Learning to Cry for the Culture
He was a small man—barely five feet in his knickers, knee socks, and ballooning white shirts. For two weeks, first as a freshman and then again as a senior, I sat in my assigned seat at Wheaton College's chapel and heard him cry. He was the evangelical conscience at the end of the 20th century, weeping over a world that most of his peers dismissed as not worth saving, except to rescue a few souls in the doomed planet's waning hours. While Hal Lindsey was disseminating an exit strategy in The Late Great Planet Earth, Francis Schaeffer was trying to understand and care for people still trapped on the planet in The God Who Is There.
Francis Schaeffer was hard to listen to. His voice grated. It was a high-pitched scream that, when mixed with his eastern Pennsylvania accent, sounded something like Elmer Fudd on speed. As freshmen, unfamiliar with the thought and works of modern man, we thought it was funny. As seniors, it wasn't funny any more. After we had studied Kant, Hegel, Sartre, and Camus, the voice sounded more like an existential shriek. If Edvard Munch's The Scream had a voice, it would have sounded like Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer, who died in 1984, understood the existential cry of humanity trapped in a prison of its own making. He was the closest thing to a "man of sorrows" I have seen.
I grew up with a Christianity that was predisposed against sorrow. To be sad was to deny your faith or your salvation. Jesus had made us happy, and we had an obligation to always show that happiness. Then Francis Schaeffer came along. He could not allow himself to be happy when most of the world was desperately lost and he knew why. He was the first Christian I found who could embrace faith and the despair of a lost humanity at ...
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Eric
Schaeffer loved the enemies of the gospel enought to listen to them and to take their concerns and criticisms seriously. Sure his mind was troubled; that was and is an appropriate response to a world gone mad.
Stephen Fox
Most of you know Barry Hankins of Baylor U is about to publish a book about Schaefer. Given Hankins has written about Al Mohler and Karl Rove's operative in the SBC, Richard Land, his book should be seminal, coloring the lament in this CT Essay. I am waiting for Mark Noll's assessment of Hankins book when it is published. I fear Schaefer may finally be put in some analogy to Robert E. Lee, where folks like Randall Balmer and Jim Wallis will be remembered as the Lincolns of the culture war within the evangelical community. Would make Schaefer something of a tragic figure. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, his tragedy may be more a function of how his legacy was abused by the likes of Mohler and Land to distort in the Baptist world at least, a nobler legacy of how justice politics nuances the critical foundation of Separation and Church and State. I am cashing in with Carter and Clinton and the new Baptist Covenant, as holding more promise than Schaefer's legacy.
Greg Livingstone
Before I went to L'Abri I was secretly "ashamed of the Gospel". After being there, I came out as a lion...never to doubt the Bible or the Gospel again! I realized it was the non-Christians who were hiding their heads in the sand! And Schaeffer modeled compassion, and sent me back to lay down my life for the Muslims Dr. Greg Livingstone, Founder, Frontiers