I grew up in a schizophrenic culture. On the one hand, Los Angeles in the 60’s and 70’s marked ground zero for the dramatic social changes rocking the entire country. Hippies, the sexual revolution, drugs, Hollywood, rock-n-roll, Vietnam, antiwar demonstrations, race riots, assassinations – all of it happened right in front of me, like I had a front row seat in The Theater of the Absurd. The national guard used my middle school as a command center during the Watts Riots. The LAPD towed my car away to make room for an antiwar demonstration. And when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, a family friend was the doctor who treated him in the ER.
On the other hand, my family and the church we attended were extremely conservative. Even though we lived in the shadow of the famous “HOLLYWOOD” sign in Hollywood Hills, I wasn’t allowed to go to the theater. Nor was I allowed to listen to secular music, play with playing cards, or do anything on Sunday other than attend church. And attend church we did – three times a week: Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and once again during the week.
The building that housed our church, Church of the Open Door, was spectacular: a 13 story edifice (at the time, no building in LA could be built higher than 13 stories due to earthquakes) right smack dab in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. It had two forty foot high blazing red neon signs on top, one facing north and one facing south. They shouted “Jesus Saves” to the entire LA Basin. The preacher that preached in that 4,000 seat church was equally amazing. Dr. J. Vernon McGee, known as one of America’s leading Bible teachers with his Thru the Bible radio program, held us spellbound with his weekly sermons.
I don’t know about the rest of LA, but at the age of ten, I discovered personally what those blazing red neon signs on the top of the church meant. Jesus does indeed save, because He saved me. And then Church of the Open Door discipled me. COD, as we affectionately called our church, provided dozens of wonderful male role models for me to emulate while I was growing up. One of them, Leighton Ogg, my senior high Sunday school teacher, introduced me to the works of Dr. Francis Schaeffer, a Christian apologists and philosopher.
It was perfect timing. Coming of age as a young Christian in Los Angeles was like standing on two icebergs that were quickly drifting apart. I was doing intellectual splits between my faith and the secular culture around me and I needed something to make sense of it all. Reading Schaeffer’s signature book, The God Who is There, suddenly brought everything into focus.
Dr. Schaeffer’s main thesis was that only a personal God can provide a sufficient foundation for human society because only a personal God who is infinite and holy and who has created us in His image can explain why we are who we are: moral creatures who have a sense of purpose, can discern beauty, perceive order in the universe, and can make choices. If we do away with this personal God – the God of the Bible – then humanity has only a material basis to explain existence and, therefore, will lapse into moral and social chaos.
Part of the power of Dr. Schaeffer’s argument was that he could trace with specific examples the historic process of western culture turning away from God and, as a result, being increasingly driven to a reductionist view of humanity.
Suddenly, the blur that was Los Angeles in my youth resolved into a crystal clear picture: I was living in, and experiencing the consequences of, a culture that had no adequate foundation because it had rejected the Christian worldview that only the Bible can provide. In reading Francis Schaeffer, the two icebergs I was standing on merged into one.
But Francis Schaeffer influenced me, not just by what he said, but by what he did. L’Abri, his community of Christian intellectuals in Switzerland, fascinated me. Los Angeles, with its commuter culture, was so impersonal. Even our church was impersonal. People drove to COD from all over the LA Basin. The only time members of our congregation saw each other was at church. I could see in the New Testament that believers lived in a much closer context with each other. And yet the concept of community was completely absent from my Christian experience. But with L’Abri, I saw an example of Christians living close enough to each other to be able to see each other spontaneously on a daily basis. They could and did actually practice in their daily lives together the “one anothers” – the numerous commands in the New Testament that govern how believers are to live with each other.
After reading The God Who is There, I went on to read everything else Francis Schaeffer wrote, along with all the other publications that came out of L’Abri. By the time I started UCLA, I was well equipped to defend my faith in the public arena. As a result, my four years in undergraduate school turned out to be some of the most spiritually exhilarating of my life. After seminary, I spent an additional year in a Ph.D. program at University of Texas at Dallas studying the history of ideas, which validated what Schaeffer was saying, only from a secular point of view.
Today, once again, we live in socially tumultuous times in America. And once again we need Christian thinkers like Francis Schaeffer who are thoroughly grounded in the Word of God to stand up and explain in clear terms the relevance Jesus Christ and the Word of God have to our culture.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Learn more about Dr. Francis Schaeffer and his ongoing influence at The Francis Schaeffer Foundation. Learn about the ministry of L’Abri Fellowship at Labri.org. For an example of a contemporary Christian philosopher who has been influenced by Francis Schaeffer, check out my interview with Dr. Doug Groothuis.
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