Francis Schaeffer - Writings

Writings

Francis A. Schaeffer wrote twenty-two books, which cover a range of spiritual issues. They can be roughly split into five sections, as in the edition of his Complete Works (ISBN 0-89107-347-7):

• A Christian View of Philosophy and Culture: The first three books in this block are known as Schaeffer's "trilogy," laying down the apologetical, philosophical, epistemological, and theological foundation for all his work.
  • The God Who Is There: Deals with the existence and relevance of God, and how modern man came to first distance himself from, and ultimately disbelieve, God as revealed by the Bible.
  • Escape from Reason: How the rejection of the biblical God causes man to lose contact with reality and reason.
  • He Is There and He Is Not Silent: How God speaks to man through the Bible on the three philosophically fundamental areas of metaphysics, morals, and epistemology.
  • Back to Freedom and Dignity: An answer to B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity, arguing that freedom and dignity of man are God-given and therefore can't be left aside without dire consequences.
• A Christian View of the Bible as Truth
  • Genesis in Space and Time: Argues that the historical (as opposed to literalist or figurative) view of Genesis as historically true is fundamental to the Christian faith.
  • No Final Conflict
  • Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History
  • Basic Bible Studies: Biblical studies on the fundamentals of the faith.
  • Art and the Bible
• A Christian View of Spirituality
  • No Little People: Argues that Christians should never despair of having a significant life of realizations, small as they seem to be.
  • True Spirituality: The spiritual foundation for Schaeffer's work, as a complement to the theological and philosophical approach of most other books. Useful for gaining a balanced view of the whole of Schaeffer's life and ministry.
  • The New Super-Spirituality: Claims the intellectual decadence of students and the counter-culture from the late sixties to the early seventies can be traced back to the conformism of their fathers, only with fewer moral absolutes, and predicts the contamination of the church. Offers an analysis of Postmodernism.
  • Two Contents, Two Realities: First presented as a position paper at the First International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974.
• A Christian View of the Church
  • The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century
  • The Church Before the Watching World
  • The Mark of the Christian: Analyzes the balance between the holiness of God and the love of God in the spiritual life of the Bible-believing Christian. (Online E-text
  • Death in the City
  • The Great Evangelical Disaster
• A Christian View of the West
  • Pollution and the Death of Man. A Christian response to issues concerning ecology.
  • How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. This is also a film/video series produced and directed by his son Frank Schaeffer.
  • Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (with former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop). A Christian response to abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide. This is also a film/video series produced and directed by his son Frank Schaeffer.
  • A Christian Manifesto: Christian principles for secular politics.

In addition to his books, one of the last public lectures Schaeffer delivered was at the Law Faculty, University of Strasbourg. It was published as "Christian Faith and Human Rights", The Simon Greenleaf Law Review, 2 (1982–83) pp. 3–12. Most of his writings during his Bible Presbyterian days have not been collected, nor reprinted in decades.

In addition to the five volume Complete Works listed above there were also two books by Dr. Schaeffer published after his death:

• Dennis, Lane T. (ed) Letters of Francis A. Schaeffer, Crossway Books, Westchester, 1985.
• Schaeffer, Francis A. The Finished Work of Christ: The Truth of Romans 1–8, Crossway Books, Wheaton, 1998.