“Protestantism has become bourgeois,” explained Francis Schaeffer in a 1960 Time magazine profile. “It reaches the middle-class people, but not the workers or the intellectuals. What we need is a presentation of the bible's historical truth in such a way that it is acceptable to today's intellectuals” (74). Schaeffer's ambition coordinates elegantly with the Library of Religious Biography, a long-running Eerdmans series which seeks to provide “well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied.” Although Eerdmans now allows endnotes, for a long time their books had the quality of pop nonfiction, tracking deep into the religious subject without trailing citations to inhibit the tales. There is a pulse to these books, as Hankins flavors his story with telling descriptors, calling Francis “a morose and depressed individual” who “often wept as he preached and spoke,” and describing his wife, Edith, as advocate of sexual oneness as an “ongoing daily thing of fulfillment” (9, 107, 32). Invariably the publisher draws its authors from the best ranks of church historians, many of whom testify to a relationship with the reformed tradition, an identity which may factor into the vivacious spirit in which these studies are written.
Schaeffer is ideally suited to the annals of this biographical set, since his tale includes hardscrabble uplift, dramatic ecclesiastical episodes, unwieldy celebrity, and interpersonal controversy. Schaeffer's tale is also ripe for Eerdmans' imagined lay readership, as he served a global audience of seekers, believers, and devotees who encountered him through retreat centers, cassette tapes, and the college lecture circuit during his heyday as a Christian intellectual expositor. In his strongest argumentative claim, Hankins casts Schaeffer as a fulcrum, attributing to Schaeffer the work of “reshaping evangelical attitudes toward culture, helping to move evangelicals from separatism to engagement” (xv). As Hankins teaches us through his use of personal correspondence and interviews, however, this is too neat by half, since on nearly all points Schaeffer was more ambiguous than clarifying. Raised in a diffident Presbyterianism, Francis Schaeffer read the Bible at age seventeen. At an Anthony Zeoli revival in 1930, he became a Christian; not long after he would marry Edith. Following a college degree at Hamden-Sydney, Schaeffer attended Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Attracted by J. Gresham Machen's writings, Schaeffer stayed at Westminster for two years before he transferred to Faith Seminary, a splinter faction led by Allan McRae and Carl McIntire. This group formed not only a new seminary but also a fundamentalist denomination called the Bible Presbyterian Church; Schaeffer became the first minister ordained in this sect.
Hankins establishes the split from Westminster as a signal event in Schaeffer's religious education, pressing him as a young man to consider the details of his own Calvinism, his commitment to premillennialism, and his position on a variety of social issues. Eventually Schaeffer would weary of McIntire's militancy, and he would grow more ambivalent on the importance of separatism to the maintenance of a fundamental Christianity. By 1948, when Schaeffer decamped for his European mission, he would have had his fill of ecclesial conflict. After serving pastorates in Pennsylvania, and Missouri, Schaeffer departed for Europe hoping to tussle with the neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth. While other Christian leaders in America organized the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Christianity Today magazine under the auspices of a neo-evangelicalism, Schaeffer feared such a softening of fundamentalism allowed the victory of modernism. Indeed, at one point he would go so far as to compare Harold Ockenga and his Fuller Seminary to the sixteenth-century Counter Reformation. In 1950, he gave an address on the “New Modernism,” indicting those thinkers who thought they could have things both ways, who believed that “something could be historically false and religiously true” (23). This divide between experience and reality was not, Schaeffer argued, just a fallacy of modernism, but also the central error of modern western intellectual history. According to Schaeffer, Christians who did not battle for the unity of natural truth with religious truth were not really Christian.
To practice his particular missionary position, Schaeffer launched into the project that would define his reputation: L'Abri. Based at the Chalet les Melezes in Huémoz, Switzerland, L'Abri distanced the Schaeffers from fundamentalist organizations while drawing them into intimate proximity with its basic epistemic battles. Offering housing to anyone who wandered there, L'Abri attracted Christian soldiers and Timothy Leary drop-outs alike, all seeking the passionate pastor in Swiss knickers who would, they said, answer any question you asked him. “They would arrive at L'Abri,” Hankins explained, “announce themselves as Nietzschean or whatever else they happened to be, ask what Christianity was all about, and the conversation would begin, often lasting for hours into the night and early morning” (60). In these debates, Schaeffer was famously frank and persuasive, repeating to his listeners that Christianity was the only coherent worldview and that it was the only answer to their deepest traumas and demands. Recordings of these debates provided Schaeffer an international audience as listening groups sprang up to hear these Alps evenings. But Schaeffer's focus was on the inquirer in front of him. As one L'Abri worker would later remark, “It was apologetics in the pit, down and dirty” (61).
As the possible subplots at L'Abri become increasingly tawdry, Hankins disappears into intellectual biography, refusing to adjudicate the various accusations made by Schaeffer's son, Franky, in his roman à clef trio devoted to his family life in Europe. After his robust presentation of L'Abri in chapter 3, Hankins turns toward Schaeffer's written work. There are views to his InterVarsity lectures, and to his anti-abortion activism, but in the main the second half of this biography focuses on a detailed engagement with Schaeffer as a thinker. As such, Hankins offers a sympathetic volume, tracking Schaeffer's thinking from his early, definitive trilogy (The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason, and He Is There and Is Not Silent), to his expositions on the visual arts and worries about the decline of inerrancy. Hankins capably reads Schaeffer for his readers, pointing out the ways Schaeffer sought to reply to aspects of the Western canon and the Christian tradition. Using images from John Cage to Kierkegaard, Schaeffer ranged wildly (even, as Hankins suggests, irresponsibly), demonstrating his belief that culture was not an evangelical enemy. It was an ally, supplying inspiration and relevancy to a subculture that survived too often on its own sense of embattlement. Schaeffer arrived at some “idiosyncratic interpretations” of American history and Christian theology, an assessment Hankins achieves after searching Schaeffer's corpus with impressive commitment (101). Although the final chapters include figures like R. J. Rushdoony, perhaps the most poignant material surrounds the largely epistolary debates between Schaeffer, George Marsden, and Mark Noll. Chapter 8, which addresses in detail these interactions, should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of evangelicalism in American religious historical writing. Like the biography itself, this account demonstrates the energizing, maddening, and emboldening overlap between American religious history, American religious thought, and American religious authority.
