Books in Brief: The Great Evangelical Disaster

The Great Evangelical Disaster, by Francis Schaeffer (Crossway, 192 pp., $7.95)

Francis A. Schaeffer, who died in May of this year in Rochester, Minnesota, would have liked to be a fundamentalist if he just didn’t have to be called one. Newsweek labeled him “the guru of the evangelicals,” but, in his last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, he roasts them to a loving turn. The reason for his jeremiad is his belief that the evangelical leadership has fallen into a low and equivocal state as regards “making a difference” in today’s world. Schaeffer charges the evangelicals with “failing to take a stand”; says they have a weak and compliant Christianity unworthy of the name. There should be a “balanced and loving confrontation,” in the pattern of Christ, he says; and nowhere should the battle be more sharply joined than on the issue of abortion. On the other side, he writes, the fundamentalists have been so rigid and unloving that they, too, have given the non-Christian world a distorted picture of Biblical Christianity. He decries the fundamentalists’ slim record of demonstrated social concern and reiterates a theme central to his life of writing and speaking—that Biblical, personal Christianity should transcend the compartments of life and permeate all aspects of living. The fields of art, music, business, and politics, he says, have been needlessly abandoned by Christians; thus worldlings dominate, and Christians cower. One has the clear impression, however, that if he had been obliged to choose between the fundamentalists or the evangelicals, he would have preferred the action, protest, and imprecatory prayers of the Joneses, Paisleys, and Falwells to the accommodation of the Peales and Grahams. Schaeffer puts a fine point on his argument in the concluding paragraphs of this book that, as it turns out, are also the concluding paragraphs of his life’s work: “If the Christians in this country, and the evangelical leaders in particular, had been in Poland over the last few years instead of in the United States, would they have been on the side of confrontation or on the side of accommodation? . . . Accommodation leads to accommodation— which leads to accommodation. . .”

JB

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Jack E. Buttram

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The Great Evangelical Disaster, by Francis Schaeffer (Crossway, 192 pp., $7.95)

Francis A. Schaeffer, who died in May of this year in Rochester, Minnesota, would have liked to be a fundamentalist if he just didn’t have to be called one. Newsweek labeled him “the guru of the evangelicals,” but, in his last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, he roasts them to a loving turn. The reason for his jeremiad is his belief that the evangelical leadership has fallen into a low and equivocal state as regards “making a difference” in today’s world. Schaeffer charges the evangelicals with “failing to take a stand”; says they have a weak and compliant Christianity unworthy of the name. There should be a “balanced and loving confrontation,” in the pattern of Christ, he says; and nowhere should the battle be more sharply joined than on the issue of abortion. On the other side, he writes, the fundamentalists have been so rigid and unloving that they, too, have given the non-Christian world a distorted picture of Biblical Christianity. He decries the fundamentalists’ slim record of demonstrated social concern and reiterates a theme central to his life of writing and speaking—that Biblical, personal Christianity should transcend the compartments of life and permeate all aspects of living. The fields of art, music, business, and politics, he says, have been needlessly abandoned by Christians; thus worldlings dominate, and Christians cower. One has the clear impression, however, that if he had been obliged to choose between the fundamentalists or the evangelicals, he would have preferred the action, protest, and imprecatory prayers of the Joneses, Paisleys, and Falwells to the accommodation of the Peales and Grahams. Schaeffer puts a fine point on his argument in the concluding paragraphs of this book that, as it turns out, are also the concluding paragraphs of his life’s work: “If the Christians in this country, and the evangelical leaders in particular, had been in Poland over the last few years instead of in the United States, would they have been on the side of confrontation or on the side of accommodation? . . . Accommodation leads to accommodation— which leads to accommodation. . .”