By Francis A. Schaeffer
From Eternity Magazine, Vol. 24, March 1973, pp. 64f
In the past five years, twelve books have come out of the ministry of L'Abri. To explain why I write my books, I have to go back to my late teens.
For some time I had been attending a very liberal church. Sunday after Sunday I listened to the minister, and the more I listened, the more I realized that he was giving answers to nothing. Finally, I could go on with this no longer, and I became an agnostic.
In my search for answers I read and studied all the philosophy I could find, until I was back into the time of the Greeks. While reading Ovid one night, I thought, "Well, now I'm reading all this material, maybe I should read the Bible too, just as a matter of curiosity." So I began to read. Each night I read a little from Ovid and a little from the Bible. I just want to say that I never finished reading that particular book of Ovid, but I have read the Bible I don't know how many times since.
And I found truth in that Book. In my reading of philosophy I saw that there were innumerable problems that nobody was giving answers for. But in the Bible I began to find answers, not individual answers that shot down the problems one at a time, but a series of answers that bound all the problems together. The Bible, it struck me, dealt with man's problems in a sweeping, all-encompassing thrust.
In about six months I was flattened. At the beginning of that period, I was not a Christian. I don't know exactly when the change came, but I know that at the end of those six months, I was a Christian.
What this experience did was give me a terrific confidence in the Bible. Since then I have studied for 40 years. Today I know a lot more about the problems of the world, but every year I am more convinced that the Bible, when it is read properly, gives all the answers to all the intellectual questions to all of life.
The way to read my books, then, is to realize that I came through a real struggle in those early days, and I've tried to be honest in my study ever since. I try to approach every problem as though I were not a Christian and see what the answer would be.
Later on in my ministry I faced another crisis that equally influenced the writing of my books. It came after I had already been a pastor for ten years in the U.S. and a missionary to Europe for five years. Throughout this period one thing was dinned into my thinking: "Why," I asked, "is there so little reality among orthodox evangelical Christians? Why is there so little beauty in the way Christians deal with one another?"
This led to doubts about the reality of spiritual things in my own life. I realized that although I had been studying for years and although I had been active in Christian ministry and although I was becoming more and more known in certain Christian circles, the reality of my own spiritual life was diminished. Somehow I had lost what I had when I first became a Christian.
For about two months I walked out in the Swiss mountains. When it rained, I walked in the old hayloft above our chalet. And as I prayed, I went all the way back to my agnosticism. With as much honesty as I could, I asked myself, "Was I right in becoming a Christian as a young man?" The unreality I had found in the Christian world, the ugliness I saw in Christian relationships, the fact that Christians were not able to talk to twentieth-century people¾all these things made me ask, "Was I right?"
And finally the sun came out. I saw that my earlier decisions to step from agnosticism to Bible-believing Christianity was right, and I also discovered that I had been missing something vital in my biblical understanding. It was this: that the finished work of Christ on the cross, back there in time and space, has a moment-by-moment meaning. Christ meant His promise to be taken literally when He said that He would bear His fruit through us if we allowed Him to do so, not only in our religious life but in all of our life. Christ meant to be Lord of my whole life. This brought my life to a great shattering moment. What began as struggle ended in a song. Without that crisis, I could never have written True Spirituality, for that book is the outcome of that personal struggle.
This, then, was the background when, in 1955, my wife and I began L'Abri in the little town of Huemoz, Switzerland. Edith and I committed ourselves to God with one single aim. It was not an evangelistic work we wished to start, nor a young people's work, nor a work for intellectuals, nor an outreach to drug people. It was simply that we offered ourselves to God and asked Him very profoundly if He would use us to demonstrate that He exists in our generation. That's all L'Abri is, that's the way it began.
Some of my friends at that time scolded me very thoroughly. Why should I limit myself to talking to so few people? Humanly speaking, it was a moment of great sacrifice. In some small way, it was the grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying.
At L'Abri, I listened as well as talked. I learned something about twentieth-century thinking, in many fields, across many disciplines. Gradually, people began to come from the ends of the earth¾not only students but professors. They heard that L'Abri was a place where one could discuss the great twentieth-century questions quite openly.
To the best of my ability I gave the Bible's answers. But all the time I tried to listen and learn the thought forms of these people. I think that my knowledge, whatever it is, is formed from two factors: 1) 40 years of hard study, and 2) trying to listen to the twentieth-century man as he talked.
I still had no thought of writing books. As more and more people came, someone sent us a tape recorder, but I said, "Thank you very much, but I'll never work with a tape recorder."
One day we were having a bang-up conversation with Smith College girls, all of them really bright girls, agnostic or atheistic. All of a sudden I noticed one of our workers fooling with the flowers. And I thought, "I wonder what he's up to." What he was up to was hiding a microphone. Later, the girls, instead of being put off as I thought they might be, all wanted copies of the tape. And that was the unplanned beginning of our tape program. We now have about 1300-1500 hours on tape.
At the same time I was being invited to lecture in wider and wider circles: Cambridge, Oxford, Fribourg, University of London, Manchester. I never wanted to stand in a privileged position where I couldn't be answered, so I always threw the meetings open for discussion.
And as I listened I continued to learn what contemporary thought forms really were, and I learned how to present the Gospel to the twentieth-century man so that it was really simple to him. And gradually a message came forward which I began to use in various places. I called it "Speaking Historic Christianity into the Twentieth-Century World." I gave this lecture at a number of universities, including Harvard and MIT. After I presented it at Wheaton College, they put it out in a pamphlet form. That was the first thing that came out in print.
When I saw this little pamphlet, which was really a rather extensive piece; I knew that I had a topic in my hands, something the Lord could use to give the Gospel to my own generation.
So we took it to a publisher in England. We decided to call it The God Who Is There. It was written in such a way that it could fit two groups. It would fit the non-Christian so that he could hear the Gospel in his own terms. And it could fit also the Christian who wished to speak to the twentieth-century person. At first the publishers said, "But we don't know what reading public it's for." Nevertheless, they went ahead, and I thank God that it has reached into both groups.
All my books from that time on have flowed out from the first book. (The God Who Is There was written even before Escape From Reason, although through a publisher's fluke the latter came out first.) And in a way, all the books I've written or expect to write are one book, and the hub of this "book" is the trilogy which I have now completed after five years, The God Who Is There, Escape From Reason and He Is There and He Is Not Silent. If we are going to have answers for the twentieth-century world, we must not only have a God who exists, but a God who has spoken and a God who has spoken in propositional terms, otherwise we do not know Him¾otherwise all we have is one more upperstory religious experience.
The books all come from two sources: from the thousand-some hours of tapes and from our continuing discussions at L'Abri. We just sit around our fireplace and I kick off my shoes and talk and listen to the people who come there. And so the books have been kept up-to-date; they haven't yet become fixed. One of the most recent books to come out of these discussions is Genesis In Space And Time.
Who are the people these books are touching? Well, the people are coming from all over the world, not only from the West. We have had 13 Malaysians saved in Huemoz. The first one came and then he wrote to his friends and some of them hitchhiked all the way from Malaysia to Switzerland in order to hear the Gospel. Who but God would think of starting a mission for Malaysia in the midst of the Swiss Alps? Most of these were Malaysian Malaysians. (Practically no Malaysian Malaysian has ever been saved in all the history of missions. Chinese Malaysians have, but not Malaysian Malaysians).
We have in general three kinds of people coming to us now. The first are the far-out twentieth-century people that the church rarely ever touches, the dropouts. Some are drug people, we see hundreds of them, and a great many have been straightened out. Some people come with psychological problems, or almost any kind of a problem you can name.
Often they come simply because one person tells another. One day there was a boy sitting in the Garden of Gethsemane, reading a book on Hegel. He had a rucksack on his back, had blown his mind to a certain extent and had dropped out of one of the great universities of America. A girl came up and stood behind him and said (she had been to L'Abri but she'd never become a Christian), "Oh, you're reading Hegel."
"Yes," he said, "I'm reading Hegel."
She said, "Do you understand Hegel?"
He said, "No, I don't understand Hegel."
She told him, "I know a man who understands Hegel. His name's Schaeffer and he's in a place called Huemoz in the Swiss Alps."
He said, "Thank you very much," took his rucksack and turned up. That boy today has gone back to university and done a brilliant job as a great born-again Christian.
We have them come to us like this in many marvelous ways. One tells another. We have so many wanting to come now, we can only take about one for every three that ask to come. We've started branches in Italy, France, England, the United States and Holland in order to help care for some of these.
The second class of person who comes is the Christian kids. They come to us at the rate of a couple hundred a year. In some way or another, they say "You're our last hope. I've gone to the churches, I've asked 'Why,' and nobody's giving me any answers. I've looked at the church and I haven't seen much beauty. But I've heard of L'Abri, and this is the last chance."
And they come. We've seen a lot of them sort it out. Are the books that deal with the intellectual questions worthwhile? Yes, not only for the unbelieving youngster, but for the children from Christian homes as well. They need to know the answers. They need to know that Christianity is really true and not just another upper-story, religious, superspiritual experience.
The third group that come are the professors, ministers, medical men, artists, poets. They come because they hear that we have been able somehow by the grace of God to bridge the gap between Bible-believing, strict, orthodox historic Christianity and the twentieth-century world. They want to know how to communicate in their field. So, there's hardly a time there's not a scientist, medical man, a poet who is there struggling with the problem of communication in the twentieth-century world.
In our ministry my wife and I have consciously tried to balance the intellectual with the spiritual and personal sides. This is seen particularly in L'Abri and True Spirituality; also, the last chapter of Death in the City stresses the reality of the individual and the group relationship to God.
A second emphasis we try to make is that in true Christianity there is not only the reality of a spiritual relationship with God but also the beauty of a proper relationship with men.
In our books we have tried to do five things for our readers: 1) instill the strong content of a clear doctrinal position; 2) give honest answers to honest questions; 3) maintain a thorough intermingling of the spiritual, the intellectual and the cultural aspects; 4) emphasize the reality of an individual relationship with the God who is there; and 5) insist on beauty in our human relationships, so that we treat all men as made in the image of God and our brothers in Christ as truly our brothers.