Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 24:2 (Summer 2020)
Article: The Spiritual Integrity Of Francis Schaeffer
Author: Dick Keyes

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The Spiritual Integrity Of Francis Schaeffer

Dick Keyes

Dick Keyes is the director-emeritus of L’Abri Fellowship in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he has been working with his wife, Mardi since 1979. They now continue in the work of L’Abri but on more of a part-time basis. They have three married sons and nine grandchildren. He holds a BA in History from Harvard University, and an MDiv from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has worked for L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland and in England, where he served also as a pastor in the International Presbyterian Church in London. He has been an adjunct professor at Gordon Conwell Seminary, Covenant Theological Seminary and Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is the author of Beyond Identity (Servant, 1984), True Heroism (NavPress, 1995), Chameleon Christianity (2014), and Seeing Through Cynicism (IVP, 2006), as well as chapters in several anthologies such as No God But God, ed. Os Guinness (Moody, 1992), Finding God at Harvard, ed. Kelly Monroe (Zondervan, 1996), and The New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics (IVP Academic, 2006).

I have chosen to write about Francis Schaeffer’s spiritual integrity and a few of the many places where that integrity led him in his life’s work. It enables me to include the importance of his wife, Edith, and also to at least suggest something of the breadth of his contributions to church and world. First, by his “spiritual integrity” I certainly do not mean some sort of spiritual perfection. I mean his sense that God is really “there,” true and present with us here and now in every area of our lives, making a difference. Christian faith must be personally “real,” not only a mental acceptance of certain doctrines about God, salvation and his world. Many of us who knew him remarked that what he believed with firm confidence and followed with extraordinary commitment, he also experienced emotionally in great depth. He felt God’s

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truth—whether it was the wonder of God’s glory and grace for himself and others, the suffering of individual people or compassion for the lostness of the non-Christian world.

It was spiritual integrity which led him to creative listening, thinking and praying into many areas of brokenness in the mid and late twentieth century. He was intensely aware of failures in the church which had become destructive to Christian individuals and also to the attractiveness and persuasiveness of Christ to the world which so needed him.

I will try in this brief space to describe something of the scope of Francis Schaeffer’s thinking and its continuity int...