeffer said to the workers at L’Abri, he believed in the right of the non-Christian to ask questions and to probe the truthfulness of Christianity.113
FALLING ON DEAF EARS
Schaeffer recognized that all people, whether they realize it or not, function within a framework of some concept of truth. For him, the chasm between the generations was brought about “almost entirely by a change in the concept of truth.”114 Thus the Church was failing to communicate Christian truth to the next generation. Following a visit to the United States in late 1963, Schaeffer became convinced that this was the “greatest problem” facing evangelicalism and felt that there was “a specific danger of even the believer’s children being thrown away.”115 He argued that if Christians were to be truly prophetic, they must be the interpreters of the world and “speak to the ‘worldlings’ and cause them to understand.”116 This conviction underlay his discussions with individuals, and it was his great desire to communicate “the gospel to the present generation in terms that they can understand.”117 Schaeffer deplored those evangelicals who, in their desire to communicate Christianity, were “tending to change what must remain unchangeable.” Although firmly committed to the unchangeable truths of Christianity, he maintained that evangelical Christians must grasp what is “the present ebb and flow of thought50 forms” because otherwise the “unchangeable principles of Christianity will fall on deaf ears.”118
Yet it was this sort of comment that “raised eyebrows” within evangelicalism. When he visited England in 1963 he was challenged about his Reformed credentials by one person who asked him whether he believed “that if a man is of the Elect, he will hear the gospel so that he can understand it?” While Schaeffer answered “yes,” he also stated that election does not remove from the Christian a “responsibility in communicating the gospel.” Another critic in England advised Schaeffer not to worry too much about the problem of communication, for “when revival comes, the Holy Spirit will break through into history and then men will understand.” Again while Schaeffer agreed with the truth about the role of the Holy Spirit, he argued that this “doesn’t touch our problem of communication and our responsibility.” 119 He longed for the method of explaining the gospel, as well as the message itself, to be suitable for communicating “into a changing historical situation.”120
Schaeffer certainly gave greater attention to human responsibility for communicating the gospel than other Reformed writers did. LloydJones, for example, rejected the view that the modern person must be allowed the opportunity to have his or her say and maintained that “true preaching” would still draw people. He argued that “not to believe this is indicative, ultimately, of the fact that we have very little place for the Holy Spirit and His work in our outlook.”121 Yet Schaeffer recognized that you could not “separate true apologetics from the work of the Holy Spirit, nor from a living relationship in prayer to the Lord on the part of the Christian.”122 He saw no contradiction between praying with expectancy for a person and giving good and necessary answers to the questions raised by the person. In fact, he stressed that “we must consciously pray for the Lord’s work as these adequate answers are given.”123 Schaeffer did not lose sight of the purpose of apologetics. For him it was “not just to win an argument or a discussion, but that the people with whom we are in contact may become Christians and then live under the Lordship of Christ in the whole spectrum of life.” Nor did Schaeffer forget “that eventually the battle is not just against flesh and blood.”124 Despite the importance he gave to rational discussion and human responsibility, he maintained that
as we look at the book of Acts, we find in the early Church not a group of strong men labouring together, but the work of the Holy Spirit bringing to them the power of the crucified and glorified Christ. It must be so for us also.125
SOVEREIGNTY AND FREEDOM
The balance accorded by Schaeffer to the role of the Holy Spirit and human responsibility in communicating the gospel was in some ways a more accurate reflection of the traditional Reformed approach than that prevailing among Calvinists of his generation. Perhaps in response to the emotional appeals made by many fundamentalists for personal decisions, the Reformed stream within evangelicalism had put such an emphasis on God’s sovereignty that they failed to give proper attention to the human dimension. Schaeffer’s approach was thus a healthy corrective. It also reflected his deep conviction that every person to whom we talk, “however far from the Christian faith he may be, is an imagebearer of God. He has great value, and our communication to him must be in genuine love.”126 Schaeffer frequently stressed that man “has not ceased to be man because he is fallen.” Although twisted, corrupted, and lost as a result of the Fall, man is still man, and he “has become neither a machine nor an animal nor a plant.”127
For Schaeffer the heart of the problem of modern man is the issue of personality and whether or not one lives in a personal universe. He believed that modern thinking viewed man as something determined by chemical, psychological, or sociological factors—a sort of machine. Schaeffer felt that “man is increasingly getting lost as he doesn’t understand who he is” and is “lost among the machines.”128 It was to explain to the modern person who he or she really was, someone made in the image of God, that Schaeffer conducted his personal conversations and group discussions. Yet it was also because they were made in the image of God that Schaeffer believed that individuals could discuss the things of God. Schaeffer often pointed out that the Bible does not “reduce man to a zero,” one who, incapable of doing anything, “just sits there and suddenly there is a strike of lightning out of the sky and he is a Christian.”129
Furthermore, as people are created in the image of God with individual personality and are able to make a free first choice, they live as significant individuals in a significant history. An individual can choose to obey God or not “because he was created to be different from the animal, the plant and the machine.”130 In his many discussions at L’Abri, be it with an individual or with a group over the meal table, Schaeffer stressed time after time the significance of man against the prevailing secular notion of mankind as nothing more than a machine determined by various factors.131 Although Schaeffer believed in unconditional predestination, he stressed that “history and humanity are not caught in the wheels of determinism.”132 Burson and Walls note that this emphasis is “an important thread that can be traced through the entire Schaeffer corpus.” He spoke forcefully about the significance of human freedom “in order to challenge the ever-increasing mechanistic mindset of the twentieth century.”133
Loving Each Person
To understand Schaeffer, we need to understand the love he had for the individual person. As stated earlier, he believed that communication about the gospel to a non-Christian must be made in love, for each person has great value because he or she bears the image of God. This was no dry theological doctrine for Schaeffer, who argued that “emotionally as well as intellectually, we must look at the man before us as our kind.”134 Each individual is unique and worthy of love, for as Schaeffer liked to say, “with God there are no little people.”135 Nor was this something he merely developed in the 1960s as an apologetical strategy to reach disillusioned young people: it was a lifelong core belief. Indeed it is crucial, if we are to gain an insight into Schaeffer and his apologetics, that we grasp the depth of his love for the individual. It was a belief that had not only shaped him but his entire ministry.
Back in the 1930s at a time when American churches sadly reflected the segregation of society, Schaeffer taught Sunday school to African-American children while he studied at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.136 In 1941–1943 he served as an Associate Pastor of a church in Chester that had five hundred members, but he found time to help “a child with Down’s Syndrome, whose parents could ill afford special education.”137 People of whatever position or ability were important to Schaeffer and to his wife: they both believed that an effort should be made to make the individual feel special. For example, in the 1940s Edith had a cleaning woman who was African-American, and they had lunch together every day. “When they ate together, Edith put a candle in the middle of the table so the table setting would have beauty.”138 To Edith, the woman was not just the person who cleaned but a woman made in the image of God. This love for the individual underpinned Schaeffer’s apologetics, and it was a love from which the apologetics sprang, rather than, as stated above, a strategy for successful apologetics.
In his apologetics Schaeffer thought that loving the other person as ourselves is the place to begin, though he warned that “genuine love, in the last analysis, means a willingness to be entirely exposed to the person to whom we are talking.”139 For the Schaeffers this involved opening their home to whoever was in need and welcoming whomever God drew to them, making it an issue of prayer that God would choose the people who would come.140 We do well to remember that when L’Abri was established in 1955, it was not with the aim that it become a center for apologetics. The purpose of L’Abri was “to show forth by demonstration, in our life and work, the existence of God.”141 Thus the real basis of L’Abri was this desire to show the reality of God, and it was a desire that flowed from Schaeffer’s spiritual crisis in 1951. Apologetics—giving, as Schaeffer put it, “honest answers to honest questions”—indeed became a key feature of L’Abri, but it should not be confused with its founding principle.142 Apologetics quickly became an integral part of L’Abri, but this was not a distraction from its main purpose of demonstrating the reality of God. To the Schaeffers, living on the basis of prayer meant allowing God to “plan the work and unfold His plan” day by day rather than their deciding how L’Abri should develop.143
FROM SMALL BEGINNINGS
In some ways the work of L’Abri began even before Schaeffer formed L’Abri Fellowship and resigned from his mission board on June 5, 1955. The previous month Priscilla, his oldest daughter, brought a friend from Lausanne University who was struggling with spiritual questions home for the weekend.144 Word spread among the students that Priscilla’s father could help make sense of life, and more “young people showed up and additional conversations ensued.”145 L’Abri was run very much as an open home where guests joined the Schaeffers and were treated as part of the family. In a six-week period extending to the end of July, the Schaeffers had 187 guests who stayed varying lengths of time.146 It wasn’t only students who came to L’Abri: after the first visit in September by an American soldier stationed in Germany, there was a stream of GIs.147 In the early days of L’Abri, Edith Schaeffer thought a full dining room consisted of about ten people, but by the 1960s she was providing Sunday meals to as many as fifty on a regular basis.148 After Schaeffer’s books were published, in 1968 the numbers visiting L’Abri really took off. One staff member recalls having to wash the dishes of 140 people who had been to Sunday tea.149
As L’Abri had expanded, other chalets had been acquired in Huémoz and more staff appointed to lead the work from them. These different households all formed a part of the L’Abri community, and while everyone would come together for lectures or church services, they normally ate in the different chalets. This, as Edith Schaeffer observed, “means smaller numbers around a table, gives opportunity for continuing the informal family atmosphere, and encourages conversation around the tables.”150 In addition to the chalets where visitors could stay, a chapel and study center (Farel House) were built as money became available. Farel House developed in response to requests from people who had been converted to Christianity at L’Abri and wanted to return and study for a period of some months. But those students who came to study at Farel House were not left to work by themselves through the extensive tape library that had emerged from Schaeffer’s lectures and discussions. They were expected to take part in the reality of what was going on at L’Abri, including undertaking a share of the hard physical work (be that growing food or washing dishes) and listening to table discussions.151
FINDING A SHELTER
With table discussions, seminars, lectures on topics such as “The Intellectual Climate of the New Theology,” and the presentation of papers by students, it was not surprising that L’Abri was described by Time magazine in 1961 as a “mission to intellectuals.”152 However, one would have a totally misleading picture of L’Abri if one were to view it as a place purely for intellectuals. No doubt some who have visited it, and perhaps even some who for a time worked there, would like to regard L’Abri as a sort of intellectual community. Of course, L’Abri attracted those who wanted to explore Christianity in more depth than the local church was either able or willing to do. Thus, as Pinnock has observed, Schaeffer was able through his intellectual analysis to help guide students into trusting Jesus Christ as their Savior and to help existing Christians to develop their faith in a more cogently reasoned way.153 Nevertheless, we do well to remember that the number of people visiting L’Abri with purely intellectual problems comprised only a small percentage. The vast majority of those who came to L’Abri were young Christians who were just doing badly in their walk with God, whether as a result of drying up spiritually, being overwhelmed by personal problems, or difficult family relationships.154 For them, L’Abri was truly a shelter.
For those who did struggle with intellectual problems—whether Christians whose faith was weakened by doubt or non-Christians who believed Christianity lacked intellectual credibility—help was not confined to rational discussion. Edith Schaeffer believes that in addition to long and detailed answers to their intellectual questions, something else was happening at L’Abri. “People were finding it hard to ‘shake off’ what they were living through . . . they were being given (not by us but by God’s answers to prayers) a demonstration that God exists.”155 Deirdre Ducker, a former worker at L’Abri, recalls that “prayer was seen as absolutely essential, the mainstay of the whole work,” for Francis Schaeffer “had instilled in everyone such a Biblical emphasis on the Holy Spirit.” Thus, for all the intellectual discussions, day-to-day life at L’Abri “was a visible walk with the Lord.”156 As Catherwood points out, love for the individual was a powerful demonstration of spiritual reality that “showed that Christianity was not just a set of correct propositions, but something true in experience as well as theory.”157
LOVE AND COMPASSION
Schaeffer sought to show individuals love by understanding their experience and attempting to empathize with their plight. His compassion for the individual person led him “to tailor an apologetic strategy to each person he met instead of offering a canned systematic presentation or prepackaged methodology.”158 Those who worked with Schaeffer remember him as a man who had a genuine interest in the individual, who listened carefully, and who gave the person the time he or she needed.159 Indeed David Porter, a Christian writer, says that he was won over by Schaeffer’s attentiveness rather than by his arguments in favor of Christianity.160 Schaeffer was a very emotional man who, as James Hurley witnessed, “often did shed tears of concern as he spoke with people. He was not speaking about a world of abstract ideas or ideals. His goal was to bring a message that would alter the lives of his hearers.”161 James Sire rates Schaeffer’s compassion for people so highly that he suggests that it could almost be put “before Schaeffer’s passion for truth and just after his passion for God.”162 That view is echoed by Os Guinness, who lived and worked at L’Abri for five years. He believes that part of the secret of L’Abri’s success was that “truth mattered and people mattered.”163
However, it is important that we remember that Schaeffer’s love for the individual was not just a technique for successful apologetics. Rather, his approach to apologetics was successful because of his underlying conviction about the importance of the individual. Speaking of Schaeffer at the memorial service held for him in London following his death in 1984, Os Guinness said that for Schaeffer, “truth was personal because it was rooted in a personal God.”164 For the Schaeffers, loving people didn’t just involve listening and talking with individuals, but, as mentioned earlier, it involved opening their home as an expression of love. Schaeffer was convinced that love was the mark of the true Christian, and thus Christians “must show a practical demonstration of love even when it is costly.”165 Opening their home and fostering a sense of Christian community was, as Schaeffer acknowledged, a “costly business.” Everybody could come to their table, and “drugs came to our place. People vomited in our rooms . . . and we have girls come to our homes who have had three or four abortions by the time they are 17. Is it possible that they have venereal disease? Of course. But they sleep between our sheets.”166 As Edith Schaeffer recalled, their own “family life was almost non-existent,” and life at L’Abri wasn’t easy. “But we hadn’t asked for ease. We had asked for reality.”167
LOVE AS THE FINAL APOLOGETIC
Francis Schaeffer realized that many of the alienated young people who came to L’Abri were deliberately trying their patience to see if they would be accepted, and “when we pass the test we can begin to talk, but we have to pass the test.”168 Difficult though it was, and even painful at times, Schaeffer remained committed to reaching out in compassion and building a sense of community. He believed that “this is where we must begin. This is what the love of God means.”169 This approach reflected his fundamental belief that “true Christianity produces beauty as well as truth, especially in the specific areas of human relationships.”170 While the Christian’s relations with all humanity were to be loving, his or her relationships with fellow Christians were to be “so beautiful that the world would be brought up short.”171 Schaeffer argued that one of the marks of the early church was a real sense of community that flowed from the beauty of relations between the Christians. This he felt was not exhibited by the evangelical churches, and there was a need alongside an orthodoxy of doctrine for “an orthodoxy of community.”172
Indeed Schaeffer went as far as to say that the love of Christians “must have a form that the world may observe; it must be visible,” for it is “the final apologetic.”173 Drawing upon John 13 and 17, Schaeffer noted that “Jesus gives the world the right to judge whether the Father has sent the Son on the basis of whether the world sees observable love among all true Christians.”174 Living in an age that did not believe truth existed, Schaeffer asked Christians whether they expected young people to take seriously the truth-claims of the gospel if Christians did not practice truth.175 Although he did not minimize the need to give honest answers to honest questions, Schaeffer also believed that “unless Christians love one another, the world cannot be expected to listen, even when we give totally sufficient answers.”176 At L’Abri, Schaeffer attempted to have a community that was in many ways a microcosm of what the Church ought to be. “[It] combines spiritual formation, intellectual stimulation, holy living, ethnic diversity, shared responsibility and mutual interdependency. It was a fertile context for engaging the whole person.”177
CONCLUSION
With Schaeffer’s concern for the individual and the importance of love as the final apologetic, it is not surprising that a regular visitor to L’Abri remarked that “most went away with the knowledge that they had been loved—with a sense of worth and a clear idea of the existence of God, and with the reality of communication on both a divine and human level.”178 Yet Schaeffer’s apologetics have been criticized by Pinnock for being “preoccupied with rational methodology and propositions and inerrancy.”179 However, Pinnock fails to give proper attention to Schaeffer’s approach and his method of conducting apologetics. I believe that this chapter has clearly demonstrated that Schaeffer’s approach is as important as his argumentation. Any evaluation of Schaeffer’s apologetics that does not give as much consideration to his method as to the message he shared is defective. As has been established, Schaeffer did not restrict apologetics to a narrow definition of a reasoned explanation but also applied it to how the Christian lived. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that there has been extensive criticism of Schaeffer by several evangelical writers in relation to the role he accorded reason. Donald Bloesch, for example, has accused him of having a bent toward rationalism for claiming that a person need not believe until he or she is “satisfied intellectually that the claims of faith are true.”180 We will consider this whole issue in the next chapter.