At the risk of oversimplification, Francis Schaeffer’s vision can be expressed in two fundamental concerns:
* True truth * True spirituality
Born in the German town section of Philadelphia in 1912, as a young man he came in contact with the Christian faith in an almost unique way. During his late teens he happened to be reading classical philosophy. This showed him (a) that he had found the field of interest in which he felt most at home, ideas; and (b) that philosophy had no answers despite the fact that it dealt with what he called later ‘the basic philosophic questions’. Plenty of questions, but no answers!
Then he found the Bible, or rather the Bible found him! He read alternately from the classical philosophers and from the Old Testament with the latter steadily displacing the former as he went along. ‘Before I left Genesis 3’, he once told me, ‘I knew that this book had the answers to what the philosophers were asking’. Simply through his reading of Scripture he was born again. No one on the outside was helping. ‘Before I reached the New Testament I was virtually a believer in Christ’, he said. Not surprisingly his life began to move in an entirely different direction.
