Justified True Belief

(●) The pastor in a Swiss village who answered a generation’s questions one at a time, and taught Christians that the faith has something to say about everything. + In the 1960s a student who had lost her faith, or had never had one, could get on a train in Paris, change at Lausanne, ride a small postal bus up a mountain road, and knock on the door of a chalet in a village of a few hundred people. Somebody would answer, show her a bed, and put her to work peeling potatoes for lunch. In the evening a short man in knee breeches and a goatee would sit down across from her and answer her questions for as long as she wanted to ask them, and if the questions ran until two in the morning he would still be there. Thousands of people made that trip. The chalet was called L’Abri, French for the shelter, and the man was Francis Schaeffer. He is on a Christian apologetics site for a simple reason: few people in the twentieth century did more to persuade ordinary Christians that their faith was not a private religious feeling but a claim about how things actually are, and that it therefore had to be able to face philosophy, painting, film, music and politics without flinching. Apologetics is the reasoned defense of the faith, the work Peter has in mind when he tells Christians to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them (1 Peter 3:15). Schaeffer’s contribution was to insist that the reason had to reach the whole of life, and to demonstrate it in conversation rather than only in print. The fact worth remembering about him is not one of the books. It is that at thirty-nine, already a missionary, already a pastor for a decade, he told his wife that in honesty he had to go all the way back to his agnosticism and think the whole thing through again. He meant it plainly. Agnosticism is the position that nobody can know whether God is there, and it was where he had stood as a boy before he ever opened a Bible; he proposed to go back and stand there a second time, and find out whether the road still ran where he remembered it running. Then he spent months walking the floor of a hayloft in the rain doing exactly that. Everything he wrote afterward came out the other side of those months.

(●) 1912 AD: Born in working-class Germantown to a father who saw no point in books. + Francis August Schaeffer IV was born on 30 January 1912 in Germantown, then a working district of Philadelphia, the only child of Francis August Schaeffer III and Bessie Williamson. His father worked with his hands and expected his son to do the same, which in that house was not a preference to be discussed but simply the way things went. There was no habit of churchgoing under that roof and no shelf of books in it, and when the boy later wanted to go to college it was a fight rather than a formality. That background matters for what he became. The man who would spend his life among students who had read Sartre and Camus in the original had not grown up among people who read anything at all. He never lost the plain manner of the street he came from, and it is part of why he could sit down with a nineteen-year-old in a chalet kitchen without sounding like a lecture.

(●) 1930 AD: He read the Bible through to see whether it answered the questions philosophy had raised, and at eighteen he believed it. + The story he told about the beginning of it has a comic accident in it. As a teenager he came home with a book of Greek philosophy he had not meant to buy, started reading it because it was there, and found that the old questions were his own questions: what is real, what is a person for, why is anything here. He looked for answers in the church he occasionally attended and did not find them there. So he did something characteristically direct. He decided to read the Bible from the beginning, as he would read any other book, to see whether it dealt with the questions at all. It took about six months, which is roughly what it takes at a few chapters a night, and he was not reading it devotionally; he was checking. By the end of it he had concluded that it did deal with them, and on 19 August 1930, at a tent meeting run by the evangelist Anthony Zeoli, he walked forward and made a public profession of faith. The date is fixed by his own diary, where he wrote that night that he had decided to give his whole life to Christ unconditionally. Two things about that six months lasted. First, he never afterward treated Christianity as something a person inherits or feels; he had come to it by asking whether it was true. Second, he came to it through philosophy’s questions rather than around them, which is why the students who arrived at his door thirty years later found a man who was not frightened of them.

(●) 1932 AD: He met Edith Seville at a church meeting where a speaker was denying that Jesus is the Son of God, and both of them stood up. + On 26 June 1932 a young people’s meeting at the First Presbyterian Church of Germantown was addressed by Ed Bloom, a former member of that church who had joined the Unitarians, a movement that honors Jesus as a teacher while denying that he is God the Son. His announced subject was how he knew Jesus was not the Son of God and the Bible not the Word of God. Edith Seville, seventeen, had come with her notes ready to answer him. So had Francis Schaeffer, home from his first year of college and working for the summer. He got to his feet first; she got up after him. They walked home together, and they were together for the next fifty-two years. Edith had been born in Wenzhou, in China, to missionary parents with the China Inland Mission, and she brought into the marriage both a missionary’s instincts and a gift for making a house work as a place people wanted to be. Half of what L’Abri later became was hers. He had got to college in the first place only over a flat refusal from his father, who told him he did not want a son who was a minister, and who then, on the morning his son said he was going anyway, relented far enough to pay for the first half year. The college was Hampden-Sydney, in Virginia, and he entered it in 1931 and graduated with high honors in June 1935. He and Edith married the following month, at the Wayne Avenue United Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, with Edith’s father performing the ceremony. The exact day is one of those small things the record cannot agree on: the standard biography gives 26 July, the Wheaton College archive 6 July. That September he entered Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he sat under the two men who marked him most. J. Gresham Machen was the New Testament scholar who had left Princeton rather than sign onto a theology he thought had abandoned the gospel. Cornelius Van Til taught something that sounds obvious until you try to argue with somebody: nobody comes to a question empty-handed. Every one of us reasons from commitments already made about what sort of world this is, and those commitments do more of the work than the arguments built on top of them. Schaeffer picked that up at twenty-three and never put it down (T1).

(●) 1938 AD: A church split carried him out of one seminary and into another, and he became the first man his new denomination ordained. + Machen died on the first day of 1937. He had spent his last years founding things: first the seminary, then a small denomination for people who would not stay in a church they believed had given up the gospel. Separated was the word they used for a body like that, and it meant what it sounds like, a clean break rather than a reform attempted from inside. What they had broken from was the liberalism of the older denominations, and in the fights of those years liberalism meant a movement that kept the vocabulary of the faith while quietly letting go of the events behind it: a Jesus who was a fine moral teacher rather than a risen Lord, a Bible that recorded religious experience rather than delivered a word from God. That was the quarrel worth having. Within months of Machen’s death, the little body he had founded divided again, this time over questions that had nothing to do with the liberalism it had left: the timing of Christ’s return, total abstinence from alcohol, and control of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, the agency that paid and posted their missionaries. Schaeffer, twenty-five and two years married, went with the departing group. Carl McIntire and Allan MacRae founded Faith Theological Seminary in Wilmington, Delaware; Schaeffer transferred there, graduated in 1938, and was the first man ordained in the new Bible Presbyterian Church. Then came a decade of American pulpits: Grove City in western Pennsylvania from 1938, Chester near Philadelphia from 1941, and St. Louis from 1943. With Edith he built a children’s evangelism program, Children for Christ, which spread further than either of them expected. He was good at this work. He was also becoming known as a hard man in a hard fight, quick to draw lines and quick to defend them. The gentleness he is remembered for now was learned later, and at a price (T5). In 1947 the mission board sent him across a Europe still full of rubble: thirteen countries in about three months, to find out what had happened to the churches during the war and what the theology of the continent now looked like. He came home convinced of two things. The fight he cared about was being lost in Europe first, and somebody ought to go.

(●) 1951 AD: Three years into missionary work in Switzerland he went back to his agnosticism to see whether he was still a Christian. + The family sailed for Europe in 1948 and settled first at Lausanne, then in 1949 at Champéry, a village in the Catholic canton of Valais. A canton is one of the Swiss states, and in those years a canton still decided for itself who was permitted to live inside its borders. They rented a chalet there, and Edith fed whoever turned up. On paper it was going well. What went wrong was internal, and he was honest enough to name it. Among the people who held the orthodox position, the ones who had the doctrine right and knew they had it right, himself squarely among them, he saw very little of the reality that the Bible says ought to follow from believing it. Not much love. Not much joy. A great deal of being right. So he told Edith that in honesty he had to go all the way back to his agnosticism and think the whole matter through again, which is not a thing a man of thirty-nine says lightly when a mission board is paying his rent on the strength of his convictions. When the weather was clear he walked in the mountains. When it rained he walked backward and forward in the hayloft of the old chalet, praying and going over his own reasons for being a Christian one at a time. He came out the other side, and what he found there was not a new argument. It was something he felt he had been taught far too little about: what the finished work of Christ means for the present moment, on an ordinary Tuesday, and not only for the day a person is converted or the day he dies. In his own account the sun came out and the song came, and he began writing poetry again after years of writing none. Everything in the book he eventually made of it, True Spirituality, dates from that hayloft.

(●) 1955 AD: Ordered out of one canton, the Schaeffers opened a chalet in the next valley to anyone who arrived with a question, and called it L’Abri, the shelter. + On 14 February 1955 the authorities of Valais gave the family six weeks to leave the canton, on the ground that they had exercised a religious influence in the village. Six weeks is not long when you have no money, no house and no permit, and when Swiss residence in those years was tied to owning or renting a property, so that finding somewhere to live and being allowed to stay in the country were the same problem. At what was very nearly the last hour a gift arrived, and it was enough to buy Chalet les Mélèzes in Huémoz, a village above the Rhône valley in the neighboring canton of Vaud. Then, on 5 June 1955, they did something that looks from the outside like recklessness. They resigned from the mission board that had sent them and opened the house on terms that sound impossible and turned out not to be. They would not advertise, they would not raise funds, and they would not recruit staff; they would pray for the people, the money and the workers, and take what came. They called it L’Abri, the shelter. What came, at first, were the friends of their eldest daughter. Priscilla was studying at the University of Lausanne and began bringing fellow students home: Europeans who had been raised on Hegel and Kierkegaard and were reading Sartre and Camus for themselves, which in those years meant reading that the universe has no author, that it means nothing in particular, and that a person must invent his own reasons or go under. They arrived with real despair and real questions, which is not a combination most households are equipped for. By 1957 something like twenty-five people were staying most weekends. On 11 January 1960 Time ran an article on the chalet under the title "Mission to Intellectuals," reporting that a fellowship had grown up there in four and a half years, and after that the little postal buses coming up the mountain were full.

(●) 1968 AD: The lectures he had been giving in a farmhouse living room became books, and the books made him evangelicalism’s teacher. + In 1965 Wheaton College invited him to give a series of lectures, and he stood in front of American students and drew on the blackboard the diagram he had been drawing for years in Switzerland: a horizontal line across the last century of Western thought, with hope of finding truth by reason above it and despair of finding any below it. The lectures were transcribed. Out of them came The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason, both in 1968, and then He Is There and He Is Not Silent in 1972, the three books usually read together as his trilogy. He was not a systematic writer and never pretended to be. The books are spoken books, full of the rhythms of a man answering a question in a room, and they sold in the millions to readers who had never been given permission to think that Christianity had anything to say about a Bergman film or a Jackson Pollock canvas. The others came steadily after them: Pollution and the Death of Man in 1970, True Spirituality in 1971, Art and the Bible in 1973. Branches of L’Abri opened in England, the Netherlands and the United States, and the chalet in Huémoz stopped being the whole of it. In 1977 he took a place on the founding council of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. Inerrancy is the position that the Bible tells the truth in everything it actually affirms, so that where it means to report what happened, what it reports happened. The Council spent a decade arguing that this was the hinge on which the rest turned, and it is not hard to see why Schaeffer signed on. The controversy that had formed him back in the 1930s had turned on that same question, and he had watched from close up what happened to the churches that answered it the other way.

(●) 1984 AD: He spent his last six years, most of them with cancer, arguing that a society which forgets who man is will not stop at abortion. + In 1976 and 1977 his son Frank produced a ten-part film series from the book How Should We Then Live?, and Schaeffer, who had never been near a camera, turned out to be able to stand in front of one. The series toured American cities and put him in front of audiences who had never read a page of him. In October 1978 he was diagnosed with lymphoma at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He treated the diagnosis as a schedule rather than a sentence. Between courses of chemotherapy he made a second film series and book with C. Everett Koop, the pediatric surgeon who would soon become Surgeon General of the United States: Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979), on abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, which he then took on tour. A Christian Manifesto followed in 1981 and sold roughly 290,000 copies in its first year. Then, in 1984, the last one. The Great Evangelical Disaster told the evangelical world that its besetting sin was accommodation, by which he meant giving away, a piece at a time and always for good reasons at the time, the very truth it claimed to be holding. He died in Rochester on 15 May 1984, at seventy-two, in a house near the hospital where a branch of L’Abri had been opened so that people could keep coming with their questions while he was dying. Edith outlived him by twenty-nine years.

What He Taught

(T1) Everyone reasons from presuppositions, and everyone lives more consistently with them than they know. + Two men watch the same news report about a famine. One says it is a tragedy and gives money; the other says it is a tragedy, gives money, and also thinks it is an outrage that ought not to be. Nothing in the report accounts for the difference. The difference is in what each of them already believed about whether the universe contains a standard the famine offends. That is what Schaeffer meant by a presupposition: the basic way a person looks at life, the grid through which the world is seen, held before any particular question comes up and usually never examined at all. His claim was not that having presuppositions is a fault. Everyone has them, including him, and a person without any would not be able to think. His claim was that most people have never noticed theirs, and that a conversation which never gets down to them is a conversation about the wrong thing. Arguing about the evidence for the resurrection with a man who has already settled it that history cannot deliver truth about God is arguing on the second floor of a building whose ground floor is the actual dispute. You can win every point up there and change nothing. Out of this came his awkward and useful coinage, "true truth." He used it because the word truth had gone soft: people would say that Christianity was true and mean that it worked for them, or was true within their community. He wanted a phrase for truth that corresponds to what is actually there, whether it works for anyone or not. Christianity, he insisted, is not a set of religious truths sitting alongside the real ones. It is a claim about total reality, and if it is false it should be abandoned.

(Q) "People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize." + Source: Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, chapter 1, "The Roman Age" (Fleming H. Revell, 1976). The opening move of his history of Western culture. He goes on to define a presupposition as the basic way an individual looks at life, the grid through which he sees the world, and to argue that the culture of any period is the flowering of what its thinkers presupposed a generation or two earlier (T1).

(T2) Western thought crossed a line, gave up hope of finding truth by reason, and moved meaning upstairs where reason cannot follow. + Picture a two-storey house with no staircase. Downstairs are the things everybody agrees can be known: chemistry, dates, the tensile strength of steel, whatever a laboratory or an archive can settle. It is furnished, it is well lit, and it contains no meaning, no purpose and no morals, because a laboratory cannot weigh those. Upstairs are the things a person cannot live without: love, significance, right and wrong, God. There is no way up from the lower floor by reasoning, so the only way to get there is to jump. That picture is Schaeffer’s summary of what happened to Western thinking, and the moment the staircase was pulled out he called the line of despair. Before that moment, thinkers worked with what he called antithesis: the plain principle that if a thing is true, its opposite is not. A detective uses antithesis all day without knowing the word for it. If the butler was in Glasgow on Tuesday night, then he was not in the drawing room on Tuesday night, and one of the two stories on the table can be crossed off. That is how reasoning gets anywhere at all, by ruling things out. After the line, that principle was given up in favor of synthesis, in which two contradictory things are held together on purpose and the tension between them is treated as the point rather than as a problem waiting to be solved. Schaeffer put the crossing at around 1890 in Europe and around 1935 in America, and he thought it travelled through the disciplines in a settled order, each one catching it from the one before: philosophy first, then painting, then music, then the general culture, and last of all theology, where the word God survived while the claim that anything definite could be known about him did not. He is worth reading with two things in mind. The first is that his genealogy of ideas, the family tree he draws running down from one thinker to the next, is compressed and contested; specialists in Hegel and in Kierkegaard have argued at length that neither man is quite the figure Schaeffer describes, and the criticism has substance. The second is that the thing he was pointing at is real, and any parent of a teenager has met it. When a student says "that may be true for you," they are standing exactly where Schaeffer drew the line, and they did not get there by reading Hegel.

(Q) "The present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely by a change in the concept of truth." + Source: Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, section 1, chapter 1, "The Gulf Is Fixed" (Inter-Varsity Press, 1968). The first sentence of his first book, written in 1968 while the generation gap was being explained everywhere in terms of music, sex and the war. Schaeffer’s answer was that the gap went deeper than any of those, and that older Christians who did not understand the shift would keep giving answers to questions nobody was asking (T2).

(T3) Nobody can live consistently with a false view of the world, and the loving thing is to take the roof off. + A man says that human beings are a chance arrangement of chemicals and that right and wrong are conventions we agreed on. Then his daughter is hurt by someone, and he is not merely inconvenienced; he is outraged, and the outrage has a shape it has no business having if he is right about the chemicals. He is living, at that moment, off capital his own system does not provide. There is a gap there, between what a man’s stated position requires of him and what he cannot help knowing anyway, and Schaeffer gave that gap a name. He called it the point of tension. The reason there is always one, he thought, is straightforward enough: the world is what God made, and the man is what God made, so a false account of either can never quite be lived out all the way down. Something will stick out. Everyone therefore builds a roof over the spot where it sticks out, a set of evasions, distractions and unexamined inconsistencies that keeps the weather off and lets a person get through the day. Taking the roof off means gently and deliberately showing him the tension, following his own presuppositions (T1) to where they actually lead, and then declining to help him pretend. It is a method that can be done cruelly, and he knew it. He insisted the roof comes off in love and at cost to the one removing it, because a person standing in the rain of their own conclusions is a person in real pain, and the point is never to win. Those who watched him do it in the chalet remembered that he often had tears in his eyes, and that he would spend far more of an hour listening than talking.

(Q) "Every man has built a roof over his head to shield himself at the point of tension... The Christian, lovingly, must remove the shelter and allow the truth of the external world and of what man is, to beat upon him." + Source: Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer (Crossway, 1982), 1:140. The passage continues: when the roof is off, each man must stand naked and wounded before the truth of what is, and must come to know that his roof is a false protection from the storm of what is. Schaeffer is describing what he had spent a decade doing across a kitchen table, and the adverb "lovingly" is doing as much work in the sentence as the verb (T3).

(T4) God is there, and he is not silent, which is why both the universe and the human being make sense. + Any account of the world has to pay for two things, and Schaeffer thought most accounts quietly refuse to pay for the second. The first is that a universe exists at all and has this particular form, orderly enough that a physicist can write it down. The second he called the mannishness of man, an odd phrase for a real and stubborn set of facts: that human beings love, make art, feel guilt they cannot argue away, want their lives to mean something, and know they will die and find it unbearable. A dog does none of this. Start, he said, with an impersonal beginning: matter plus time plus chance, and nothing else in the pot. Then somewhere along the way you have to get personality out of the impersonal, and morals that are more than preferences out of a universe that contains no preferences at all. Nobody has ever shown how that is done. It is not a gap that further research will close, he thought, because the trouble is in the pot rather than in the cooking. Start instead where the Bible starts, with a God who is personal and also infinite, and who is not solitary either. On the Christian account he is three persons, Father, Son and Spirit, one God, loving and speaking to each other before there was anything else in existence to love or to speak to. Begin there and personality stops being an embarrassment that has to be explained away, because personality is simply what was there first. Love and communication are not late arrivals in a universe like that. They are older than the matter. Then the second half of the claim, and he thought it was the half his contemporaries had quietly dropped. God has not merely made things. He has spoken, in words, about himself and about what he has done in history, in a book that can be opened and read and checked against what else we know. Theologians call this propositional revelation, meaning truths stated in sentences that are either so or not so, as against religion understood only as an inner experience that could not be right or wrong in the first place. That is why Schaeffer would not let the upper storey have him (T2). A God who is there but silent leaves you exactly where the leap left you, upstairs in the dark, with no way of checking anything you find there.

(Q) "With an impersonal beginning, morals really do not exist as morals." + Source: Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, chapter 2, "The Moral Necessity" (Tyndale House, 1972). The book takes three problems philosophy has always had, the existence of the universe, the existence of morals, and how anyone knows anything, and argues that a personal and speaking God answers all three at once. In the section on morals, the argument is that a beginning with no person in it leaves cruelty and kindness as two equally natural rearrangements of matter, so that what is left of morality is sociology (T4).

(T5) The mark Christ gave his people to wear is a love the world can see, and it is the final apologetic. + Christians have tried a great many badges: a fish on the car, a chain, a lapel pin, a particular haircut. Schaeffer pointed out that Jesus named the badge himself on the last night, and that it is not a thing you can buy. It is love among his people, and it comes with a condition attached, which means it can be withheld: by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:35). Then he turned to the prayer of John 17 and found something harder. Jesus prays that his people may be one, so that the world may believe that the Father sent him (John 17:21). The unity is not asked for as a nice atmosphere among believers. It is asked for as the evidence the world is given. Schaeffer drew the conclusion without softening it: however good our answers, we cannot expect people to believe the claim that God sent his Son unless they can see something real of the oneness of those who say so. He called this the final apologetic, not because argument does not matter (he gave his life to argument) but because argument is not the last thing the world looks at. He insisted the love be observable. Not felt, not affirmed in principle, but visible in a form a watching neighbor could point to: money moved, time given, a difference handled in public without knives. And he applied it first to himself and to his own movement, which had spent thirty years dividing over real questions and had not always noticed what the dividing cost.

(Q) "But after we have done our best to communicate to a lost world, still we must never forget that the final apologetic which Jesus gives is the observable love of true Christians for true Christians." + Source: Francis Schaeffer, The Mark of the Christian (Inter-Varsity Press, 1970), in the section "Honest Answers, Observable Love." The sentence comes directly after a paragraph urging Christians to spend a lifetime learning to give honest answers to honest questions, which he says the evangelical church had done very poorly. He is not setting love against apologetics. He is saying which one Jesus made the world’s evidence (T5).

(Q) "In the flesh we can stress purity without love, or we can stress love without purity; we cannot stress both simultaneously." + Source: Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Crossway, 1984). Written near the end of his life, looking back on the Presbyterian battles of the 1930s in which he had been a combatant at twenty-five. He held to the end that the doctrinal side of those fights had been right and worth fighting. What he added was that many who left broke off all fellowship with true brothers who had stayed, and that Christ’s command to love one another was destroyed in the process.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He gave a generation of Christians permission to take art, film and philosophy seriously. + The evangelicalism Schaeffer was raised in had largely settled into a quiet truce with the culture around it. The world would handle painting and cinema and philosophy, the church would handle souls, and the two need never have a serious conversation. A student who came home from L’Abri had been shown something else entirely. Schaeffer would spend a whole evening on a Bergman film or a Dali canvas, not in order to condemn it but in order to read it, working on the principle that a serious artist tells you what he actually believes about the world whether he means to or not. The people who carried that outward are easy to name. Os Guinness worked at L’Abri and went on to write for forty years on faith and public life. Nancy Pearcey arrived as an agnostic music student in the early 1970s and later wrote Total Truth, which takes Schaeffer’s refusal of the two-storey split as its whole subject. Jerram Barrs, Ranald Macaulay, Udo Middelmann and Dick Keyes taught and led branches that opened in England, the Netherlands, the United States and beyond. Charles Colson said that How Should We Then Live? woke him up to the way biblical truth touches the whole of life, and named his own book after it. Behind the specific books is a habit of mind that outlived the man: that there is no sacred and secular partition running through reality, that a Christian may study anything, and that the person across the table is not an argument to be won but somebody with a question.

(†) His books turned American evangelicals back toward the mind and toward the culture around them. + Between 1968 and 1984 he published more than twenty books, and their reach had less to do with their scholarship than with what they gave readers permission to do. A pastor in Ohio who had been taught that philosophy was worldly found a book explaining why Hegel mattered to his congregation. A student at a Christian college found an author who had read the same novels she had and was not afraid of them. The trilogy set out the apologetic. How Should We Then Live? (1976), with its ten-part film series, told the story of Western culture from Rome to the present as a story about ideas having consequences, and it put that story in front of church audiences who had never once thought of the Renaissance and the Reformation as rival answers to the same question. Then there was the doctrinal work. He took his place on the founding council of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy in 1977 and signed the Chicago Statement it produced the following year, the short document that set out in plain terms what the claim about Scripture did and did not amount to, holding all the while that a church which had gone soft on whether the Bible tells the truth would not long be able to say anything definite about anything. Christian colleges and seminaries founded institutes in his name, and his books stayed in print. Two generations of evangelicals who never got to Switzerland learned from him the sentence that organized the rest: Christianity is not a religious truth among others but a claim about total reality (T1).

(†) His last books put human dignity at the center and moved evangelicals into public argument. + In 1979, with the pediatric surgeon C. Everett Koop, Schaeffer published Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and toured it with a five-part film. The argument runs straight out of everything else he taught. If a human being is only matter in motion, then the value of a particular human being becomes a decision somebody makes rather than a fact somebody discovers, and once value is a decision there is no principled place to stop: not at the unborn, not at the newborn with a disability, not at the very old. If human beings are made in the image of God, the value was there before anyone decided anything (Genesis 1:27). A Christian Manifesto followed in 1981 and sold around 290,000 copies in its first year. Its charge was that Christians in the West had spent decades fighting symptoms one at a time, seeing things in bits and pieces instead of totals, while the base underneath the whole society was quietly shifting from a Christian consensus to a humanist one, meaning one that begins from man as the measure of everything and has nobody above him to appeal to. What he urged in response he called co-belligerency: working alongside people on one particular issue without pretending they are allies in worldview, so that a Christian may stand shoulder to shoulder with someone on abortion and still disagree with him about almost everything else. The effect on American evangelical political engagement was large and is still argued about. Schaeffer himself was clear that he was not calling for a Christian nation or handing the church to a party, and he warned in the Manifesto against exactly that. What he wanted was that Christians should stop treating public questions as somebody else’s department.

(†) Where he fell short: the history was often too neat, and he knew what the fighting years had cost. + Two things belong on the other side of the account, and both of them come out of his own record rather than out of anyone else’s complaint. - He said more than his evidence carried. His genealogy of ideas (T2) runs in a straight line with no forks anywhere in it: Aquinas separates nature from grace, the Renaissance lets nature swallow grace, Hegel abolishes antithesis, Kierkegaard invents the leap, and modern despair follows on. It is a wonderful line to lecture from, and specialists have not been able to make it hold. His Aquinas, in particular, is not the Aquinas of the texts, who held that sin had wounded the intellect as well as the will and who never granted reason the independence Schaeffer assigns him. His Kierkegaard is stranger still: a man of intense and orthodox faith, attacking a comfortable state church for reasons Schaeffer himself would have applauded, which makes him at least as much Schaeffer’s opponent as his source. Notice who did the criticizing. The careful assessments came from friendly hands rather than hostile ones. Thomas V. Morris, in Francis Schaeffer’s Apologetics: A Critique (Moody Press, 1976), takes the arguments one at a time and finds that they do not carry the weight put on them. The essays Ronald W. Ruegsegger collected in Reflections on Francis Schaeffer (Zondervan, 1986), two years after Schaeffer’s death, admire the man and then go through the work field by field, with Richard Pierard on the history and Ronald Wells on the account of America. None of this reached Schaeffer for the first time in print, either. He had already met the same objections in private, and it is his answer that stings: when Mark Noll and George Marsden wrote asking him to get the history right, he replied by questioning how firmly they held to inerrancy rather than by going back over the work. That is the fault underneath the fault. He was a preacher using history to make a case, and the case was allowed to shape the history. - He was a hard man before he was a gentle one. The Schaeffer of the 1930s and 1940s was a separatist, which meant a man who held that when a denomination goes wrong you leave it rather than stay in it and argue, and he drew the lines and fought for them. He never repudiated the doctrinal side of those fights. What he did come to say plainly, and late, was what the manner of them had cost: that in the flesh we stress purity without love or love without purity, and that many who left the liberalizing denominations broke off all fellowship with true brothers who had not left. The judgment is his own and he delivered it on himself, in public, in his last book. It is also why the observable love in his work is not a sentimental afterthought tacked on at the end of a hard career, but a repair (T5). There is a third item some readers add to the list. In A Christian Manifesto he set out the seventeenth-century Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford’s three levels of resistance to a tyrannical state, protest first, then flight, then force, and he defended the third as a last resort held in a purely defensive posture. He wrote it as political theory with the American Revolution in view. Even so, the safeguards around it are thinner than the subject deserves in a book written for a mass audience, and the complaint is a fair one as a complaint about the writing.