Francis Schaeffer’s birthday
January 30, 2009
I first was introduced to Francis Schaeffer’s works when Contemporary Christian Music magazine honored Schaeffer on the cover when he died in 1984. I was in high school and recently converted. It was not until college that I read Schaeffer at the urging of my campus minister Hal Farnsworth (he also was the first to urge me to read John Owen!). I think A Christian Manifesto was my first read. By the end of my junior year I had purchased the 5-volume The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer and was well on my way to reading it all. I can’t resist noting that Crossway omitted Schaeffer’s short work explaining and defending infant baptism from the ‘complete’ set–but hey, they’re selling books, and I guess we can’t have credo-baptists stubbing their toes over Schaeffer’s covenantal theology.
I am deeply indebted to Schaeffer’s work for the framework and earliest assembly of a Christian world-and-life-view in my own life. I still think True Spirituality and No Little People are some of the finest Christian writings of the 20th century. His work exhibits a breadth of knowledge and wisdom, uncompromising commitment to biblical truth, and a practical, loving concern for people. Schaeffer was an early model in the Truth-Authority-Integrity-Love philosophy of ministry.
Today is the anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s birth in 1912. Fred Sanders pays homage and gives an assessment not unlike my own at Scriptorium.
