Remembering Francis Schaeffer

This year is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984). Like many others, I remember the first time I read Schaeffer's Escape from Reason; its approach and its impact were so different from the Christian books that I had previously encountered.

Schaeffer confirmed that his essential trilogy of books is The God Who Is There (1968), Escape from Reason (1968), and He Is There and He Is Not Silent (1972). In the Appendix to Genesis in Space and Time, Schaeffer said that these three books "make a unified base; without them, the various applications in the other books are really suspended in space... On the base of these three books, all the other books which have come or will come depend."

Here are some reflections on Francis Schaeffer and his legacy by James Packer and by Don Sweeting.

Barry Hankins once said that there were three distinct periods in Schaeffer's ministry: during the 1930s and 1940s, he was an American Fundamentalist separatist; during the 1950s and 1960s, he was a European Evangelical apologist; and finally during the 1970s and 1980s, he returned to America as a conservative Christian activist.

Here is a brief Schaeffer chronology between 1935 and 1947:

1935-1936: The young Francis Schaeffer studies at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia under J. Gresham Machen and Cornelius Van Til.

1936 (June): The Presbyterian Church of America is founded by Machen and others (this group includes Schaeffer).

1937: Carl McIntire and a group of Christians (including Schaeffer) break away from Machen's Presbyterian Church of America and form the Bible Presbyterian Church (this new church was fundamentalist, separatist, Calvinist and premillennial in character). About this time, Schaeffer becomes a student at Faith Seminary.

1938: Schaeffer is ordained in the Bible Presbyterian Church. (Beginning in the late 1930s, Schaeffer was a BPC pastor in three different churches. It was only in 1956 that Schaeffer left the BPC.)

1939 (February): Machen's church (the Presbyterian Church of America) is renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

1942: Schaeffer writes a paper which includes these words: "Let no one of us forget that our Separatist position is not an arbitrary thing; it is doctrinal. If one should ask for a single word that would show our stand against the evils of this day, the word would be Separatist; and it should be, for we are Separatists."

1947: McIntire's Foreign Missions Board sends Schaeffer to Switzerland.

Note: In Schaeffer's well-known books (written between 1968 and 1984) and in the accounts of his life written by his wife Edith, there is no mention of Schaeffer's early fundamentalist separatism and his association with Carl McIntire.