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Francis A. Schaeffer: The Later Years

Instructor: Professor Jerram Barrs

Audio Transcription for Lesson 5: The Ministry God Gave to the Schaeffers

Our Father, we want to thank You for all You give us each day, for the beauty of today, for the signs of the seasons all around us, and for Your glory displayed in all You made. We thank You for Your care for us each day and for all You give us. We pray, Father, that You will teach us in this lesson, as we think about Your hand in Schaeffer's history, that it may encourage us to think about Your hand in our own lives and what You are able to do in our lives. We pray, Father, that we may run the race You have set before us with faithfulness. We thank You for the perseverance that You gave to Schaeffer and all the ways You blessed his life and ministry. We pray, Father, that You will be with us, in Jesus' name. Amen.

In this lesson we will consider what ministry the Lord gave the Schaeffers. I will summarize some things about the ministry God gave them. Before I do that, let me add one comment about a question we previously considered concerning Schaeffer's study habits. I spoke to my wife about when he studied. She was his secretary for a year and got to know very well how he conducted his time. She said that he simply studied all the time. He took advantage of every moment that he had. He was an extraordinarily self-disciplined person.

Let me give an illustration from his Bible-reading habits. He read four chapters of the Bible every day. He read three from the Old Testament. He would start at Genesis and then maybe also read in Kings and Isaiah. So he was always reading from each third of the Old Testament. He would start reading through like that. If you do that, you will get through the Old Testament in less than a year. He also read a chapter from the New Testament each day. If you do that, you get through the New Testament in something like seven or eight months. He did that for many years. It was not because he felt legalistic, as though it was something he had to do. It was simply because he wanted to grow in his own understanding of Scripture. So he read four passages of the Bible every day of his life for many years. You can imagine the number of times that he read through the whole of Scripture. You can imagine how well he knew it and how well he knew how the parts related to each other. It was one of the reasons why he read in several different places at once. It helped him to see the interwovenness of God's hand throughout the history of His people and how different parts of Scripture related to each other. Just as he was disciplined like that in his personal Bible study habits, he was also disciplined in his other study habits as well. He took advantage of every spare minute there was to read or think about something.

The question for this lesson is what ministry did God give to the Schaeffers? I cannot really answer that question, of course, only God can. One of the exciting things to look forward to is to see what history really meant when we stand before God, and He shows us what has been built by each person on the foundation of Christ. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3 that each person's work will be shown, whether we have built with gold, silver, and precious stones, or with wood, hay, and stubble, which will be exposed by the searching fire of God's examination of what we have done. It will be wonderful to see what God did through the ministry of the Schaeffers. We will see what gold, silver, and precious stones were actually built on the foundation of Christ. We have all read history books, and every day we read the newspaper, listen to the radio, and watch television. We hear about the things that people think are important. The news on the television and in the papers is supposed to be history-making events, yet we know that God's perspective of history is quite different.

The example I like to use of how different things look from God's perspective than from the perspective of our society is the example of John F. Kennedy. He was a popular president in the United States. He was regarded as an extremely significant person in history. C. S. Lewis died on the same day that Kennedy was shot. When the true history is written, we will see how significant C. S. Lewis' life was. It will have enormous significance in comparison to John F. Kennedy's significance in history. Heaven is going to have many people there because of the ministry of C. S. Lewis. God will show us the true meaning of history when we stand before Him and see the things that people have done and the significance of the choices they have made and the way they spent their time.

So I cannot really give you an accurate picture of the ministry that God gave the Schaeffers. I will attempt to do it, however, in terms of what one can see at the moment regarding what God accomplished through the Schaeffers' life together. I will divide it under several headings.

First I will speak about L'Abri. In a way, the work of L'Abri was their major ministry. It was the ministry that they gave most of their life to. There are many thousands of people who passed through the branches of L'Abri over the years, including the Swiss branch when the Schaeffers were working there. There are many thousands of people whose lives were touched, who became believers, or who grew dramatically in their understanding. Those people went back to their homes to either carry on their lives or to pick up new paths of their lives as pastors, missionaries, schoolteachers, lecturers, doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, as men and women in the armed forces, as housewives, as homemakers, as farmers, as police men and women, and as all kinds of people. Many of them went out to help other people in a completely new kind of way.

I will speak about four ways to think about this that the Schaeffers themselves used to describe their work. Schaeffer constantly spoke about the "narrower and wider" L'Abris. The narrower work of God was the work that He was doing in Switzerland and the other branches. It included the people who were going there and being helped by the personal contacts, by the discussions around the table, by the lectures, by the sermons, by the Bible studies, and by the whole life there. That is the narrower L'Abri, the people who came through. By the wider L'Abri Schaeffer meant all the other people whose lives were touched by those who went to L'Abri. It included the people who went back to their own homes and then started teaching others what they had learned. They started putting in to practice before others what they had learned about Christian obedience, discipleship, sacrifice, and hospitality.

A second expression that Schaeffer used was when he talked about "people bundled up with us in a special bundle of life." That was one of his favorite expressions. By that he meant the people who, because of their time spent at L'Abri, began to share the same approach to what being a Christian meant to the truth of the Christian message and to what the Lordship of Christ means to the Christian life. It meant living in the supernatural now, living before the face of God. It was all the things that people had learned and found precious while they were there. Schaeffer used to speak of those people as those who were "wrapped up with us in a special bundle of life."

The third way Schaeffer would describe it was to speak about the ripples in the pool of history. This was one of his favorite images to use when speaking about the eternal significance of our lives. Just as you cast a stone into a pool of water and then it starts making ripples that go out ever wider, he was saying that in our lives as believers, when we touch somebody, we also make ripples. He was thinking about when he and Edith touched somebody's life. When a person became a believer through them or had their understanding of the Christian life transformed by God using their ministry in their lives, it was like a ripple in a pool. Yet it did not stop with that individual. It went on through history, affecting one person after another.

The fourth image that they used was one that Edith used and Francis picked up from her. It was the image of the tapestry. That was the title of the autobiography that Edith wrote about their life together -- The Tapestry: The Life and Times of Francis and Edith Schaeffer. Edith often used that image and so did Francis. They were speaking about the way God weaves our lives into the lives of other people. Then we stand back and look at what wonderful things God does as He brings us to affect other people's lives and impact them. That process can go on forever.

Those were four ways that Francis and Edith described their work. In thinking about their personal contacts with people and those affected through them, it will be amazing when we stand before the Lord to see how many people were affected and what God accomplished through their lives. In my position teaching at Covenant Seminary and after spending so many years working at L'Abri, I constantly have people writing me letters or telephoning me whose opening statement is that they became Christians through Francis and Edith Schaeffer in L'Abri or that they were profoundly helped by their stay with the Schaeffers at L'Abri. Almost every week I meet with somebody or hear from somebody like that. Then I hear about what God is doing in their lives now. That is what Schaeffer meant by ripples in a pool or the tapestry that God is weaving. There are people whose lives are touched, and then those ripples go on into the lives of other people. Often we have no idea, only God knows, what those ripples are. The Schaeffers themselves did not know, although I am sure Francis knows now. He is one among that cloud of witnesses looking on at what God is accomplishing in the world. We can only get a small idea now of what God has accomplished through their lives.

Let me give one illustration. Vishal Mangalwadi is from India. He went to L'Abri because he had heard that Schaeffer was there, was answering people's questions, and was prepared to really think about other religions and philosophies. Vishal had a Christian upbringing, but he had absolutely no help in dealing with the challenge of Hinduism from Christians in India. He heard that maybe Schaeffer could help him. He went to Switzerland with many questions and problems that were being raised by Hinduism. He found Schaeffer's answers enormously helpful, even though Schaeffer had no first-hand experience with Hinduism. He had not lived in India, but his approach was to look at Christianity as the truth. He also looked at the way other religions and philosophies presented their worldview, how they failed to answer the most basic questions, and their internal inconsistencies. Vishal found Schaeffer's work enormously helpful, including the personal discussions they had together and the various lectures Schaeffer had given on that and related subjects. Now Vishal is back in India, and God has given him a wonderful ministry as an evangelist in rural villages, speaking to people whom nobody has ever had the chance to speak to about the Gospel. There are many other wonderful aspects of his ministry as well.

He is only one illustration of a person whose life was profoundly touched by the Schaeffers who has then gone on to touch the lives of many other people as well. One could multiply that story by thousands. I personally know pastors in a dozen different countries who were converted through the ministry of the Schaeffers. Now they are preaching the Gospel to others. That is the first way we can speak about their ministry. It is the ministry they had through the grace of God to other individuals who came through the branches of L'Abri.

The second aspect of their ministry was Schaeffer's lecturing and speaking to people as he went to different countries. Edith gave many examples in The Tapestry. I constantly hear from people or meet people who say they heard Schaeffer give a lecture in some place and it changed the whole way they looked at the Christian life. Other people became Christians through his speaking. I remember a fellow becoming a Christian here at Covenant Seminary when Schaeffer came and gave his lectures "Possible Answers to the Basic Philosophical Questions." That was when I was a student here. One non-Christian came to those lectures. It was a series of five or six lectures that Schaeffer gave for the students. That fellow became a Christian at the end of the week. That kind of thing happened all over the place as God brought people along to hear him. He affected both unbelievers who came to hear him and other people who were helped in their faith.

There is a passage in The Tapestry in which Edith speaks about this aspect of their ministry. After L'Abri began, in about 1954 or 1955, Schaeffer began to do quite a bit of speaking all over Europe, especially Western Europe, and particularly in Britain. He went many times to speak to groups at various universities in England -- at Cambridge and Oxford in London, and in Durham and Manchester, and also in Scotland at Saint Andrew's. In 1965, Schaeffer had not spoken in the United States in many years. Edith described the spiritual struggle she had in relation to the speaking that he was doing outside of L'Abri. She wrote, "A spiritual struggle on my part, so it seems to me, needs to be exposed here. In the very early part of the 1960s I had been going through a time that can only be described as one of self-pity." That is one of the things I like about The Tapestry. There are very few Christian autobiographies in which people write like that. She continued, "I had begun to look away from willingness for anything to a desire for something for myself. This filled far too much of my thoughts and prayer times." I think that is an interesting comment that she made there. We may not even be aware of it, but often our selfishness and sinful desires become a part of our praying as well as the rest of our life. They are not in a separate compartment. We often spiritualize the things that we want and pretend that they are really godly, when in fact it may be something like self-pity, as Edith described. Then she said,

It was an elusive thing that could be rationalized as something I deserved. Now, one night when Fran and I were in Zurich, in somebody's arty apartment, I was sitting in a corner on the floor of a candlelit room sipping a cup of tea, as the room filled up with pilots, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and a few air hostesses and others. [The hostess was an air hostess in Zurich.] The hostess of the evening was a Christian who wanted her non-Christian friends to hear some answers. I watched the faces from my almost-hidden spot in the corner and saw scorn, amusement, superiority, skepticism, and cynicism in their changing expressions as questions were asked rather belligerently and answers were being given. Then I saw those expressions changed to curiosity, interest, surprise, serious consideration, thoughtfulness, and even admiration. The questions became real, and they grew into sincere searching.

That is another important point to notice. Often when you start talking to somebody, either in a group context or in an individual context, people will ask questions that at first are not real. They are belligerent, cynical, superficial, and only have as their purpose to knock you down and make you feel bad. They may have the attitude, "Who do you think you are as a Christian setting yourself up to answer questions?" Yet you ought to take even those questions seriously and start answering them, rather than concluding that they are not things the person needs to hear and that they are just things the person is putting up as a front. You should not answer belligerently yourself, saying, "That is not what you need to hear. This is what you need to hear," which is what Christians often do. If you take even those cynical, belligerent questions seriously, they will soon change to real questions. By taking a person seriously, even when they are not being serious, you will disarm them. Then they may begin to be real and expose the things they think and the real questions and struggles they have.

Edith continued,

The questions became real, and they grew into sincere searching. Before the evening had come to an end, something happened to me. I silently talked to the Lord, 'O Lord,' I said, 'Please forgive me if I have been a piece of dirt in the water pipe. Forgive me if I have hindered the work of Your Spirit in any way. If You want Fran to do a much wider work, if You want what happened here in this room tonight to happen on a much larger scale, if You have people in other parts of the world who should hear what he has said here tonight, then I am will for whatever it takes on my part. Forgive me for my selfish prayers for a different life. I promise I will go on as You give me strength to do whatever my part requires.'

That struggle and that victory came just before Francis went to America to speak after not having crossed the ocean for speaking engagements for five years. It came before his first time in the Boston area and before any of his books were written.

Then she went on to describe some of the speaking engagements that happened in the United States after that point, as he went around the country. He gave a series of lectures at Wheaton College, Westmont College, and many different universities, both secular and Christian, all over the United States.

Edith was describing her struggle. She felt her life was impossible and wondered how it could become even more demanding than it was at the moment. She did not think she could do the new work as well as what they were already trying to do. She described how she had to be prepared to say, "Lord, whatever it is that You want, that is what I am prepared to do." That was the beginning of the much wider ministry of Schaeffer.

She describes something that I remember hearing about at the time. When he came to the United States in 1968, for example, he went to Harvard, and the group of Christian students who were preparing for his lectures produced a lapel button. It was a white button with red letters that said, "Schaeffer is not a beer." People started asking questions in response to that lapel button. It was a creative thing to do, and it enabled them to tell their friends and everyone they met about the lectures Schaeffer was coming to give and who he was. They also had a paper they had prepared to give people when they asked what Schaeffer was, if it was not a beer. They had written a paper about who he was, his work in Switzerland, and about the lectures he was going to give on his positions on Christianity. Many people went to those lectures. Again, I have met people whose lives were transformed at those lectures at Harvard in 1968.

That is the second area of their ministry, the many contexts in which Schaeffer spoke over the years. He spoke to hundreds of thousands of people who never went near one of the branches of L'Abri. Yet they heard him give lectures. As he grew older and became more respected in the evangelical church, he began to be asked to speak in wider contexts that were further removed from his own denominational background. He spoke to conventions of Southern Baptists, Missouri-Synod Lutherans, Pentecostals, and every kind of denomination that you can imagine and probably many that you have never heard about. He was able to reach far beyond his own denominational context because people recognized that God had used his work and teaching to affect so many people from so many different contexts. They gladly dropped their opposition to his Reformed position and his Presbyterianism, and they were happy to have him speak and hear what he had to say in all kinds of situations. Toward the end of his life he was asked to speak many times in Washington D. C. as well, to various groups of congressmen and senators and groups like that. Again, we will not know the effects of all that speaking. Even though we may see glimpses now, we will not know the full effects of those speaking engagements of his until we stand before the Lord and see what God did through them.

The third area of their work was the tape ministry that grew out of L'Abri. Let me tell you how that began. I will again refer to The Tapestry, in which Edith recounted how the tape ministry of L'Abri began. It is an interesting and amusing story that I have heard her tell many times. She tells how they were given their first tape recorder. She said, "During 1958, a man who was flying across Ohio read in the plane one of my family letters, given to him by his cousin. He was on his way to a business meeting. Feeling stirred by that family letter, he thought he should immediately send off a tape recorder to L'Abri, to Chalet les Melezes. He did not have any idea how it would be used, but his business was in tape machines, so he sent a tape recorder. When the tape recorder arrived, Fran remarked, 'Leave it in its box. We have no space to put it, and anyway I will never speak into a microphone. I do not want our discussions recorded ever. People must feel free to ask their real questions in privacy.'" Then Edith described how for six months they used the tape recorder in its box as an extra place to put things on. It was not even taken out, because Schaeffer was really serious when he said he did not want ever to be recorded. He was not prepared to have their discussions recorded to be listened to by others. Then she described how they recorded the first session. She said,

One late evening I was washing dishes and preparing to cook something for the next day's meals when John, who was a L'Abri worker at that time, came hurrying into the kitchen. 'Mrs. Schaeffer,' he said, 'I am going to unpack that tape recorder right now and set it up in the downstairs hall. I will run an extension cord in and hide the microphone in the plants. Could you serve the tea to everybody and make a lot of noise so that he will not notice? There are some girls down there from Brandeis University and from Smith College, and they are asking really good questions, and he is giving wonderful answers, and I really think we ought to record what he is saying because other people need to hear this as well.' I did not think he would approve, in fact I knew he would not, but it sounded like a good idea anyway. I did my part. I fixed popcorn and a tray of cookies and made a pot of tea. Then I went in, and I made as much noise as I could setting it out. I kept thinking, 'What does he think,' because I am not usually awkward. But I made a great deal of noise to attract attention to what I was doing and distract attention from what John was doing. So the microphone was hidden among the plants and that discussion was recorded.

Then she described what happened the next day. "When the girls discovered, they said, 'Can I buy a copy of it? I want to send that back to my friends. I want to take it back home and play it for other people.' That is how it began."

So for a couple of years, from 1958 until late 1960, there were only a few discussions recorded like that. When Dr. Schaeffer saw how helpful they were to people, he was happy with the idea. Until then, however, there were only a few tapes. Edith said, "It was not until November of 1960, after Farel House had started, that the Farel House luncheon started." At the beginning there were only three students studying individually at Farel House. These were the first things that were recorded regularly. She said, "He [Schaeffer] would gather together clippings from current newspapers and magazines. At lunch, while I served and guessed whether someone wanted tea or coffee, he would read various bits concerning the ideas coming forth in films, music, science, art, law, and government, and then talk. He called this 'the twentieth-century climate.' This series of discussions over the lunch table and his comments on these articles from papers and magazines grew into thirteen lectures called "The Development of Modern Thought," or as it came to be known, "The Basic Farel House Lectures." That was the first series of lectures that were recorded."

The second lot that was recorded was a group of studies on the book of Romans. It became a second set of basic tapes, which almost everybody who came through L'Abri, and certainly everybody in the early days, would listen to. I know people who became Christians listening to that series on Romans. Then there were many other basic tapes that were produced.

What happened with those tapes? At first they were not professionally recorded at all. They had no idea at first that they were going to be widely listened to. Even though there have been serious attempts to clean those tapes, if you listen to some of the early tapes like the Romans tapes, you will hear teacups and other things in the background along with his voice. Nobody had any idea that anybody would be listening to them 30 or 40 years later and using them all over the world.

Soon after they began to record things, however, those tapes began to be used in many places. Let me read some of what Edith wrote: "We were astonished as we heard of tape-listening groups beginning in so many places. The astonishment came, not because we heard officially but in unexpectedly casual ways. Once when Fran was in Kennedy Airport in New York, a girl walked over to him and said, "Are you Dr. Schaeffer?" "Yes I am," he said. "Oh, I was sure I recognized your voice. I have never even seen you or had a picture of you, but I have listened to hours and hours of your tapes. Thank you for helping me so much in all you have taught me." Then Edith said, "We began to hear of tape-listening groups in Japan, India, South Africa, Rhodesia, Ghana, Hawaii, Alaska, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and England among other places -- in so many places it made us feel dizzy. People were listening to these answers all around the world. People were becoming Christians as they listened to those tapes. People were having their lives transformed by them."

The tapes eventually began to be distributed on a much wider basis, on a more professional basis. In the United States they are now distributed by an organization called Sound Word in Michigan City, Indiana, which has a contract with L'Abri to sell tapes. The head office for all the tapes is now at the L'Abri branch in Greatham, England, which has the masters of all of Schaeffer's tapes and all other L'Abri tapes, too. They send them to the different outlets that sell or lend them out all over the world. That has become a huge enterprise. It has never been something that L'Abri has made any money from. They have always charged little for the tapes. There have been no royalties for the speakers who have given the lectures. They were happy to have those tapes listened to in as many places as possible.

How did God use the tapes? He used them in all kinds of ways. Let me give you two illustrations. My own conversion was through listening to some of Schaeffer's tapes. A Canadian fellow who was studying at the university where I was in Manchester, England used to have a tape-listening session on Saturday nights at his apartment. That is basically how I became a Christian. It was largely through hearing what Schaeffer said in some of those lectures.

I came across another example a few weeks ago. I went to preach at a church in rural Missouri. This was a group of people I had never met before and who knew nothing about. They had been quite pleasant on the telephone when they invited me to speak. When I got there I discovered a whole church of people of whom many had become Christians through listening to L'Abri tapes. They had decided to have a group meeting together in order to listen to tapes, and it had eventually grown into a church. Now there is a little church there in Lake of the Ozarks of these people whom nobody at L'Abri has ever heard of before. They formed their church on the basis of some of the tapes they had listened to, including a series of tapes on New Testament principles of the church. They are now meeting each week and reaching out with the Gospel to all kinds of other people.

It is extraordinary to see what God has done in ways like that. It is something that the Schaeffers will not see the full results of until they stand before the Lord and see what He has done. I do not think it will be finished until the end of the age, because things go on after people have died. People are listening to Schaeffer's tapes even though he died many years ago. They are still being touched by them.

So the tape ministry was the third aspect of the Schaeffers' ministry. The fourth aspect was radio. This started in 1967. Trans-World Radio, which broadcasts all over Eastern and Western Europe, came to Schaeffer and asked if he would be prepared to give a series of half-hour programs on the radio. They tried various different things, and eventually they did it from John Sandry's office, which was actually a tiny hayloft called a mazot. Francis and his son-in-law, John Sandry, would go there every week and produce a half-hour broadcast. Schaeffer would start off giving a little talk, and then John would ask him some questions. The programs were done live and broadcast out all over Western and Eastern Europe. The series was called "Euro Club." There were 78 broadcasts, enough for a year and a half.

Edith recounted this in The Tapestry. "At first, Trans-World Radio used them to broadcast behind the Iron Curtain on shortwave and medium bands, and this also covered Western Europe, too. To reach this audience was the original purpose of these informal chats discussing the relevance of Christianity today." That was the purpose of the broadcasts, to discuss the relevance of Christianity today. They were so popular, and the radio station got so many letters back from people saying they had never heard anything like this before and that they were so helpful to them that when they finished the first time they rebroadcast them again for another year and a half. So they went on broadcasting this "Euro Club" for three years. The series was then taken by a station in Cypress and broadcast into the near-East and Africa. I remember an Israeli girl who came to L'Abri once who had been listening to them in Jerusalem. Later on, far-Eastern stations broadcast them into China. They were broadcast by the Voice of the Andes across South America from Ecuador. They were also put on radio in the United States. So they went into many places and touched many people's lives.

The fifth area of God's using their ministry was the books. The first of those was the Basic Bible Studies, which was originally published by L'Abri itself. They were published by L'Abri because L'Abri had no idea that anybody would use them widely. Then The God Who Is There was published in 1968. Then Escape from Reason and L'Abri were the next books to be widely published, and then there were many books after that. We will consider those books in this course. They have sold many millions of copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Let me give you two illustrations of how those books are used today. Joanne Kemp, for example, the wife of an American politician, has a group that has met in her home for many years -- the wives of senators and congressmen and others in Washington D. C. They meet to study Schaeffer's books. It is a Schaeffer or L'Abri study group that meets there. Another example I came across last year is a group of Chinese people that meets in Beijing, studying Schaeffer's books every week. There are many groups like that, which I know of, in many different places. People meet to study his books; people become Christians in that context, and others grow as Christians in that context.

The sixth area of Schaeffer's ministry was the films that were made. These began with How Should We Then Live? in the 1970s. That was followed by Whatever Happened to the Human Race. There were other films as well of hearing him answer questions and speak about different issues. Those films are widely used in many churches. I met a man in Oregon who played the films at lunchtime to all the men in the factory where he worked. They came in and watched How Shall We Then Live? and had discussions on the basis of the films.

Many people have used them creatively in different contexts. I used to go every week to a private boarding high school in England, and the whole school of boys was watching these films. Then I would answer questions. This was done through a Christian teacher in the school who managed to convince his colleagues that the children should be subjected to these films. So they have been used in many contexts.

Finally, the seventh area of Schaeffer's ministry, which I do not want to speak about in detail at the moment, is what you could call political and social influence. This was particularly through Whatever Happened to the Human Race and The Christian Manifesto as well as some of the lectures Schaeffer gave on the issue of abortion and many other issues as well. He began to have a considerable influence on the stand that Christians took in regard to their responsibility in society and whether they should have any effect on the political situation. We must leave it to God to see what the effects of Schaeffer's work in that area are.

Those are seven areas in which we can think about the ministry that God gave to the Schaeffers. They are seven ways in which He used their ministry to reach many millions of people all over the world. He is carrying on using them to touch many people's lives. Using Edith's image, it will be an exciting thing to stand before the Lord one day and look at the whole tapestry that God has woven in history through these two faithful servants.

I have been asked if Schaeffer ever wrote commentaries on the Bible. The nearest things to commentaries that Schaeffer wrote are his books of sermons and studies that he gave on Genesis and Joshua. Those are not actually commentaries, but I heard both of those series when they were originally given, and the series on Joshua especially was tremendously powerful. There are many more series of his on tape on various portions of Scripture. Another work that would come close to a commentary is Death in the City, which arose from a series on the book of Jeremiah. There is also a series on the book of Revelation, which includes 30 lectures, and there is a long series on the book of Daniel as well.

In terms of theology, there is a series of 60 lectures that he gave on the Westminster Confession. He went through it bit by bit. He would not have claimed to be a theologian in the formal sense. Yet there is an enormous amount of theology written by his pen and spoken by his mouth. I remember listening to that whole series on the Westminster Confession as a young Christian. I still have my notes on it today. It was very helpful, because one of his great gifts was taking theology, or taking Scripture, and rooting it down to earth.

This is an illustration I have used before. Often when I hear people's sermons and I read books, they are like a series of balloons that have no connection with earth, with reality, with the place people live at. They are like balloons floating across the sky. The preacher, speaker, or writer does not make any attempt to tie them in to the here and now. That is not biblical theology. Biblical theology is rooted into people's lives so they know what it means. What was so helpful about Schaeffer's teaching, both in written and in spoken form, was that you hear his sermons on the book of Joshua, for example, and they would come alive. It was completely applicable to where you are today. So much Christian teaching and preaching dies the death of a million abstractions. His teaching was always rooted to the earth. It was right in the modern world, where people were living, and into their personal lives where they struggle day by day.

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