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Francis Schaeffer’s enduring influence upon evangelicals and evangelicalism cannot be overlooked. In great measure, Francis Schaeffer taught evangelicals the value of intellectual engagement. While in Europe, Schaeffer began to see the fault of fundamentalism lying primarily in its strident separatism. As he would interact with young unbelievers who were persuaded by nihilism, atheism, and existentialism, Schaeffer learned that merely attacking liberalism and other evangelicals was less than profitable. He needed to provide a positive response to modern philosophies and thoughtfully interact with opposing ideas on the level of world-view so unbelievers could see the incoherence of their positions and subsequently embrace the truth of Christianity.
Schaeffer’s desire to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christianity to unbelievers led him to begin to think more and more about how world-views had played a significant role in the formation of Western thought and culture. As such, Schaeffer sought to engage with and think critically about past and present culture; not for its own sake, but so he might listen to the voice of those who were drowning in meaninglessness because they had embraced a world-view that erased the existence of a personal God—a world-view that inevitably led to the loss of a sense of humanness and overall purpose.
Schaeffer’s endeavor to wrestle with ancient and contemporary culture, especially in the realm of ideas and world-view, would have a tremendous influence on how Christians thought about and interacted with culture. Ronald Nash summarizes his impact in this area well when he writes,
Francis Schaeffer was the instrument through whom hundreds of thousands of people became conscious of [the] intellectual dimension of the Christian faith, of the importance of philosophy, of the significance of world views and their presuppositions, of the message that ideas have consequences (Parkhurst, 69).
Among these hundreds of thousands to be profoundly influenced by Schaeffer would belong Christian apologists, philosophers and authors. Nancy Pearcy, popular editor and author, tells of her trip to L’Abri and how she was immediately intrigued by Christians who were engaged with the intellectual and cultural world. As she read works by Christian apologists and interacted with Schaeffer and others at L’Abri, Pearcy interacted with many good and sufficient arguments that did much to challenge her unbelief (Nancy Pearcy, Total Truth, 55). Pearcy would eventually embrace Jesus Christ and a biblical world-view.
Pearcy also notes how Schaeffer provided her and other Christians with the apparatus with which to properly enjoy and accurately evaluate culture. She writes,
There is no need to avoid the secular world and hide out behind the walls of an evangelical subculture; instead, Christians can appreciate works of art and culture as products of human creativity expressing the image of God. On the other hand, there is no danger of being naïve or uncritical about false and dangerous messages embedded in secular culture, because a worldview gives the conceptual tools needed to analyze and critique them (Pearcy, 56).
Pearcy here testifies to what Barry Hankins believes was Schaeffer’s “signal achievement and most lasting influence;” namely, the “important task of world-view formation” (Hankins, 227).
On the other hand, we would be remiss if we did not reflect here on what motivated Schaeffer in his whole enterprise. It was not merely an interest in ideas; it was love for people. Bryan Follis guards us from turning Francis Schaeffer into a stuffy, intellectually smug apologist when he writes, “To understand Schaeffer, we need to understand the love he had for the individual person” (Follis, Truth with Love, 53). Love for others appeared to free Schaeffer to engage the surrounding culture for the sake of people’s good and salvation. As Schaeffer traveled to America and shared his message with young evangelicals, his point was unmistakable in this regard. Barry Hankins notes,
…[Schaeffer’s] message to American evangelical college students was that to be effective witnesses they would have to move beyond fundamentalist separation from secular ideas and beyond mere denunciation of liberals. Instead, evangelicals needed to take their ideas seriously and to understand and engage their culture (Hankins, 233).
Schaeffer would not merely seek to understand and exhibit the impotence of unbiblical world-views; he would sympathize with and weep over those who struggled desperately with the essential questions of life—even if their answers came in the form of unbelieving, incoherent philosophy, art, and poetry—and he encouraged following generations of evangelicals to do the same.
