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He also learned the art of 1930s Presbyterian polemics. Before Francis had finished his degree, Machen was dead and Westminster's people were at each other's throats. So in 1937 Francis and Edith helped set up Faith Seminary as an alternative. The split was a bitter one, giving birth to personal animosities that lasted for years. In the short term, it made of Francis a sharp-tongued partisan for separatist fundamentalism. But in later years, wounds inflicted and received spurred him to serious reflection about how to handle theological disagreement in a spirit of genuine Christian love.

After nine years of pastoring Bible Presbyterian churches and youth work, the Independent Board for Foreign Missions sent Francis on a three-month trip to Europe to build networks among "Bible-believing" churches, pastors, and institutions. Between appointments, he spent his time in art galleries. Then, in 1948, the board sent the Schaeffers to Europe as long-term missionaries.

The Schaeffers located in Switzerland, where they took up the tasks of spreading their Children for Christ program throughout Europe and organizing an international arm of the separatist fundamentalist movement. On the side, they entertained groups of schoolgirls on ski holidays, hosting evening religious discussions by the fire in their chalet. They kept a relentless schedule, most days working until well past midnight.

A year later, Francis met a Dutch student of art history, Hans Rookmaaker, who shared Schaeffer's commitment to Kuyperian thought. Together they discussed how art could be a window into the general philosophy of society. This became a trademark both of Rookmaaker's career as an art historian and of Francis's portrait of the decline of Western society. In later years, Francis gave Rookmaaker international exposure, and Rookmaaker in turn inspired and assisted a number of young evangelical artists such as Theodore Prescott and art historians such as Mary Leigh Morbey and E. John Walford of Redeemer and Wheaton colleges, respectively.

Schaeffer's separatist preaching frequently decried the weaknesses of Karl Barth's theology: "Neo-orthodoxy gave no new answer. What existential philosophy had already said in secular language, it now said in theological language." In 1950 Schaeffer visited the renowned theologian at his home in Switzerland. There he asked Barth, "Did God create the world?" Barth answered, "God created the world in the first century a.d." Francis gestured out the window to the forested hillside and asked, "This world?" Barth replied, "This world does not matter." This was a signal moment for Schaeffer, confirming that modern thought presumed that religious truth and material truth consisted of two separate realities. He spent the rest of his life dissenting from this view, insisting that "Christianity speaks of true truth." His commitment to the unity of truth reinforced his lifetime insistence that the Bible was inerrant in all respects. He refused to countenance the idea that the Bible's history and science might be less true, or even differently true, than the Bible's theology.

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March 3 1997, Vol. 41, No. 3