Did Schaeffer believe that only Christians should occupy all positions of authority in all secular institutions throughout this age? He did not. Schaeffer happily honored, gladly received, and cheerfully benefited from the skills of unbelievers who worked in many different kinds of secular institutions.

Jerram Barrs is professor of Christian Studies and Contemporary Culture at Covenant Theological Seminary. He is also resident scholar of the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute. In 1967 Barrs worked as a cook and gardener for Edith Schaeffer at L’Abri in Switzerland. There, he met and soon married Vicki Buxman, Francis Schaeffer’s secretary, who worked on Schaeffer’s personal correspondence and typed the manuscripts for Escape from Reason and The God Who is There. “The Schaeffers,” Barrs says, “both had a significant impact on me.”

Recently, after presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann cited Schaeffer as an influence on her life and thinking, Schaeffer has come under attack, both in The New Yorker and on NPR. Given Barrs’ close relationship with the Schaeffers, byFaith asked him to comment on these criticisms.

Many readers of byFaith have either seen or heard of the article by writer Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker on Michele Bachmann that was critical of Francis Schaeffer. Some also have heard about the interview with Lizza on NPR. Others have seen the two thoughtful responses by Ross Douthat to Lizza’s attack on Schaeffer, both of which were printed in The New York Times. [See links to these and several related articles below.]

Following are the explicit criticisms and charges that Lizza made against Francis Schaeffer. The article presents a kind of “guilt by association,” so that the reader’s impression is that all the views Lizza puts forward as influences on Michele Bachmann’s thinking come from a group of people who share common convictions about a whole series of subjects: Christian belief in the Bible; Christian faith; Christians who write about government, law, and education; Christians convinced that Christ should be Lord in all of life; Christians seeking to impact society; Christians rejecting evolution … . The effect of Lizza’s approach is that a reader who knows little or nothing about Schaeffer may come away from the interview on NPR or the article in The New Yorker deeply distressed about the kind of man Schaeffer was and the sort of views that he held and taught.

Charges Against Schaeffer

1. Lizza presents Schaeffer as a “Dominionist;” indeed, Lizza argues that Schaeffer was “a major contributor to the school of thought now known as Dominionism, which relies on Genesis 1:26, where man is urged to ‘have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’” By Dominionism, a name which will be unfamiliar to most readers of byFaith, Lizza is referring to Theonomy or Reconstructionism, a view held by Rousas John Rushdoony, a theologian often credited with being “the father of Christian Reconstructionism.” Apparently the term Dominionist was created by a sociologist named Sylvia Diamond and it appeared in her book, Spiritual Warfare, published in 1989.

2. Lizza declares that as a fundamental part of his Dominionist convictions Schaeffer believed that “Christians, and Christians alone, are biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.” (This quote is taken from Sylvia Diamond.)

3. Lizza charges Schaeffer with encouraging Christians to engage in civil disobedience, up to the level of violent overthrow of the United States government, if ordinary political and legal means do not enable us to overturn Roe v. Wade and so end the killing of unborn babies…

To answer these and several other implicit charges against Schaeffer, I will simply offer a personal account of what I heard Schaeffer say about these various subjects on numerous occasions.

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[Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]