What L'Abri Means
January 1, 2003
To baby boomer evangelicals of an intellectual bent, nothing is more stunning than the waning popularity of Francis Schaeffer. Most Christians entering the professions, the arts, and academia these days are ignorant of who exactly Francis Schaeffer was, or what L'Abri is. It is indeed a shame that's the case, usually for both sides. Young evangelical intellectuals don't realize how much they owe Schaeffer, nor how much they have to learn from him and what he did. And a lot of baby boomers, it must be said, never quite had a handle on Schaeffer either. Those baby boomers thought of Schaeffer as the author of high-minded books on apologetics, philosophy, and contemporary culture. They either regarded this as a very good thing or as unspeakably boring. One former Wheaton student I know says that after he heard the first sentence come out of Schaeffer's mouth one morning in chapel, he pulled out his copy of Time magazine and was immediately lost in its pages. Most of Schaeffer's books seemed to stream in an unending flow from InterVarsity Press in the early 1970s. Like so many others, I first encountered Schaeffer through those books. In my case he was lurking on Level D of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins. I don't know what I was supposed to be looking for that day, but I found Schaeffer's Escape from Reason. "Dude, cool cover," said the undergraduate assistant at the checkout desk. "What's it about?" It was, I imagine, precisely the reaction that the art department at InterVarsity Press was trying to achieve. But my excitement about Schaeffer soon diminished. I came across his survey of Western civilization, How Then Shall We Live? just as I began studying medieval history, and I thought it wrong and rather silly ...
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