Until the New Yorker identified him as the intellectual force behind the coming Christian theocracy, few people outside of evangelicalism had heard of the late Francis Schaeffer. Owen Strachen explains why, twenty-seven years after his death, the “missionary to the intellectuals” is still relevant:
First things first: Schaeffer is unparalleled in evangelical history. There is no one who prefigures him and no one who now perfectly emulates him. Born in 1912, Schaeffer was raised in a Protestant home and came to faith in 1930. He studied and moved in fundamentalist circles in the 1930s and 40s and was influenced early on by famed controversialist Carl McIntire. Schaeffer moved to Europe in 1948 to conduct missionary work among children. Warming quickly to the physical beauty and intellectual spirit of Switzerland, Schaeffer and his wife, Edith, established L’Abri, a shelter-turned-community-turned-waystation, in 1955.Through a variety of unusual encounters with spiritual pilgrims, Schaeffer soon earned a reputation as an evangelical guru, one to whom skeptics or struggling Christians could go for all-night conversation that led in many cases to personal transformation. The salon-like discussions were often taped and subsequently distributed throughout the world by Schaeffer devotees as a cycle developed: more guests distributing more tapes led to more guests. Schaeffer became something of an evangelical celebrity, with stories circulating throughout evangelicalism of visits from the son of President Gerald Ford, the children of Billy Graham, and counter-cultural mystic Timothy Leary.
In the mid-50s, Schaeffer began venturing back across the pond to lecture in the United States at schools like Harvard, MIT, Wheaton, Calvin, and many more, electrifying his audiences even as he provoked them. His talks ranged over Western philosophy and theology and held his audiences spellbound. The apologist knew how not to over-conclude, to leave his hearers on the edge of a rhetorical precipice. According to Baylor historian Barry Hankins, in a 1968 Wheaton College address, Schaeffer ended on a dime:
There is death in the city; there’s death in the city; there’s death in the city.
He then sat down. Those who believe in the cultivation of searing oratory will find ample means of growth in the Schaefferian corpus.
