Reading Schaeffer Today and the Voices That Built on Him

Francis Schaeffer was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on January 30, 1912, and died in Rochester, Minnesota, on May 15, 1984.¹ In between he moved his family to Switzerland in 1948, helped establish L'Abri there in 1955, and wrote books that put old philosophy into the hands of college students and church members.¹ Michael Hamilton wrote in Christianity Today in 1997 that perhaps no intellectual save C. S. Lewis affected the thinking of evangelicals more profoundly.²

The Books in Order

The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason appeared in 1968, and He Is There and He Is Not Silent followed in 1972.³¹ The first surveys the intellectual and cultural climate of the second half of the twentieth century. Its chapters walk through steps of what Schaeffer called the line of despair: philosophy, then art, then music and general culture, with theology as the fifth step.³ The second goes back to the sources and starts with Aquinas, the Renaissance and the Reformation before moving through Kant, Rousseau, Hegel and Kierkegaard.³ The third gives the positive case in three necessities, metaphysical, moral and epistemological.³

In 1976 he told the same story for a wide audience in How Should We Then Live?, and a ten-part film series followed in 1977, with episodes that run from "The Roman Age" to "Final Choices."⁴ The later works, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979) and A Christian Manifesto (1981), turn the map into calls for action.¹ A reader who is new to him can start with the film or with Escape from Reason, which is shorter and gives the argument in outline.

How to Use His Map

The map has a simple pattern. Ideas move through the disciplines in a sequence, and the sequence begins in philosophy, passes through art, music and general culture, and reaches theology last.⁵ He taught that a worldview should be pressed to its conclusions, a method he called taking the roof off.¹ The best way to honor a teacher who works this way is to read what he read. The lessons on Enlightenment reason and rights, the two faces of the Enlightenment, Sartre and Camus, Barth and the liberal church and the postmodern turn send the reader to the thinkers in their own words, with Schaeffer's description beside them.

Rookmaaker and the Arts

The first helper was a friend. Hans Rookmaaker was born in The Hague on February 27, 1922, and took a doctorate in art history with a dissertation on Paul Gauguin. By the mid-1960s he had founded the art history department at the Free University in Amsterdam.⁶ He met Schaeffer in 1948, lectured at L'Abri from 1955 on, and the friendship lasted until Rookmaaker's death in March 1977.⁶ Wikipedia describes him as a close friend who shaped Schaeffer's approach to culture, and the scholar Irving Hexham says it was Rookmaaker who introduced Schaeffer to the writings of Herman Dooyeweerd.⁷

His best-known book is Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970).⁶ A reader who wants to test Schaeffer's readings of painting can go to Rookmaaker.

Guinness, Pearcey and Colson

The next ring is made of students. Os Guinness was born in China to medical missionaries on September 30, 1941, and was a leader at L'Abri in the late 1960s.⁸ He lived with the Schaeffers for a time and was a close friend of the family.⁷ His The Dust of Death (InterVarsity Press, 1973) joined the same conversation. He has kept writing about freedom, truth and public life ever since, with Time for Truth (2000), A Free People's Suicide (2012) and The Magna Carta of Humanity (2021).⁸

Nancy Pearcey, born in 1952, studied under Schaeffer at L'Abri in 1971 and later served as the Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar at the World Journalism Institute.⁹¹⁰ She says that Escape from Reason and The God Who Is There trace the history of the split between fact and value, and her own book Total Truth (Crossway, 2004) argues that Christianity speaks to all of life, not only to private religion.²¹¹ It won an ECPA Gold Medallion.⁹ With Charles Colson and Harold Fickett she wrote How Now Shall We Live? (Tyndale House, 1999), a title that echoes Schaeffer's.¹²

Colson (1931 to 2012) came to the subject from public life. He went to prison on July 9, 1974, and was released on January 31, 1975, in the Watergate affair. He founded Prison Fellowship in 1976, won the Templeton Prize in 1993 and received the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2008.¹² Prison Fellowship took his faith into the prisons, and his later books with Pearcey took it into the question of worldview.

Postman, MacIntyre and Taylor

Three writers outside Schaeffer's circle reached neighboring conclusions by other roads. Neil Postman (1931 to 2003) taught at New York University from 1959 and in 1971 founded a graduate program in media ecology.¹³ In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) he argued that television turns public discourse into entertainment, and that the form of a medium decides what ideas it can carry.¹⁴ He compared Orwell's fear of restricted information with Huxley's fear of distraction and judged Huxley closer to the truth.¹⁴ In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992) he turned from television to technology in general.¹³ A reader of Schaeffer's chapters on the general culture will find the same concern for the habits that shape thought.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929 to 2025) opened After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) with an allegory. After a catastrophe in the natural sciences, the survivors rebuild science from fragments, and the result looks familiar and has lost its content. He argued that modern moral language is in the same condition, reduced to emotivism, the view that moral statements express feelings. In his account the Enlightenment attempt to justify morality failed once it dropped the Aristotelian idea that human life has a proper end.¹⁵ His last sentence looks for another St. Benedict, "doubtless very different" from the first.¹⁵ MacIntyre arrives at the problem Lewis named in lesson 15 and Sartre met in lesson 13: what ground is left for a moral claim?

Charles Taylor (born 1931) published A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), which grew out of the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1998 and 1999. It asks how Western society moved from a time when belief in God was nearly unavoidable to one where belief is a single option among many. Taylor rejects "subtraction" stories, in which religion just drops away, and describes a modern "immanent frame" that can be read as open or closed to the transcendent.¹⁶ The book covers some of the same ground as Schaeffer's histories at far greater length, and it shows how the self came to be understood as a buffered one.¹⁶

Hunter and Himmelfarb

James Davison Hunter (born 1955), a sociologist at the University of Virginia, wrote Culture Wars (1991), The Death of Character (2000) and To Change the World (Oxford, 2010), and founded the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.¹⁷ The last book adds an institutional dimension to the study of ideas. Andy Crouch summarizes it this way: culture changes through institutions at the center, driven by a small elite, and a hope for change that stops at individual hearts and minds does not reach far enough. Hunter's own proposal is "faithful presence," taking part in every cultural structure while being formed by the church.¹⁸ The book gives readers of Schaeffer a practical question to put beside his history of ideas: where do ideas become habits, in which schools, agencies, newsrooms and boards?

Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922 to 2019) was a historian who wrote The De-Moralization of Society (1995) and The Roads to Modernity (2004).¹⁹ The second book separates the British Enlightenment, which stressed social virtues such as compassion and benevolence, the French, which made reason an ideology against the church, and the American, in which religion was an ally and political liberty the chief concern.²⁰ She called the French version "the Ideology of Reason" and the American "the Politics of Liberty."²¹ That division bears on the lessons here on reason and rights and the two faces of the Enlightenment. It also helps a citizen see why the American Republic took the path it did.

Putting the Voices to Work

Taken together, the writers answer different questions about the same terrain. Rookmaaker supplies the arts, Guinness and Pearcey the public use of worldview, Colson the personal and prison ministry side, Postman the media, MacIntyre the moral philosophy, Taylor the long history of belief, Hunter the sociology of institutions, and Himmelfarb the history of the Enlightenment itself. None of them wrote as a copy of Schaeffer, and most came from other fields. That independence is the strength of the case. When writers from different fields end up asking where moral standards come from, what holds a culture together and why public language has thinned, the question is real.

The Declaration of Independence says that "all men are created equal" and that governments exist "to secure these rights."²² The framework works as long as people can still say what the words mean. Schaeffer's map says an idea reaches public life through philosophy, art, schools and law, and the later writers fill in the roads. The work of keeping a free people free includes keeping those channels honest. Reading them in order, with the primary sources beside them, is a good way to do that work.

Who added what to Schaeffer's map

Writer	Key work	What it adds
Hans Rookmaaker	Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, 1970	Art history behind Schaeffer's readings of painting
Os Guinness	The Dust of Death, 1973	Student voice from L'Abri on culture and faith
Neil Postman	Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985	How media shape public thought
Alasdair MacIntyre	After Virtue, 1981	Why modern moral language lost its ground
Nancy Pearcey and Charles Colson	How Now Shall We Live?, 1999	Worldview applied to daily life
Charles Taylor	A Secular Age, 2007	The history of belief becoming one option
James Davison Hunter	To Change the World, 2010	How institutions carry ideas
Gertrude Himmelfarb	The Roads to Modernity, 2004	Three Enlightenments, with the American one tied to liberty

1. 1948 The Schaeffers move to Switzerland; Schaeffer meets Rookmaaker.¹⁶
2. 1955 L'Abri is established.¹
3. 1968 The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason.³
4. 1970 Rookmaaker's Modern Art and the Death of a Culture.⁶
5. 1976 How Should We Then Live?¹
6. 1981 MacIntyre's After Virtue.¹⁵
7. 1984 Schaeffer dies on May 15.¹
8. 1985 Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.¹⁴
9. 1999 Colson and Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live?¹²
10. 2007 Taylor's A Secular Age.¹⁶
11. 2010 Hunter's To Change the World.¹⁷

Learn more

• Wikipedia, Francis Schaeffer: a timeline of his life and works.
• Crossway Trilogy contents: the chapter structure of the three core books.
• Nancy Pearcey, About: a student's own account of studying at L'Abri.
• Christianity Today, Crouch on Hunter: a clear summary of To Change the World.
• BookPage, Himmelfarb: a short guide to the three Enlightenments.
• Wikipedia, After Virtue: MacIntyre's argument in outline.
• Wikipedia, A Secular Age: Taylor's argument in outline.

Notes

1. "Francis Schaeffer," Wikipedia: born January 30, 1912, in Germantown, Pennsylvania; died May 15, 1984, in Rochester, Minnesota; the family moved to Switzerland in 1948 and established L'Abri in 1955; How Should We Then Live? (1976); Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979); A Christian Manifesto (1981). The phrase "taking the roof off" is Schaeffer's own, in a section so titled in The God Who Is There (The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy, Crossway, 1990). Read it online. ↩
2. "Francis Schaeffer," Wikipedia, on his influence: Michael Hamilton, Christianity Today, March 3, 1997, as quoted there: "Perhaps no intellectual save C. S. Lewis affected the thinking of evangelicals more profoundly" (the comparison is Hamilton's and does not claim that either man influenced the other); Nancy Pearcey says Escape from Reason and The God Who Is There trace the history of the fact/value split. Read it online. ↩
3. Francis A. Schaeffer, The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway), table of contents: The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason and He Is There and He Is Not Silent, with the chapter and section titles used in this lesson. Read it online. ↩
4. "How Should We Then Live?," Wikipedia: book first published in 1976 by Fleming H. Revell; the ten-episode film series of 1977, from "The Roman Age" to "Final Choices." Read it online. ↩
5. Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (1968), section one, chapters 2 to 4 ("The First Step in the Line of Despair: Philosophy," "The Second Step: Art," "The Third and Fourth Steps: Music and the General Culture") and section two, chapter 1 ("The Fifth Step Theology"), per the Crossway table of contents. ↩
6. "Hans Rookmaaker," Wikipedia: born February 27, 1922, in The Hague; founded the art history department at the Free University in Amsterdam in the mid-1960s; dissertation on Paul Gauguin; met Schaeffer in 1948; lectured at L'Abri from 1955; Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970); died March 13, 1977. Read it online. ↩
7. "Francis Schaeffer," Wikipedia, on Rookmaaker: Rookmaaker, a close friend, shaped Schaeffer's approach to culture, and Irving Hexham says Rookmaaker introduced Schaeffer to the writings of Herman Dooyeweerd; Os Guinness lived with the Schaeffers and was a close friend of the family. Read it online. ↩
8. "Os Guinness," Wikipedia: born September 30, 1941, in China to medical missionaries; a leader at L'Abri in Switzerland in the late 1960s; The Dust of Death (InterVarsity Press, 1973); Time for Truth (Baker, 2000); A Free People's Suicide (InterVarsity Press, 2012); Renaissance (2014); The Magna Carta of Humanity (2021). Read it online. ↩
9. Nancy Pearcey, "About," nancypearcey.com: studied under Francis Schaeffer at L'Abri in Switzerland (a photo caption on the page gives 1971); taught at the World Journalism Institute as "the Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar"; author of Total Truth and How Now Shall We Live? (with Chuck Colson and Harold Fickett), both described as ECPA Gold Medallion winners, and of Saving Leonardo and other books. Read it online. ↩
10. "Nancy Pearcey," Wikipedia: born 1952; How Now Shall We Live? (Tyndale House, 1999); Saving Leonardo (B&H, 2010); Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar at the World Journalism Institute. Read it online. ↩
11. "Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity," Crossway: publication date June 30, 2004 (Wikipedia gives 2005). Read it online. ↩
12. "Charles Colson," Wikipedia: October 16, 1931, to April 21, 2012; indicted March 1, 1974, in the Watergate cover-up and imprisoned at Maxwell, Alabama; in prison from July 9, 1974, to January 31, 1975; founded Prison Fellowship in 1976; Templeton Prize 1993; Presidential Citizens Medal 2008; How Now Shall We Live? with Nancy Pearcey (Tyndale House, 1999). Read it online. ↩
13. "Neil Postman," Wikipedia: born March 8, 1931; died October 5, 2003; taught at New York University from 1959; founded a graduate program in media ecology in 1971; Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992). Read it online. ↩
14. "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Wikipedia: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Viking Penguin, 1985); television turns public discourse into entertainment; the introduction contrasting Orwell and Huxley; the phrase "now this." Read it online. ↩
15. "After Virtue," Wikipedia: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); the opening allegory of a catastrophe in the natural sciences; emotivism; the failure of the Enlightenment project; the return to Aristotle; the closing sentence, which speaks of waiting for another St. Benedict, "doubtless very different" (quoted at Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame); life dates of MacIntyre, 12 January 1929 to 21 May 2025, from Wikipedia. Read it online. ↩
16. "A Secular Age," Wikipedia: Charles Taylor (born 5 November 1931), A Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), from the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, 1998 to 1999; the three senses of secular; rejection of "subtraction" stories; the immanent frame; the buffered self. Read it online. ↩
17. "James Davison Hunter," Wikipedia: born 1955; Culture Wars (Basic Books, 1991); The Death of Character (Basic Books, 2000); To Change the World (Oxford University Press, 2010); LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia; founder and executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Read it online. ↩
18. Andy Crouch, review of James Davison Hunter, To Change the World, Books & Culture, 2010, carried by Christianity Today: influence flows through institutions at the cultural center; "cultural change is almost always driven by change among a small élite"; Hunter's call to "fully participating in every structure of culture as deeply formed Christians," which he calls faithful presence. Read it online. ↩
19. "Gertrude Himmelfarb," Wikipedia: born August 8, 1922; died December 30, 2019; The De-Moralization of Society (1995); The Roads to Modernity (2004; Knopf per BookPage). Read it online. ↩
20. "Gertrude Himmelfarb: Redefining Enlightenment," BookPage, September 2004: the British Enlightenment of "the social virtues of compassion, benevolence and sympathy," the French of reason as "the ideology to challenge religion, the church and other institutions," and the American, in which "religion was an ally, not an enemy" and political liberty the chief concern; published by Knopf. Read it online. ↩
21. Robert Curry, "Sorting Out the Enlightenments," Claremont Review of Books, Digital Exclusive, December 2, 2013: Himmelfarb's labels "the Ideology of Reason" for the French and "the Politics of Liberty" for the American Enlightenment. Read it online. ↩
22. Declaration of Independence, 1776, National Archives transcript: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." Read it online. ↩