Francis Schaeffer Archives - James E Hartley

Battle Cry in the Culture War

Let’s start with a quick quiz. Name this book:

The United States is in great peril because it has abandoned its Christian roots and is being taken over by people who are immersed in a humanistic worldview which is antithetical to God. The result will be a tyranny which will oppress Good Christians everywhere.

Trick question, obviously. There are thousands of books fitting that description. Even more books fitting that description will be published in the next six months. And the six months after that. And after that…

Truth be told, I truly wonder why people keep reading these books. They are insanely repetitive. The anecdotes illustrating the thesis get updated every year, but the basic argument is the same. Pick up one of these books from the early 1990s and switch the names “Al Gore and Jesse Jackson” to “Joe Biden and AOC,” and you have the 2020s version.

If you want to read a book in this vein, then you might as well read the template. Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto was published in 1981. It was a sensation—so much so that those thousands of writers in the last four decades have simply been rewriting it. How big was this book? From the back cover, we have Joel Belz, founder of World magazine (which is basically just Schaeffer’s book in a biweekly news magazine): “Go to any evangelical Christian gathering and ask 20 people the simple question: ‘What single person has most affected your thinking and your worldview?’ If Francis Schaeffer doesn’t lead the list of answers, and probably by a significant margin, I’d ask for a recount.”

“The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years…” That is the opening of A Christian Manifesto. No soft sell here. You, dear Christian, have a problem. A big problem. What is the problem? You “have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.” You notice that this thing in society over here is a bit problematic (fill in your own anecdotes). Oh, and that other thing over there is also a problem. And there is that other thing going on that just seems wrong. And you just heard that story that you have a hard time believing could actually be true—surely nobody would do that.

Enter Schaeffer, in effect saying, “All those things you notice: they are all connected!”

There is a war going on in the country (and remember this was written in 1981) between two worldviews. The Christian Worldview and the Humanist Worldview. “The term humanism…means man beginning from himself, with no knowledge except what he himself can discover and no standards outside of himself. In this view, man is the measure of all things, as the Enlightenment expressed it.”

Now obviously, Schaeffer wants all his readers to join Team Christian Worldview, but he does not think this is simply a lighthearted game of checkers. “Humanism, with its lack of any final base for values or law, always leads to chaos. It then naturally leads to some form of authoritarianism to control the chaos. Having produced the sickness, humanism gives more of the same kind of medicine for a cure.” This is a serious battle for the future of society.

As I said, change the anecdotes, and this book could have been published in 2024 with zero change in the underlying structure of the argument. Why should that be so? How is it possible that the framework of this battle has not altered at all in half a century? Neither side has won. Both sides stare at the enemy from their trenches. Is there any reason to think things will be different in 2081? What could possibly happen that will enable a victory in this cold trench war?

Just when the realization that A Christian Manifesto is just the original battle cry of the Christian soldier hit, I got to the part which was obviously coming where Schaeffer notes, “the bottom line is that at a certain point there is not only the right but the duty to disobey the state.” Yep, here we go.

The next sentence: “Of course, this is scary.” Ya think?

Then came the surprise. The scary part wasn’t just what those other guys were going to do when Christians start disrupting the social order. The really scary part is what Christians on the Christian side will start doing. Suddenly, the book turned into a prophetic warning about what could happen to Christians as they engage in this culture war.

“First, we must make definite that we are in no way talking about any kind of a theocracy.” Now, everyone these days denies that they want a “theocracy.” But Schaeffer elaborates: “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: ‘We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.’”

Christian nationalists have no place in Schaeffer’s army of the good. Suddenly, this book doesn’t fit in with the copycat books being written in the 2020s. How to explain how a movement born with an explicit argument against wrapping Christianity in the national flag emerged into a movement that does exactly that?

We must say that speaking of disobedience is frightening because there are so many kooky people around. People are always irresponsible in a fallen world. But we live in a special time of irresponsible people, and such people will in their unbalanced way tend to do the very opposite from considering the appropriate means at the appropriate time and place. Anarchy is never appropriate.

Now that is most certainly not the sort of thing that is commonly said by Team Good Christian in 2024.

A Christian Manifesto thus stands not as yet another example of the type of book that litters the political sections of bookstores today, but rather as a useful corrective to those books. The Christian nationalists and the irresponsible people have grown in numbers over time. The effect has been that the central message of Schaeffer’s book is lost in one social media firestorm after another.

The real reason to read or reread A Christian Manifesto is not because you want to see a historical version of a common contemporary theme, but because you want to find a way out of the current morass. Schaeffer stands there like a marker showing where you entered into the mire. Sometimes the best way to get out of a swamp is to go back to your starting place.

Related Posts
Schaeffer, Francis The Church Before the Watching World “The World is Watching the Church”
Sowell, Thomas The Vision of the Anointed “Conflicting Visions”

(Mandatory Note: I am not sure if Team Humanism or Team Christian doubts my sincerity here, but one of the other has made it my legal obligation to tell you that Crossway sent me a copy of this book so that I could review it.)

Schaeffer and the Modern Evangelical

“We live in a post-Christian world. What should be our perspective as individuals, as institutions, as orthodox Christians, as those who claim to be Bible-believing? How should we look at this post-Christian world and function as Christians in it?…The church in our generation needs reformation, revival, and constructive revolution.” (italics in original)

That is the opening paragraph of a book. In what year was this book written?

It seems like something that could have been written in 2024, but the actual date is 1969. Death in the City by Francis Schaeffer.

One of the huge advantages of reading older books is that they get us out of the mindset that what we see around us is somehow new and different. There are endless laments these days about the post-Christian society, the crisis in the church, the horrors to come if our course is not corrected. But, then we turn to Schaeffer, writing a half-century ago, and his language is every bit as Apocalyptic as anything you will find today:

[T]he whole culture has shifted from Christian to post-Christian.
Do not take this lightly! It is a horrible thing for a man like myself to look back and see my country and my culture go down the drain in my own lifetime. It is a horrible thing that sixty years ago you could move across this country and almost everyone, even non-Christians, would have known what the gospel was. A horrible thing that forty to fifty years ago our culture was built on the Christian consensus, and now we are in an absolute minority….
There is only one perspective we can have of the post-Christian world of our generation: an understanding that our culture and our country is under the wrath of God. Our country is under the wrath of God!

Again, exclamations like that are now proclaimed daily by speakers who think they are saying something new. Schaeffer was there long before those modern unrelenting critics of the society. Schaeffer really does believe that there is death in the city. This books spends much time recrafting the language of Jeremiah and Lamentations, repeatedly arguing that we too should be denouncing the world with the same fury Jeremiah used.

First, we may say there is a time, and ours is such a time, when a negative message is needed before anything positive can begin. There must first be the message of judgment, the tearing down. There are times—and Jeremiah’s day and hours are such times—when we cannot expect a constructive revolution if we begin by over emphasizing the positive message. People often say to me, What would you do if you really met a modern man on a train and you had just an hour to talk to him about the gospel? And I’ve said over and over, I would spend forty-five or fifty minutes on the negative, to really show him his dilemma—to show him that he is more dead than even he thinks he is; that he is not just dead in the twentieth-century meaning of dead (not having significance in this life), but that he is morally dead because he is separated from the God who exists. Then I’d take ten or fifteen minutes to preach the gospel. And I believe this is usually the right way for the truly modern man, for often it takes a long time to bring a man to the place where he understands the negative.

There is many a speaker today who seems to be taking Schaeffer’s advice. Is it good advice? I have no idea what it was like in 1969, but there is something a bit strange in this advice in 2024. Schaeffer’s man on a train in 2024 already knows that he is condemned by Christians. He already knows that Christians think he is a terrible person living under the wrath of God. If you spend 45 minutes telling him that, then is he hearing anything he has not already heard many times? If the goal of the Church is to tell society that it is wicked and horrible and under the wrath of God, then I think we can all agree it has met its goal.

But is that the goal of the Church? Why is Francis Schaeffer advocating sending so much time on the negative? Would Schaeffer really be at home in the modern church?

Not at all. Just as you settle in to thinking Schaffer would fit right in among the Christians engaged in fear mongering about the horrors of modern society, a strange note creeps in. “I am convinced that one of the great weaknesses in evangelical preaching in the last years is that we have lost sight of the biblical fact that man is wonderful.” Wonderful? These people living in this really wicked post-Christian world are wonderful?

If people are wonderful, why is the world in such horrible shape? Why is there death in the city?

First of all, man is separated from God; second, he is separated from himself (thus the psychological problems of life); third he is separated from other men (thus the sociological problems of life); fourth he is separated from nature (thus the problems of living in the world—for example the ecological problems). All these need healing.

That man on the train with whom Schaeffer will spend 45 minutes talking about the negative, talking about the wrath of God, Schaeffer cares about that man.

[W]e must comprehend and speak of the lostness of the lost, including the man without the Bible. And like Paul we must not be cold in our orthodoxy, but deeply compassionate for our own kind even when it is costly.
If we are Christians and do not have upon us the calling to respond to the lostness of the lost and a compassion for those of our kind for this life and eternity, our orthodoxy is ugly. And it is ugly in the presence of anybody who is an honest person. And more than that, orthodoxy without compassion is ugly to God.

Orthodoxy without compassion is ugly. That is the important lesson for these days. If you are condemning the lostness of the word, if you are screaming about the wrath of God, but you do not have love, then your message is ugly, not just to those whom you are condemning, but to God. If you believe that there are people out there who are leading sinful lives and are leading others astray, and you do not have compassion for them, then you are missing the entire point of the gospel.

Death in the City is a book written over a half century ago, but it is a book that many people today need to read. The next time you hear someone denouncing their opponents, calling down the wrath of God, if you do not also hear compassion, then this is the book you should give that person. It is book perfectly crafted for the modern age; it starts out all fire and brimstone, and then slowly reminds us that God’s love is there even for those under God’s wrath. When we forget about the love, when we fail to communicate our compassion to those outside the church, then our message is ugly not just to them, but to any honest person and, most importantly, to God.

Related Posts
Schaeffer, Francis The Church Before the Watching World “The World is Watching the Church
Chesterton, G. K. The Ballad of the White Horse “Yea, Faith Without a Hope”

(We can thank Crossway that this book is still in print. They sent me a copy so I could l review it here. I had no idea when I got it that this message from the 1960s would have such importance for today.)

The World is Watching the Church

Sometimes a book from a half-century ago is the best way to see the problems of the modern age.

Francis Schaeffer’s The Church Before the Watching World is a book like that.

Schaeffer begins by noting there are two seemingly conflicting principles governing the church:

1. “the principle of the practice of the purity of the visible church in regard to doctrine and life,” and
2. “the principle of the practice of an observable love and oneness among all true Christians regardless of who and where they are.”

So far, so good. It would be very hard to argue that both of those things are not important. If the church abandons any attempt to have correct doctrine, then it is not a church; it is nothing other than a social club. If a church does not manifest observable love and oneness, then it is not a church; it is nothing other than a debate club.

In this short book, published in 1974, Schaeffer is very concerned about the first principle. He looks out at the world and sees the increasing influence of “liberal theology” in the church. In Schaeffer’s telling, liberal theology follows the currents of the secular world. When the secular intellectual world latches onto a new idea, the liberal theologians are right behind exclaiming, “We Christians agree with that too!” Over time, liberal theologians drift farther and farther from orthodox faith.

This worries Shaeffer mightily. How much? Shaeffer describes the worship of Molech, in which parents would place their infant first-born children into a fire burning inside the idol of the god. Pretty gruesome practice. Schaefer: “Modern liberal theology is worse than following the Molech of old.”

Set aside for a moment whether an argument like that was needed in the mid-1970s. Is it needed today?

If you look at the language of church discussion, it is fairly obvious that most Christians believe that is exactly the right sort of language to use. It makes no difference whether the church is Fundamentalist Baptist or a Hip Episcopalian. Both churches spend quite a bit of time making sure everyone knows they are not like those other churches.

And, let’s be honest here, the problem has magnified in the Age of Trump. Sometimes it seems like people pick their church based on which side of the political divide they believe the church falls. Could you go to a church where the pastor or priest supports Trump? Could you go to a church where the pastor or priest opposes Trump? Did you answer either of those questions knowing nothing else about the church in question?

This is a problem. A big problem. And interestingly, Schaeffer describes the problem perfectly.

All too often young people have not been wrong in saying that the church is ugly. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ we are called upon to show to a watching world and to our own young people that the church is something beautiful.

The world is watching the church. What does it see? “Your children will see the ugliness, and you will lose some of your sons and daughters.”

Finding right doctrine is incredibly important. A godly Christian should never cease in the quest to find a pure, perfect doctrine and to live a pure, holy life.

Showing Love to other Christians is incredibly important. As the 1960’s hymn says, “They’ll know we are Christians by our Love.”

We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, and we pray that all unity may one day be restored.
We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand, and together we’ll spread the news that God is in our land.
We will work with each other, we will work side by side, and we’ll guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride.
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Faced with those two important principles, keep pure doctrine and demonstrate love, the church will constantly struggle when they seem to conflict. We should all be able to agree that abandoning one principle or the other is wrong. So how do we navigate?

Let us also agree, at some points in church history, establishing doctrinal purity is the paramount task. This is exactly why the Creeds were written. This principal led to the break between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. It led to the Reformation.

But, might there not be other times when showing the unity of the church, showing love to other Christians, might not become the paramount task?

We are at such a moment right now in American society. The political divide is deep and increasingly bitter. You undoubtedly have a very strong reaction to the phrase “President Trump.” Should the Church mimic that divide?

The world is watching. If the church looks no different than the political divide, then why do we need the church? Can anyone watching the church actually agree with Jesus when he said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35)?

Let me be very clear. This is not an argument for abandoning the quest for doctrinal Truth. This is not an argument that there are not sharp disagreements on theology across churches or that we should pretend that those differences are not incredibly important.

It is an argument for something more fundamental. Love one another. And that means love those Christians in churches who have theologies which you firmly believe are wrong. Love those people in churches which seem to be dominated by people on the other side of the political spectrum.

If Christians cannot love, truly love, across the political divide, then may God help us all. If Christians cannot demonstrate that love transcends the political divide, then Christ is not with us.

The world is watching. At this moment, it is time to rise above politics. It is time to demonstrate love.