What would Francis Schaeffer say to the evangelical church today?[1] To answer this question, I first must highlight two crucial aspects of Schaeffer’s life and ministry. First, the burden of his life was to teach that the message of Christianity isn’t primarily about “religious experiences,” but about “true Truth.” Second, in contending for the truth, Schaeffer sought to do so with gentleness and compassion, and by doing so to practice simultaneously the holiness and love of God. To uphold God’s holiness requires that we stand against falsehood and unrighteousness. To uphold God’s love requires that we stand for the truth while also remembering life’s brokenness, including our own, and to walk moment-by-moment with Christ as we seek to love and honor God more than any created thing.
Throughout his entire ministry, Schaeffer practiced these two crucial points. He not only personally believed the gospel, he also taught and demonstrated that Christianity’s truth claims were really true in contrast to non-Christian thought. As such, he was willing to stand against those who either denied the truth or compromised it, and especially against those who did so within the church. Schaeffer loved and trusted Scripture. His message was the same whether chatting to individuals or addressing crowds. Honor God and revere his Word; follow Christ and submit to Scripture. What mattered to him was the trustworthiness of God’s written Word, hence the reason why he contended tirelessly for Truth in a post-truth society. For Schaeffer, if one tampers with the Bible, all is lost. This explains his concern at the end of his life regarding the direction of evangelicalism. As Schaeffer warned in his last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, some evangelicals were in danger of compromising the full authority of Scripture, and up until his last breath, he sought to call the evangelical church back to a full commitment to Scripture and the truth of the gospel.
With this in mind, we are now able to answer the question of what Schaeffer would say to today’s evangelical church, and also to discover his ongoing relevance for Evangelicals today. I will do so in two steps. First, I will answer the question of why Schaeffer’s commitment to truth and the full authority of Scripture is still relevant for evangelicals today despite the changes that have occurred in our culture since his death. Second, I will conclude with what I believe Schaeffer would say to us today.
Schaeffer’s Commitment to “True Truth”: Is it Relevant for Evangelicals Today?
Many evangelicals, I think, would be hesitant to answer yes. Why? So much has changed. For one thing Schaeffer died before Postmodernism took center stage. More specifically, his stress on antithesis and confrontation was a bone of contention even during his lifetime and the reaction to this would be stronger today: at best impractical, at worst offensive, unloving, and fractious. As a friend put it, why focus on Truth when people are interested only in experience, or why contend with falsehood when everyone just wants to be tolerant and accepting?
This attitude to Schaeffer’s alleged rationalism and commitment to “true Truth” is unfortunate because his opposition to the Enlightenment could not have been clearer. For example, Schaeffer argued strongly that, “the central ideas of the Enlightenment stand in complete antithesis to Christian truth. More than this, they are an attack on God himself and his character.”[2]
Nevertheless, some evangelicals have argued that his commitment to objective Truth reflects the Enlightenment more than the Bible: that he was wrong to talk of “propositional revelation;” that he emphasized the mind too much; that his view of inerrancy was too literalistic; that he was too dogmatic, etc. Their dislike of the Modernist tradition is intense. By contrast they favor the Postmodern approach. They see it as more congenial to faith, more accepting, more open, more attentive to the heart rather than the head. Those who think this way conspicuously overlook Schaeffer’s warnings back in 1974 when he spoke in Lausanne. His message was blunt: if the Enlightenment was bad the existential methodology is worse. In Schaeffer’s view its foundations are like shifting sand, its proposals like poison.
The irony here is striking. Despite Postmodernism’s dislike of Modernism, we must never forget that it is itself derived from Modernism. Once Descartes and the Empiricists started to work out the logic of their ideas, they ran into difficulty. David Hume realized that even causality (the sine qua non of science) was a problem: “Do I sense the cause in causality” he asked, “or do I merely observe two consecutive events? I see billiard ball number one strike billiard ball number two—but do I observe ‘cause?’” Evidently not. With his empirical foundation, he had no answer—even though he admitted he couldn’t operate like this when playing board-games with his friends! Immanuel Kant tried to respond, but it was a hopeless task. Knowledge, like everything else, requires a metaphysical source. As a result, Modernism gradually nose-dived into Existentialism, which in turn morphed into Postmodernism—but only because the original epistemology was inadequate. When the cracks started to appear, the philosophers should have acknowledged that they had taken the wrong turn. On this point, Schaeffer was entirely on point!
But that was precisely what the Postmodernists didn’t do. Instead of back-tracking to reconsider where they’d come from, namely, the Christian worldview, they carried European thought towards “the hermeneutic of suspicion.” All attempts to establish worldviews based on rationality, they said, are suspect. According to Jacques Derrida, for example, not even language works that way. “Nothing exists outside the text,” he said. In other words, everything is an interpretation. No definitive explanation of anything is possible because language itself is relative. Similarly, Jean-François Lyotard dismissed all metanarratives, all, that is, which claim to be true and therefore exclusive—especially Christianity. Overarching stories of what life is about and how best to live are valid, but only as stories, never as “Truth.” Michel Foucault undermined things further by arguing that language, like everything else in society, is just a power-game: powerful social groups dominating others—oppressors/their victims, men/women, rich/poor, white/black, Europeans/colonials and so on.
The net effect of the postmodern slide was catastrophic. Particularly in relation to that, sadly, many have failed to appreciate the importance of what Schaeffer said about “rationality” and “rationalism.” This goes a long way to identify Postmodernism’s essential flaws and to show how best to counteract them.
In the first place, he said, Christianity isn’t rationalistic because it rests upon the reality of creation. It doesn’t start with the human mind. That was Descartes’ mistake. When he said, “I think, therefore I am” his assertion raised an obvious question: where does the (knowing) “self” come from in the first place? No answer. He just assumed it. By comparison, the Bible starts further back: it says the individual is able to think only because he or she is a creature created by the triune personal God. Given this starting point, rational thought itself—the great stumbling block of modern secular philosophy—becomes intelligible. Christianity also deals with the problem of sin and insists humanity needs a supernatural Savior because guilt is real and has to be atoned. Only Christ can do this, because he is the divine Son of God. Human attempts to merit salvation are worthless. In short, the Bible is God-centered throughout.
The second distinction Schaeffer used a lot was between “true knowledge, but not exhaustive knowledge.” What he meant is that human knowledge is limited, of necessity, because all our experience is superficial. No one knows even the tiniest thing completely. We see bits and pieces only. In addition, each person is unique. No two people share the same background or have the same interests or gifts. Yet the human mind is adequate: it grasps truth adequately if not exhaustively. Its limitations don’t invalidate either rationality or communication. Our experiences, though individual, are reciprocal.
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Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Monday, November 13, 2023
The Sabbath day reminds image bearers of their obligation to worship and serve the Lord, and to trust God for the redemption that He freely provides in Christ alone. Where Adam failed in the covenant of works, Christ succeeded. As the last Adam (Rom. 5:12–21), Jesus came to secure the eschatological Sabbath rest for His people. Jesus performed numerous healing miracles on the old covenant Sabbath day, revealing Himself to be the One who alone can provide rest for the souls of His people. The restorative Sabbath-day healings foreshadowed the ultimate healing that Christ secured for believers in the resurrection on the last day. 

It has become increasingly common for business professionals, life coaches, and pastors to talk about embracing sabbath or taking a sabbatical. The idea is that people need prolonged seasons of rest and refreshment. The focus on taking a sabbath is, of course, that people would become more productive in their employments while also caring for their spiritual, physical, and emotional well-being.
While sabbaticals may address a common, therapeutic need for rest, God has given us the Sabbath day to serve as a sign of the greater spiritual need we have for the rest that He provides in Christ alone. From the beginning of time, the Sabbath day was set as one of God’s creation ordinances (Gen. 2:2–3). In redemptive history, it was the fourth of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:8–11; Deut. 5:12–15). Both at creation and in the fourth commandment, the Sabbath served as a covenantal sign holding out the promise of a greater Sabbath rest.
After creating a world in which His image bearers could dwell, the Lord set apart the seventh day as the Sabbath day. The Sabbath day served numerous purposes at creation. It was to be a day of worship and rest. It was also a reminder that mankind is finite and dependent. Since we are dependent creatures, God saw fit to give Adam this creation ordinance to remind him of his need for rest from his physical labor. Adam was to set apart the Sabbath day to worship the God who “gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25).
However, it was not simply a day in which man was to cease from his labors and embrace physical and spiritual rest; it was a sign pointing to something higher—the hope of entering eternal rest. The eschatological-sign nature of the Sabbath day was tied to God’s covenantal dealing with man in the garden. In Eden, God condescended to initiate a covenantal relationship with Adam. Had Adam obeyed the command related to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, it’s likely he would have secured an eternal dwelling place for righteous image bearers to reflect the holy character of God. Had he obeyed, he would have gained a right to eat from the Tree of Life. The two trees in the garden served as signs and seals of the covenant of works, together with the Sabbath day. That is, the Sabbath ordinance was one of the signs and seals of this covenant in Eden. The Sabbath was a sign insomuch as it pointed to the promise of the eternal rest that man would have entered had Adam obeyed the demands of the covenant of works.
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The confidence which opens Psalm 23 is not like the opening of the preceding one, Psalm 22. David says in Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?” (22:1). David’s words in Psalm 22 are drenched with agony and steeped in affliction. In Psalm 22, he is surrounded, overwhelmed, undone, and at the edge of destruction. When we pass from Psalm 22 and read Psalm 23, we can discern a progression. The psalmist doesn’t fear the Lord’s remoteness. 

How should we study the Psalms?
If we choose a psalm to study, we should certainly read and reread its content. We should look for literary transitions and notice any literary devices. We should consider whether the writer speaks from the first-, second, or third-person perspective. We should discern the emotion being conveyed: is the writer lamenting, celebrating, recounting, hoping, recoiling, etc.? Is the psalmist asking for anything specific? Does the superscription give us information, such as the author or any detail about a historical setting? Does the New Testament cite or allude to the psalm?
Studying the Psalms involves these kinds of questions. Another question to fold into the others is this: how do the preceding and following psalms illuminate the one I’m studying? Let’s apply such a question as we look at Psalm 23.
In Psalm 23 (arguably the best-known psalm in the book) the author, David, is expressing his trust in the Lord. The Lord is a faithful shepherd who guides the psalmist to green pastures and still waters (23:1–2). The Lord restores the psalmist’s soul and directs his feet to the right paths (23:3). Not even the deep dark valley excludes the Lord’s presence. The faithful shepherd, equipped with rod and staff, is with the psalmist (23:4).
The confidence which opens Psalm 23 is not like the opening of the preceding one, Psalm 22. David says in Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?” (22:1). David’s words in Psalm 22 are drenched with agony and steeped in affliction. In Psalm 22, he is surrounded, overwhelmed, undone, and at the edge of destruction.
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