Nov 10
22
The squandered legacy in Francis Schaeffer’s son
American Vision – November 22, 2010
How a Legacy Can be Squandered
By Gary DeMar
Frank Schaeffer, the son of the late Christian worldview apologist Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984), writes the following in a post-election article that was published on the ultra-liberal Huffington Post website: “One reason the Republicans won on Tuesday is because many of their supporters have already given up on this world and are waiting for the next. I know, I used to be one of them.” One of the major faults of his father’s worldview was its lack of a viable eschatology. I’m not the only one to make this observation. William Edgar, a professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, recounts the time in the 1960s he spent studying in L’Abri, Switzerland, under the tutelage of the elder Schaeffer:[1]
I can remember coming down the mountain from L’Abri and expecting the stock market to cave in, a priestly elite to take over American government, and enemies to poison the drinking water. I was almost disappointed when these things did not happen.[2]
Edgar speculates, with good reason, that it was Schaeffer’s eschatology that negatively affected the way he saw and interpreted world events. One of Schaeffer’s last books, A Christian Manifesto, did not call for cultural transformation but civil disobedience as a stopgap measure to postpone an inevitable societal decline. “The fact remains that Dr. Schaeffer’s manifesto offers no prescriptions for a Christian society. . . . The same comment applies to all of Dr. Schaeffer’s writings: he does not spell out the Christian alternative. He knows that you ‘can’t fight something with nothing,’ but as a premillennialist, he does not expect to win the fight prior to the visible, bodily return of Jesus Christ to earth to establish His millennial kingdom.”[3] This view has been true for millions of Christians. Providentially, the cracks in the foundation of this prophetic edifice are beginning to show.
Frank Schaeffer is right about a generation-long preoccupation with the end times among evangelicals and fundamentalists. Long before he wrote his latest irrational and misinformed rant, I and others have been writing about the impact or lack thereof eschatology has had on culture, education, and politics. My critique, contrary to Schaeffer’s, has been exegetical. That is, I offer biblical reasons why books written by Tim LaHaye, John Hagee, David Jeremiah, Thomas Ice, Ron Rhodes, John MacArthur, Mark Hitchcock, and others are wrong on the subject of prophecy.
Read the complete article here.