10 Concerns Francis Schaeffer Took to the Grave (pt. 2)

"Penned just before his death in 1984, Francis’ Schaeffer’s forgotten tome ‘The Great Evangelical Disaster’ drew attention to various concerns that lay heavily upon the Protestant thinker’s mind before he passed into glory. Today, rereading this book some three decades later seems to almost verge on the prophetic (small case "p"). The Switzerland-based American teacher was able to pinpoint several major themes that have come to plague the evangelical scene in our days. In this article, we are going to highlight ten major fears that Schaeffer took to the grave which should be of concern to all of us who identify ourselves with the Gospel-centred, Reformation-rooted Protestant faith.

Yesterday we considered the first five fears namely:
1.- Growing Relativism

2.- Lack of Discipline 

3.- Compromise of the Truth

4.- Social Work (Misplaced Priorities)

5.- The Temptation of Ecumenism 

Today we will consider the remaining five concerns that Mr. Schaeffer wrote about shortly before his death.  As you think about the past 35 years, how many of these concerns were valid?  What can we do to address these ten concerns as individual believers and as local churches?  

6. Abortion 

Far from assenting to rife abortion-justifying euphemisms such as the ‘quality of life’ or ‘the happiness and well-being of the mother’ or ‘the need for every child to be wanted’, Schaeffer believed that mass abortion was simply the outworking of a revived hedonistic attitude which put a person’s happiness above a sacred respect for human life.  He was unable to understand how anyone confessing the name of Christ could remain within a pro-abortion denomination. In the final analysis, abortion was an all-out attack on the precious image of God which is made known through humankind. “The unborn child is a human being created in the image of God, and to deny this is to deny the authority of the Bible. It is impossible to read Psalm 139 and truly believe what it says without realizing that life in the womb is human life. It is impossible to truly believe in the Incarnation and not realize that the child conceived in Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit was indeed the Son of God from the time of conception”.

7.- Liberalism 

The fruit of theological liberalism had left many formerly-sound churches completely destitute of any spiritual power. Modernism, influenced by German Higher Criticism, had all but baptized the cardinal doctrines of the Enlightenment in the name of Christ. What did such an approach entail? Schaeffer answers: “The denial of the supernatural; belief in the all-sufficiency of human reason; the rejection of the Fall; denial of the deity of Christ and his resurrection; belief in the perfectibility of man; and the destruction of the Bible”.  Liberal preachers like the acclaimed Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) had no authoritative Bible left to preach from. Secular humanism took centre stage therefore any doctrine that did not put the spotlight upon man was ultimately done away with. Rather than the church influencing the world; the world took the reins of the church into her Gospel-denying grasp. Today this is seen in the emergent church and in the seeker sensitive/church growth movements.

5 Myths About Abortion

Myth #1: Christian pro-lifers impose religious arguments on a pluralistic society and thus violate the separation of church and state.

The “religion” objection is a dodge, not a refutation. As Francis J. Beckwith points out, "Arguments are either true or false, valid or invalid. Calling an argument “religious” is a category mistake like asking, “How tall is the number three?” Pro-lifers argue that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings, abortion does that, therefore, it's wrong. If critics can refute that argument with evidence, go for it. But it won’t do to dismiss it with a label.

Moreover, pro-life Christians aren’t imposing their views any more than abolitionist Christians were imposing theirs or the Reverend King was imposing his. Rather, we’re proposing them in hopes we can persuade our fellow citizens to vote them into law. That’s how a constitutional republic like ours works. We’re not looking to establish a theocracy we impose on non-Christians, only a more just society for the weakest members of the human race.  All human life is precious to God because we uniquely bear his image (Genesis 1-2).

Indeed, it is no more religious to claim a human embryo has value than to claim it doesn’t. Both claims answer the same exact question: What makes humans valuable in the first place? That is an inherently religious question with no neutral ground. Either you believe that each and every human being has an equal right to life or you don’t. The pro-life view is that humans are intrinsically valuable in virtue of the kind of thing they are. The abortion-choice view is that humans have value only because of an acquired property like self-awareness or sentience. Notice that both positions—pro-life and abortion-choice—use philosophical reflection to answer an inherently religious question, What makes humans valuable in the first place? Thus, if the pro-life view is disqualified for asking religious questions, so is the abortion-choice one. At issue is not which view of abortion has religious underpinnings and which does not, but which view of human value does a better job of accounting for human rights and human dignity.

Finally, what do we mean by the separation of church and state? Do we mean it in the modest sense that the state should not establish a denomination or in the strong sense that religious believers have no right to bring their values to the public square and argue for them like everyone else? Why the constant harping about the separation of Christianity and the state but not the separation of secular metaphysics and the state or feminist theory and the state? In short, do believers get to participate in their own government or is that right reserved only for secularists? If only for secularists, where is that found in the Constitution?

What makes humans valuable in the first place? That is an inherently religious question with no neutral ground.

Myth #2: Men have no moral authority to speak on abortion.