Isaac Newton said: ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.
Our fascination with novelty can lead many of us to end up reinventing the wheel. An awareness of those saints who have gone before us can help us see further and grow taller in our spiritual walk. One such giant was born just over a 101 years ago, in 1912, and became a pioneer missionary to Europe. Francis Schaeffer studied theology at Westminster Theological Seminary under Cornelius Van Til. He arrived in Switzerland in 1948 to church plant in post-war Europe.
Crisis of faith
It was in Switzerland that Schaeffer experienced a crisis of faith and developed his own approach to apologetics, learning the best from other masters, but integrating them with a genuine evangelist’s heart. He believed that the evangelical church was out of touch with contemporary culture. He had the foresight to recognise that cultural changes in central Europe, by then long established, were sweeping the entire West. Schaeffer identified a shift that happened in Europe when people gave up on a coherent worldview of rational thought and abandoned values to being nothing more than matters of taste. Passing beyond a line of despair, people were led by their cultural elites into an era of anti-rational thought with no basis for values or meaning.
