Francis Schaeffer’s Last Book - The Great Evangelical Disaster

For the first time in decades, I picked up and read my well marked copy of Francis Schaeffer’s The Great Evangelical Disaster this week.  And I noticed more the sadness of it than I did in my callow 20’s.  In both the preface and text, Schaeffer acknowledged his health was failing, and he died a few months after publication in 1984.  This was to be his last book.

I think his health affected the book.  He told in the preface of his hospitalization with a deadline to meet.  With help he made the deadline.  But the result does not seem as well written or as tightly reasoned as his earlier work.

Nonetheless – and this is part of the sadness as well – it is a prophetic work as noted elsewhere.  Most of what he decried in culture and church in the West have only gotten worse.  Perhaps his saddest statement comes early on:

It is a horrible thing for a man like myself to look back and see my country and my culture go down the drain in my own lifetime.

Though younger now than he was then, I can certainly relate.

As for his warnings about the direction of Evangelicals, he may have seemed alarmist at the time.  But the Neo-Evangelicals of today have pretty much proved him right.

Personally, I used to be a happy reader of Christianity Today.  But a few years ago, I cancelled my subscription.  I was gladly active in InterVarsity in my college years.  (By the way, the leader of my chapter at the time was one Mark Dever.)  But with their pushing Black Lives Matter and more, I am thoroughly alienated from them now.  I am thankfully not at that point with evangelicals within ACNA, but I have been disturbed by what I see more than once.  Too much of what I fled when I fled mainline denominations decades ago I now see among evangelicals.  That is one reason I do not refer to myself as evangelical.

Schaeffer’s warnings about American culture have proven too true as well.  Have I mentioned this is not a happy read? 

And, although I revere the man, I concede his last book is probably not his best book.  Nonetheless, it should not be neglected by those who acknowledge the importance of Francis Schaeffer and of his critique of church and culture in the West.  Nor should it be overlooked by those concerned by the current direction of evangelicalism.

Francis Schaeffer on “Evangelical Accommodation to the Socialistic Mentality”

With its [Neo-Evangelical*] call for justice and compassion it sounds at first like it is the same as, or very close to, what Scripture teaches on justice and compassion. . . . But what they are in fact taking about is “another gospel” . . . with disastrous consequences theologically and in terms of human rights and human life.

Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster

(*”Neo-Evangelical” is my term, not Dr. Schaeffer’s to my recollection.)

I may write about Schaeffer’s last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, and may apply the above quote more directly in due time.

Franky Schaeffer, Traitor and Nutcase

And trust me when I say I searched for printable words to use in my title.  His trashing of Charles Colson and the late great Richard John Neuhaus is beyond despicable.  

(I have chosen not to link directly to his blog because I don’t want to give the jerk the traffic.)

The Chuck Colson obituary that Schaeffer posted on his blog Sunday, though, is truly extraordinary, and I don’t see what purpose his fulmination-from-afar serves. The obit memorably begins, “Evangelical Christianity lost one of its most beloved and bigoted homophobic and misogynistic voices with the death of Charles W. ‘Chuck’ Colson, a Watergate felon who converted to ‘evangelicalism’ but never lost his taste for dirty political tricks against opponents.”

Schaeffer’s evidence for that charge: “Colson teamed up with far right Roman Catholic activist Professor Robert George of Princeton to launch the dirty tricks campaign to brand President Obama as ‘anti-religious’ with Colson’s and George’s ‘Manhattan Declaration.’”. . .

After numerous paragraphs of Colson-bashing, Schaeffer turns his ire on another departed leader, “the reactionary’s reactionary, Richard John Neuhaus.” He argues that Colson and Neuhaus fronted for “oppressive ideas rooted in an anti-constitutional theocratic far right wish list for changes that were supposed to roll back the parts of the democratic processes—say Roe v. Wade, women’s rights and gay rights—that far right Catholics and Protestants didn’t approve of.”

Oh yeah, that great monument to the democratic process, Roe v. Wade, that arbitrarily threw out the abortion laws of all 50 states.  How democratic.  And the Manhattan Declaration is a dirty tricks campaign?

I don’t know if I should have pity or contempt for someone so far off the deep end.  Franky better pray it will be pity on God’s part . . . a lot of it.  Trashing good men who have contended for the Faith, for freedom and for “the weakest of these,” particularly the unborn and those in prison, is a hellish thing.

Franky Schaeffer’s change on abortion indicates that God may have instead chosen to give him over to a depraved mind.  Franky knows (or knew) how wrong the Roe v. Wade abortion regime is.  He helped produce the seminal documentary featuring his father and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race.  And later on, I personally saw him speak at a Texans United for Life dinner.  (He already seemed a bit odd then, by the way.)

How far he has come . . . down.

I hope in heaven Francis Schaeffer does not have to know what has become of his son.

 

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Housekeeping: Yes, I know the formatting looks awful.  You have no idea how difficult the new blogger is to use.  It's driving me to the nut house myself.