Bringing minds and lives captive to Christ

The evangelical elites have not been particularly kind to the intellectual legacy of Francis Schaeffer. Then again, it might be more accurate to say that it all depends on exactly who’s doing the talking.

As Charles E. Cotherman recounts in his book To Think Christianly: A History of L’Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement, many aspirant evangelical academics were dismayed at Schaeffer’s lack of interest in keeping up with the latest technical literature and the high-level debates they sought to foster as a part of their own eventually distinguished careers. They saw themselves as those endeavoring to “seek the welfare of the city” (Jeremiah 29:7) by standing forth as representatives for evangelicals within elite educational institutions and publications, proving that they were no backward fundamentalists incapable of serious scholarship.

Yet for the students who attended L’Abri, the ministry for which Schaeffer came to be best known, most importantly as a haven for skeptical adolescents studying in Europe, it was his insistence on dealing with ground-floor problems of the postmodern experience that made him so appealing. Inspiring some who, like Os Guinness, became leading Christian thinkers, Schaeffer’s mode of apologetics as evangelism made clear to a rising generation that letting any idea loose from total captivity to Christ was bound to lead to disaster.

In his biography of Schaeffer, Barry Hankins criticized what he described as Schaeffer’s “superficial way of learning” in comparison to evangelical academics but argued that its “positive effect was that Schaeffer never divorced the intellectual from the relational.” Because he interacted with young people on their own terms instead of considering their worldviews purely in the abstract, Schaeffer helped bring the truth of Christianity uniquely alive to them as what they had been yearning for, not just one option among a morass of other belief systems. Only the God who was really there could be the everlasting answer to their restless hearts.

In 1994, Mark A. Noll published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a blistering rebuke of what he saw as a lack of serious academic engagement among evangelicals. He opens the book with an oft-quoted indictment: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Noll intended to demonstrate the extent to which “many American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life.” By narrowly focusing on evangelistic immediatism, they wrongfully neglected the full vibrancy that the Christian worldview ought to offer the world.

In the pursuit of credentials, cosmology can find itself quickly consigned to the abyss of a private life insulated from one’s career. The gospel becomes a byline among many, not the definitive declaration of your identity and vocation. It is not academics itself that is the problem (as hopefully a cursory glance at this author’s bio should indicate). Indeed, Noll has acknowledged that “The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind.” Nevertheless, amidst accolades for one’s academic accomplishments, one can eventually become forgetful of the Master he or she ultimately serves.

To quote Andy Naselli: “When you stand before the Lord, he is not going to ask you how many academic books and articles you published. … What you will want to hear is simply, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. … Enter into the joy of your master’ (Matthew 25:21, 23).” No evangelical scholar can work for the good of the kingdom of God this side of glory with affections subservient to the altar of respectability for its own sake.

Schaeffer stands as a positive example for the Church today as someone who understood what was truly behind the culture war raging around him. It was not a war that just began in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade; it had started in the Garden. He was no scholar’s scholar, but he was a man who understood that a desire for legitimacy or prestige could not overtake Christians’ fundamental calling to seek out the lost so that they might find their only Savior. As those who might choose to pursue scholarly excellence in the present, we must not forget that our labors most of all must count forever since the greater city we seek will have no need for elites to guide the way.