25 years ago: The Death of Francis Schaeffer

May 15, 2009 marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Francis Schaeffer. Mr. Schaeffer was a Presbyterian pastor in the United States for many years before moving to Switzerland to found L'Abri, which was a place for young spiritual seekers to find answers to their questions about Christianity. Mr. Schaeffer wrote a number of excellent books in the areas of Christian apologetics and ethics, including The God Who is There (1968); Escape from Reason (1968); No Final Conflict (1975); How Should We Then Live? (1976); and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979--with C. Everett Koop). How Should We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? each served as the basis for a documentary film series. Mr. Schaeffer was dying of cancer as he wrote his last book; The Great Evangelical Disaster was published a couple of months before his death. In this book, he warned that evangelicalism was in danger of abandoning belief in the infallibility and authority of the Bible, and argued that the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, was in the same condition in 1984 that the mainline churches were in during the 1920s and '30s. In 1976 Mr. Schaeffer delivered an address on this theme, titled The Watershed of the Evangelical World, to the National Association of Evangelicals in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, Francis Schaeffer's last warning has largely gone unheeded.