Francis Schaeffer

Who Was Francis Schaeffer?

Francis Schaeffer was the most culturally engaged Christian apologist of the second half of the twentieth century — a Presbyterian minister and founder of the L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland whose work introduced a generation of evangelical Christians to the relationship between theology, philosophy, and the arts, and whose analysis of Western cultural history remains one of the most ambitious attempts to trace the theological roots of secular modernity. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, educated at Westminster Theological Seminary and Faith Theological Seminary, he moved to Switzerland in 1948 and founded L’Abri (“the shelter”) in 1955 as a community where anyone could come with honest questions and receive honest answers.

His major apologetic works — The God Who Is There (1968), Escape from Reason (1968), and He Is There and He Is Not Silent (1972) — traced the history of Western thought from the medieval synthesis through the Renaissance and Reformation, through the Enlightenment and its aftermath, to the contemporary situation of what he called “the line of despair”: the condition of a culture that has abandoned the Christian framework that alone can sustain rational thought, moral seriousness, and genuine human dignity.

His later work — How Should We Then Live? (1976) and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979, co-authored with C. Everett Koop) — applied his cultural analysis to the political and moral questions of the 1970s and contributed directly to the formation of the religious right. His influence on evangelical intellectual and cultural engagement in the last half of the twentieth century is difficult to overstate.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The God Who Is There — 1968
• Escape from Reason — 1968
• He Is There and He Is Not Silent — 1972
• Art and the Bible — 1973
• How Should We Then Live? — 1976