Bio- Francis Schaeffer

 

 FRANCIS. A. SCHAEFFER.

 

 (1912–1984)

 

Evangelical missionary, philosopher, author, and lecturer 

  Schaeffer was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a Lutheran family, but became an agnostic during his teen years.

While a student engineer at Drexel Institute, he became a believer. In 1935 he completed his college work magna cum laude at Hampden Sidney College, Virginia, a Southern Presbyterian school, receiving his bachelor of arts degree. During this year he married Edith Seville. 

Schaeffer further attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, studying under Cornelius van Til, a Reformed apologist from the Netherlands; and he finished his training at Faith Theological Seminary, Wilmington, Delaware, receiving his bachelor of divinity degree in 1938.

 He became the first ordained minister of the Bible Presbyterian Church and went on to pastor other churches in Pennsylvania and St. Louis, Missouri. In 1971 he was awarded a doctor of laws degree by Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.

 In 1948 the Schaeffer family  moved to Switzerland. Francis and Edith became vitally concerned for the youth from all nations they observed there, and in 1955 they founded an international study and ministry community in the Swiss Alps at Huemoz, which they called L’Abri (shelter). Students from all cultures and beliefs were welcome to stay with the Schaeffers and discuss secular culture and ideas. Through study and prayer many of the thousands of internationals who visited at L’Abri became Christians.

 The story of the founding and development of the L’Abri community is told by Edith Schaeffer in the book, L’Abri (1969). Eventually there was L’Abri campuses in Milan, London, Amsterdam, and Rochester, Minnesota. The ministry gained worldwide recognition through the distribution of Schaeffer’s books: The God Who Is There (1968); Escape from Reason (1968); Pollution and the Death of Man (1970); The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (1970); True Spirituality (1971); He Is There and He Is Not Silent (1972); How Should We Then Live; The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (1976) to name a few.

 Schaeffer attributed much of today’s social ills to the teaching of the philosopher Hegel, who promoted the thought that truth is relative and not absolute.

 Schaeffer’s writings, twenty-four books in all, describe the disastrous political and moral consequences of adopting Hegel’s view, and contend that the only remedy for our world is a return to biblical absolutes.

 In 1979 Schaeffer toured the United States with Dr. C. Everett Koop (later surgeon general of the United States) contended that secular humanism had replaced God’s laws as the basis of contemporary ethics.

Two collections about Schaeffer, compiled by Lane T. Dennis, were published in 1986 (Francis A. Schaeffer: Portraits of the Man and His Work; The Letters of Francis Schaeffer: Spiritual Reality in the Personal Christian Life).