Schaeffer Book Review
Read the memoir by Francis Schaeffer’s son called Crazy for God. The trick with memoirs is to realize just how skewed they are given the lack of perspective and objectivity. With that huge caveat, it can be said that the evangelical community doesn’t come off too good in the book although I’m not sure God does either. I'd recently learned that my wife's non-denominational is hurting for donations (something like 70% of the members give less than $10 a week), which helps take the veneer off the seeming vitality of non-denominational Christianity. A self-selected group, i.e. one consisting of members who have left main-line denominations and which lacks infant baptism, I always thought they had a very low percentage of lukewarm Christians. Certainly brings out my compassion streak. They are as flawed and wounded as we are and there’s no magic fix.
Frank Schaeffer Sr. came off the best in the book, battling the demons of depression and complaining all the time and yet …perduring. He had that familiar desire of wanting privacy – thirsting for it such that he would constantly play his classical music at extremely loud volumes to block out the noise from the "seekers" who stayed at his house. For a person so private to open up his house and life…well….no wonder he constantly complained and was given to temper.
Stridently anti-Catholic, the elder Schaeffer thought Billy Graham was a base compromiser for once saying something nice about Catholicism. And yet Schaeffer adored Catholic culture; he was happiest in Italy and loved Catholic art. (Art being, according to his son, his true passion.) But then there was the other Passion of Francis Schaeffer – for the last six months of his life he underwent chemo and other treatments for cancer and never once complained. Was it as if he could see the light at the end of the tunnel? It is the humble man who can ask God’s forgiveness year after year, decade after decade, for the same sins and yet the elder Schaeffer did, a model of perserverance.
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