The Church in Modern Culture Francis Schaeffer’s view of the church in modern culture is multifaceted yet cuts straight to the point. He does not mince words or play clever evangelical games. He believes one major problem with Christians is that they see things in bits and pieces. They have failed to see that modern man’s despair […]
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Christian Apologetics: Two Purposes Francis Schaeffer’s holds a rather basic view concerning apologetics. He explains there are two purposes of Christian apologetics. “The first is defense. The second is to communicate Christianity in a way that any given generation can understand” (The God Who Is There, 151). Schaeffer begins his approach to apologetics by pointing out that every
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The Importance of Presuppositions Dr. Schaeffer’s epistemology is integral to his approach to apologetics and may be described simply as follows: First, one must understand that pagan thought endorses a belief in the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. Propositional and verbal revelation is nonsense in this scheme. Christian epistemology stands in stark contrast to
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The decisive result of falling below the line of despair is a pitting of rationality against faith. Schaeffer sees this as an enormous problem and details four consequences in his book, Escape From Reason. Pitting Rationality Against Faith First, when rationality contends against faith, one is not able to establish a system of morality. It is simply
The Loss of Antithesis The loss of antithesis in American culture led to what Dr. Schaeffer coined the “line of despair” or giving up all hope of achieving a rational unified answer to knowledge and life. Schaeffer outlines what he believes are the various steps below this line of despair. He begins with the German philosopher, Georg
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The Truth Crisis Francis Schaeffer sets the tone for his apologetical procedure by explaining the crisis of truth in America, “We are fundamentally affected by a new way of looking at truth. This change in the concept of the way we come to knowledge and truth is the most crucial problem facing America today” (The God
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Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984) may very well be one of the most important Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. Schaeffer graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary and was heavily influenced by J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til, and the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper. In 1948, after a ten-year pastorate in the United States, he moved his
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