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.
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.