Newsletter #79

On Rereading C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer

It turns out that the key to getting Meema and Papa and Mimi and Grandaddy to come to Missouri is just to keep having babies.

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Two Unlikely but Familiar Giants

A good friend told me recently that he had been rereading some of the works of C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. He’s one of the most well-read people I know. More recently, he’s been probing the concept of the self and anthropology. So, I wasn’t terribly surprised that his pursuits would lead him back to these formative authors.

My friend is in his early 50s. He has worn many different ministry hats, earned multiple degrees, and served in diverse contexts. I find it interesting that I so regularly hear people of diverse upbringings cite Lewis and Schaeffer as their pivotal intellectual influences.

On its face, the juxtaposition of these twentieth century figures is odd. Lewis (1898-1963) was British atheist turned Christian, Anglican to be exact. By vocation, he was a professor of English literature at Oxford then later Cambridge. He would author thousands of articles, essays, letters, and more, as well as dozens of memorable titles (both fiction and non-fiction).

Schaeffer (1912-1984) was raised and nurtured in Presbyterian fundamentalism. He was first a youth worker and pastor, then later a missionary-apologist in Europe. He authored dozens of books himself. In his later years he became more vocal and involved in speaking about politics and social issues.

Given their disparate backgrounds and the breadth of the Atlantic, there’s no definitive reason why they have become arguably the most important duo of intellectual influences on American evangelicals in the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, if I’ve heard them mentioned in the same breath once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.

The first explicit academic link I recall is perhaps the apologetics book by Burson and Walls. By this time, I was a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS). I entered seminary a little ahead of the curve when it came to reading. I credit this largely to my mother, my high school English professors, and especially the expectations and requirements of professors at Welch College. Reading was essential, desirable, and normal. Additionally, one cannot emphasize the “life of the mind” without some go-to works and authors who have a way of fostering and fueling that.

I don’t recall the exact timing or order of my journey through their works. Certainly, I knew of Lewis’s Narnia books early on. I suppose I had at least read Mere Christianity, or parts of it, by the time I left college. And I definitely had been exposed to parts of Schaeffer’s Trilogy. We even watched the old grainy video series of How Should We Then Live? in college chapel services. Yes, they were corny, but simultaneously profound.

By my first year or two at SEBTS, I hadn’t worked my way through even half of either man’s works. I didn’t know anyone who had. Yet it seemed an implicit obligation: if you want to be a serious Christian, you need to have them on your shelves and in your memory banks.

Fortunately for me, Bruce Little would be my sherpa for most of my three-year seminary education. If anyone knew and appreciated these two giants, it was Little. He was the newly installed (and first) Director of the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture, and he had plans. Among those were to host events that would bring in believers from around the nation and even the world. The first two were conferences on the legacies of C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. My good friend Matthew Bracey couldn’t resist; he had to fly in and attend both with me. They didn’t disappoint us.

We heard from some of the most significant scholars of both Lewis and Schaeffer anywhere, including people who had personally known them. We heard two outstanding plenary addresses from his longtime editor, Walter Hooper. I don’t think I’d ever heard a man more compelling. Likewise, we heard from one of Schaeffer’s sons-in-law. Both conferences were formative in my getting more “up-to-speed” on the breadth of their impact and intellectual legacies.

The greatest coup of this period was SEBTS acquiring the Schaeffer Collection. Such an acquisition must have sent shockwaves through the evangelical parachurch and academic world. Covenant Seminary, among others, were more logical homes for the collection, but in the end SEBTS prevailed. While I didn’t get full exposure to it by the time I left seminary, I was able to dabble in it a bit. I allude to it in a previously authored article about Schaeffer.

Many years have passed, but I still discover new angles to the Lewis-Schaeffer body of work. I reread excerpts that clarify the confusion of our age and illuminate aspects of Christian truth. I find myself challenged to keep reading them, especially those titles or even shorter essays and articles that I’ve never made it to. I even have colleagues who continue to discuss (and write dissertations!) on these men.

Why does the fascination and impact persist?

The Church Needs Guides

I can’t say that either of these giants offer anything like a full-fledged treatment of the church or discipleship, though Schaeffer comes closest. Some of his shorter writings on the church and spirituality are still must-reads today. But even at its best, the church needs teachers. God has given them to the church, but some are providentially situated to teach more than just a single local church. Some extend their wisdom through space by putting pen to paper, thus reaching a larger audience. This audience spans both time and geography. This explains why more than one generation of Christians has been blessed by these two men.

Vacuums Will Be Filled

In an earlier cross-post between the Helwys Society Forum and Churchatopia, Dr. Jesse Owens and I discuss Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Though we both think the book goes too far, we recognize its impact and valid concerns. One of those valid concerns is that the evangelical movement has often lacked intellectual and academic rigor. To use a metaphor of sorts, many have been content to ignore the cobwebs in the church library. This is what happens when emotionalism is mistaken for piety.  

The reality behind this concern is that absent a robust appreciation for truth and beauty, the church will settle for other things. Those who understand this problem realize why Lewis and Schaeffer are so critical. They provide critical voices to fill the vacuum that would otherwise be filled with less reliable ones.

All Truth is God’s Truth

It’s an overused aphorism, but it’s no less meaningful now than when it was coined centuries ago. It's vital to recognize the connection between truth and God. Quite literally, it is life. We can’t navigate life in God’s world without truth. More specifically, it's essential to wisely discern the content of and correlation between general revelation and special revelation.

Authors like Lewis and Schaeffer support this discernment in two main ways. First, they write with theological wisdom and depth about a range of subjects. Second, by pursuing different topics in their work (especially Lewis), they illustrate what it could mean for God’s truth to animate all of life. I’m thinking especially here about creativity. There’s a way to write good poetry or fiction that doesn’t simply repurpose Bible verses, yet still honors God’s creation and name. While not all of Lewis’s work was appreciated in its time, time has vindicated him.

In a different way, some have tried to dismiss Schaeffer as a fighting fundamentalist, a wannabe philosopher, or a political activist. Yet historians and fair-minded observers have continued to return to his legacy, recognizing that there is more than meets the eye.

Worth a Second and Third Look

My friend’s recent pilgrimage back to Lewis and Schaeffer has stirred up a lot of fond memories. It has made me want to retread old ground. It has also reminded me that while neither man is above error or critique, our churches today remain indebted to them. Even where these men haven’t been read, their congregants have been shaped and are being shaped by teachers and leaders who have.

I’m glad that Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters has intrigued several of my church members. We recently added Schaeffer’s True Spirituality to our library, so perhaps it will, too. But I speak for all of us when I say that we’ve likely only scratched the surface of what we can learn from these diverse, generational giants.

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Follow Up:

I promise that I’m not a complete liar. I did end up attending part of the Free Will Baptist National Convention last week. It was brief, but I’m so glad I made it! Lord-willing, I’ll attend the entirety of the 2024 National Convention. My only question is, with wife and two small children in tow, should we fly or drive to Tampa? Input is welcome.

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Currently Reading:

Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.

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Quote of the Week:

One of the really knotty problems with our public debates is that we often are having two or three debates at the same time, and it is easy to get confused about which question is actually in dispute at any given moment. 

Take, for example, the recent debate about racial preferences in college admissions: The question before the Supreme Court was only a legal one—not that you’d know it from the campaign-style rhetoric of Ketanji Brown Jackson or Sonia Sotomayor!—to wit, whether the law permits what Harvard and the University of North Carolina were doing, or whether that amounted to unlawful racial discrimination. The majority of the Supreme Court rightly found that this racial discrimination was unlawful. A second question—an unrelated question from the point of view of a Supreme Court justice who is actually doing his or her job instead of trying to act as an unelected legislator—is whether racial-preference policies such as those that had been implemented at Harvard are good policies. A third question—never quite explicitly discussed—has to do with “legal consequentialism,” the notion (which has official legal standing in some countries, such as Brazil) that legal questions per se should be made subordinate to utilitarian calculation. As the Brazilian statute puts it, “a decision shall not be made based on abstract legal values without considering the practical consequences of the decision.”

The consequentialist point of view is an invitation to conflate the question of what the law actually says with the separate question of what the law ought—according to … somebody—to say. 

Kevin Williamson, “Truth or Consequentialism.”

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On My Mind:

Recently I’ve been reading Rosaria Butterfield’s challenging book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key. Given the accolades it has received, it has clearly struck a nerve. Nevertheless, it’s a book about hospitality. I wonder how often we hear this subject taught and preached in our churches. Perhaps that’s something worth thinking about.