Francis Schaeffer (1912–84) was one of the 20th century’s bravest soldiers in the war against secularization, the privatization of religion, and the relativizing of all claims that there are absolute standards in theology (the true), morality (the good), and the arts (the beautiful).
In his apologetics trilogy (The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason, He Is There and He Is Not Silent), Schaeffer demonstrates how modernism had divided a once-unified field of knowledge into a lower and an upper story. In the lower story, the home of science, facts are possible but man is reduced to a product of material forces over which he has no control (determinism). If he leaps into the upper story, the home of religion, morality, and the arts, he gains his freedom but must sacrifice reason, logic, and propositional truth.
In addition to his trilogy, I knew Schaeffer as the founder of L’Abri, a critic of modern art and film, and an architect of the pro-life movement. What I didn’t realize until I read Bruce Little’s Why Truth Matters: Francis Schaeffer on True Spirituality, Christ’s Lordship, and Inerrancy is the extent to which all Schaeffer wrote and did was undergirded by his career-long allegiance to the three items listed in the subtitle.
Little, professor emeritus of philosophy at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, takes his readers on a swift but illuminating journey through Schaeffer’s oeuvre. By carefully quoting and commenting on a series of crucial passages from the full length and breadth of Schaeffer’s books, essays, and lectures, Little proves his thesis with clarity and efficiency: that Schaeffer considered all his work a unified whole undergirded by the lordship of Christ, the inerrancy of the Scriptures, and what he called “true spirituality.” Those same three emphases have continued importance for evangelicals today.
Yielding Everything to Christ
In his reflective essay “How I Have Come to Write My Books,” Schaeffer describes true spirituality as his realizing this truth:
The finished work of Christ on the cross, back there in time and space, has a moment-by-moment, present meaning. Christ meant his promise to be taken literally when he said that he would bear his fruit through us if we allowed him to do so, not only in our religious life but in all our life.
Although Schaeffer firmly believed Christians are justified by Christ’s finished work, he also believed that this reality must be lived out daily in each Christian’s life. The life of true spirituality is an active one; it doesn’t mean that “God simply takes over the life of the Christian where the Christian is out of the picture. No, there are choices to be made, based on the Word of God” (72).
God calls us to a continual yielding, a self-denial that allows the Holy Spirit to work through us. We must work out our calling, but we must do it God’s way, employing his methods and being guided by his motives.
God calls us to a continual yielding, a self-denial that allows the Holy Spirit to work through us.
Furthermore, we must relinquish all parts of our life, the sacred and the secular, the private and the public, to Jesus Christ’s lordship. To fully realize our life in Christ, we must avoid the two extremes of employing secular techniques for success and of withdrawing from the world to embrace a life of pietism. What Schaeffer called the “totality of reality” must be placed at the foot of the cross, so that “the Lordship of Christ covers all of life and all of life equally” (96). Christ is, indeed, Lord of all creation.
Scripture’s Truthfulness
However—and this is the key to Little’s book and Schaeffer’s ministry—we can neither practice true spirituality nor surrender to Christ’s lordship if we aren’t grounded in a trustworthy Scripture. “Without the inerrant Word,” explains Little, “all objectivity would be lost, and there would be no way to know how Christ’s death and resurrection was the foundation of true spirituality or even if there was a real resurrection. Without accepting the Bible as inerrant, all claims of the Christian life would be caught up in relativism and unsubstantiated claims” (82).
The loss of belief in the authority of the Bible cuts away at the Western world’s faith in a supernatural reality that transcends our own. Little notes,
Apart from having an inerrant revelation from God and His work in history, Christianity would lose its authority to speak of the supernatural, which is core to Christianity. In fact, Christian claims would crumble into meaninglessness if the supernatural realm were only a myth or something like a psychological baby’s pacifier. (85)
In the absence of a fully reliable account of God’s work in the world, we can’t sustain a life of moment-by-moment obedience to an invisible God. In the end, we’ll succumb to the worldly culture around us, adopting its naturalistic assumptions and accommodating its secular principles.
Little isn’t putting words in Schaeffer’s mouth. In his final book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, Schaeffer states his position clearly and emphatically: “Unless the Bible is without error, not only when it speaks of matters of salvation, but also when it speaks of history and the cosmos, we have no foundation for answering questions concerning the existence of the universe and its form and the uniqueness of man.”
That included Genesis 1–3, which Schaeffer took literally and which he considered foundational to true spirituality and the lordship of Christ. He also considered it a necessary building block for a true Christian epistemology. If a nonbeliever asks a believer, “How do you know that you know?” he must have an objectively true Bible on which to rest his knowledge; his feelings, his desires, even his testimony aren’t enough.
As Schaeffer’s death approached, he became troubled by the slow abandonment of inerrancy by evangelicals, many of whom claimed to believe it while they absorbed the zeitgeist.
Critique with Caution
Writing four decades later, Little warns that some evangelicals are in danger of accommodating to the prevailing cultural worldview: “Christians, in what appears as a desire to present themselves as relevant to the culture for evangelistic purposes, fail to see that they end up mimicking the world. It is a weakened view of Scripture and a fragmented thinking process that leaves the evangelical susceptible to worldly anti-human ideas” (141).
We can neither practice true spirituality nor surrender to the lordship of Christ if we aren’t grounded in a trustworthy Scripture.
Little makes his case well, and, though he and Schaeffer tend to state things in an all-or-nothing manner, I believe all Christians, especially evangelicals, need to heed their common warning about the danger of compromise to culture. Nevertheless, history also provides evangelicals with at least two reasons to handle these issues carefully.
First, C. S. Lewis, that other great 20th-century apologist, was able to steer the culture back to Christ without making inerrancy the central issue. That’s not to say he was soft on biblical authority. Lewis rejected the historicist interpretations of the Gospels put forward by “historical Jesus” theologians and stood opposed to the evolutionary-progressive paradigm that reigned supreme in the 19th and early 20th centuries (see Screwtape Letters, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” and “The Funeral of a Great Myth”).
Lewis also defended Christian epistemology by exposing and critiquing, in The Abolition of Man, the modernist reduction of all philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic judgments to mere subjective opinions that lack any grounding in fact.
Second, the fundamentalists of the early 20th century were themselves guilty of absorbing the Enlightenment belief that science is truer and more real than literature, philosophy, ethics, or the arts. Rather than defend the Bible on its own grounds, they decided it could only be authoritative if it held up to a verification system (logical positivism) that didn’t exist when the Bible was written. Although they fought a good fight against Darwinian evolution, they conceded too much ground to the modernist presuppositions that Schaeffer (and Lewis) so effectively opposed.
Why Truth Matters is a timely book, for it reminds Christians that the pressure to accommodate secular culture isn’t new. Moreover, it shows us that we can put all aspects of our life under the lordship of Christ, and that the unified witness of God’s Word is a sufficient ground on which to rest our faith and our decisions, our beliefs and our actions.
The Gospel Coalition