Francis Schaeffer

Francis August Schaeffer was born on January 30, 1912, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to working-class parents of German Lutheran heritage. His father was a laborer with little interest in intellectual pursuits, and the family expected Francis to follow a similar path. But books captured him early. At seventeen, reading philosophy in the local library, he encountered questions about truth and meaning that his nominal Lutheran upbringing had not addressed. The writings of modernist theologians troubled him — their dismissal of biblical authority seemed to undermine any coherent foundation for knowledge or morality. In 1930 he enrolled at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he majored in philosophy and began moving toward evangelical faith.

After graduation in 1935, Schaeffer entered Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia to study under J. Gresham Machen, the leading defender of orthodox Presbyterianism against theological liberalism. Machen's rigorous apologetic approach and his insistence on the inerrancy of Scripture provided Schaeffer with the intellectual framework he had been seeking. When Machen died suddenly in 1937, Schaeffer was among those who followed Carl McIntire in forming the Bible Presbyterian Church, committed to both doctrinal purity and separation from compromised denominations. He married Edith Seville in 1935, and she would become not only his lifelong partner but a formidable intellectual collaborator and author in her own right.

Schaeffer's early ministry was spent in Presbyterian pastorates in Pennsylvania and Missouri, but his calling lay beyond the conventional parish. In 1947 the family moved to Switzerland, initially for him to study European church conditions. What they discovered in post-war Europe was a continent where Christianity had been intellectually marginalized, where young people especially had concluded that biblical faith was simply incompatible with honest thought. In 1955, after a spiritual crisis in which Schaeffer questioned whether his combative fundamentalism had cost him genuine relationship with God, he and Edith established L'Abri Fellowship in the Swiss village of Huémoz. L'Abri — French for "the shelter" — was conceived as a community where honest questions about faith, philosophy, and culture could be explored without evasion.

The timing was providential. By the 1960s, young people from across Europe and America were making pilgrimages to this unlikely mountain village, drawn by word that here was a place where Christianity engaged seriously with art, philosophy, and the intellectual currents shaping modern culture. Schaeffer's approach was distinctive: he insisted that Christianity was not merely a private religious preference but a comprehensive worldview that could address the deepest questions of human existence. He traced the crisis of Western civilization to philosophical assumptions — particularly the influence of Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and existentialism — that had severed faith from reason and relegated truth to the realm of subjective experience. Against this fragmentation, he argued for the unity of truth and the rational defensibility of biblical Christianity.

His Writing and Influence

Schaeffer began writing in the early 1960s, initially developing material from his L'Abri lectures and discussions. His first major work, The God Who Is There (1968), laid out his central thesis: that Western culture had fallen "below the line of despair" by abandoning confidence in rational knowledge of truth. Escape from Reason (1968) and He Is There and He Is Not Silent (1972) formed with it a trilogy examining the philosophical roots of modern unbelief. But it was How Should We Then Live? (1976) and its companion film series that brought Schaeffer's ideas to a mass evangelical audience in America. Here he presented a sweeping interpretation of Western history, arguing that the Christian worldview had been the foundation of the West's greatest achievements in art, science, and human dignity, and that its abandonment was leading inexorably to authoritarianism.

Whatever Is True (1972) and A Christian Manifesto (1981) moved Schaeffer's analysis in a more explicitly political direction, calling evangelicals to active cultural engagement and resistance to secular humanism. This later phase of his work, particularly his opposition to abortion, made him a significant figure in the emerging religious right, though his relationship with that movement was complex. He worried that political activism might become a substitute for the deeper intellectual and spiritual work he saw as primary.

Schaeffer's influence on evangelical intellectual culture was profound and lasting. He gave a generation of evangelical students and pastors permission to take art, philosophy, and cultural analysis seriously as legitimate Christian concerns. His emphasis on worldview thinking became standard in evangelical education and apologetics. Yet his work drew criticism from academic theologians and philosophers who found his historical analyses oversimplified and his philosophical arguments insufficiently rigorous. The tension was perhaps inevitable: Schaeffer was not writing primarily for specialists but for thoughtful laypeople seeking to understand how their faith related to the broader currents of modern life.

Schaeffer died of lymphoma on May 15, 1984, in Rochester, Minnesota. L'Abri continues to operate in multiple locations worldwide, and his books remain in print through Crossway Publishers. His son Frank has written critically of his father's legacy, particularly his role in politicizing evangelicalism, adding complexity to assessments of his influence.

Who should read Schaeffer: Christians who want to understand how their faith relates to philosophy, culture, and the arts, and who are willing to engage with ideas that may challenge both secular assumptions and evangelical pieties. He is particularly valuable for readers who feel the tension between intellectual honesty and religious commitment, though his historical and philosophical analyses require careful supplementation from more specialized sources. He is not for those seeking devotional comfort or practical spirituality, but for those convinced that the life of the mind is itself a form of Christian discipleship.