Francis Schaeffer an Authentic Life

Colin Duriez

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Francis Schaeffer (1912 -1984) was a highly effective evangelist who, in the 1960s and ‘70s, became a conservative evangelical celebrity in American and European universities. 

Schaeffer became a Christian aged 18 by reading the Bible from beginning to end.  He recommended this to serious inquirers. He argued that the Bible’s worldview made rational sense of religion, philosophy, ethics, art and science.  Humanity’s only hope is reunion with ‘the God who is there’, which He has made possible by the atoning death of Christ.

The power of Schaeffer’s challenge was his analysis of humanism in all its expressions, particularly philosophy, art, films and literature. All non-Christian theories and lifestyles end in hopeless contradiction. Knowledge that that ignores God does not threaten Christianity, but it is ultimately fatal for human reason. It explains out of existence our experience of love, our moral certainties and our appreciation of beauty; we cannot live consistently with its voracious progress. Creative artists in particular perceive this fatal flaw in modern human attempts to live meaningfully.  At some point their work exhibits despair about real humanity.  They and other less tortured people leap irrationally from facts to values, without being able to explain the enduring reality of those values.  Facts disconnected from God relentlessly destroy hope including, above all, the possibility of real love. That is modern humanity’s hell.

This critique has become increasingly relevant since his death, postmodernism having become normal, while Westernised people prioritise triviality. Duriez’s biography should lead to recovered confidence in Biblical Christianity.

Reviewer: Richard Wilkins, Retired, former General Secretary, Association of Christian Teachers

Review posted on: 5 November 2008

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