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.