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Cultural Critique Column

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, volume 49, number 02 (2026).

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One of the most influential Christian thinkers of the Twentieth Century nearly lost his faith, humanly speaking, ten years into his ministry as a pastor and missionary. The fellowship of his small evangelical denomination had disappointed him because of their lack of love and because of their negative focus on exposing false theology instead of enjoying God and serving Him gladly. He wrote that he had lost “the reality” of God in his own ministry. Instead of toughing it out or hanging it up, he decided he had to rethink his whole position as a Christian and go back to his pre-Christian agnosticism to see if he could find a true foundation and a better way of living the Christian life. Thank God, he did. And we are all the better for it; but how he handled his doubts is far different from what we find in most discussions about “deconstructing” faith today.¹

That man was Francis A. Schaeffer (1912–1984), who was a pastor, an evangelist, an apologist, a theologian, a prophet, and an activist.² He and his wife Edith started a kind of retreat and study center in the Swiss Alps called L’Abri (French for “shelter”), where seekers, skeptics, and Christians could come and, as he put it, receive “honest answers to honest questions” through study, discussion, and simply living together.³ Other such centers were set up around the world and continue to this day.

Although I never met Schaeffer, his life and work have shaped my sense of calling more than anyone else. I have read all of his books, most of them several times, and I have listened to many of his lectures. I have read and reviewed books about him, both good and bad. Now, more than forty years after his death, his memory may be fading for some, and I fear a younger generation knows little about him. However, if you read one of my books, talk to me for a long time, or take a course from me, you will hear about Francis Schaeffer. His 1968 The God Who Is There, more than any other book I have read, has had the greatest impact on my ministry as a teacher, preacher, writer, and mentor.⁴ Schaeffer wrote over twenty books, which sold in the millions of copies, and he decisively influenced many Christian leaders and laypeople to know Christ as the Lord of all of life. I could go on, and I have elsewhere,⁵ but the point here is to consider his time of doubt and uncertainty as a guide for those who struggle with their Christian faith today.

A Spiritual Crisis. Schaeffer converted to Christianity in his later teens after thinking through other philosophies of life. His liberal church did not give him the answers he needed, so he began to read the Bible in quest of reality. He found a meaningful, coherent, and true-to-fact worldview in the pages of Scripture. After finishing college, he attended seminary where he was taught by both Cornelius Van Til and J. Gresham Machen, a winning combination for apologetic method, it turns out.⁶ After about ten years of pastoring and foreign missions work, when he was in his late 30s, Schaeffer began to struggle in his Christian life. He puts it this way in True Spirituality.

In 1951 and 1952 I faced a spiritual crisis in my own life. I had become a Christian from agnosticism many years before. After that I had become a pastor for ten years in the United States, and then for several years my wife Edith and I had been working in Europe. During this time I felt a strong burden to stand for the historical Christian position and for the purity of the visible Church. Gradually, however, a problem came to me — the problem of reality. This had two parts: first, it seemed to me that among many of those who held the orthodox position one saw little reality in the things that the Bible so clearly said should be the result of Christianity. Second, it gradually grew on me that my own reality was less than it had been in the early days after I had become a Christian. I realized that in honesty I had to go back and rethink my whole position.⁷

Schaeffer did not choose to be a pastor because it was lucrative, or easy work, or because he couldn’t do anything else. He did not build his ministry on a charismatic or flashy personality. He was a serious man of God. He wanted to stand for the “historical Christian position” and for the “purity of the visible Church” in a time when many had defected to liberalism or neo-orthodoxy.⁸ To do so, he needed the conviction that Christianity was indeed true to fact and worth living for. As he writes in The God Who Is There, “we are talking about objective truth when we say Christianity is true.”⁹ He goes on:

I walked in the mountains when it was clear, and when it was rainy I walked backward and forward in the hayloft of the old chalet in which we lived. I walked, prayed, and thought through what the Scriptures taught, reviewing my own reasons for being a Christian. As I rethought my reasons for being a Christian, I saw again that there were totally sufficient reasons to know that the infinite-personal God does exist and that Christianity is true.¹⁰

Notice that Schaeffer made objective truth and reason his focus. Unlike many today, he was not following a fad or looking for a new identity as one who is deconstructing. There was no cynicism or bitterness in his crisis. Moreover, unlike those who quickly doubt their faith given the latest tweet, post, or meme, Schaeffer took time to think things through in a setting that allowed him to ponder the matters at hand deeply. He was alert to the content of his beliefs and refused to coast or divert himself from the dissonances he was experiencing. To his mind — and this was long before he wrote any books on apologetics — Christianity passed the tests of reason. It does for me as well.¹¹

In this, Schaeffer sets the right example for those questioning some truth claim about Christianity, whether it be the existence of God, the deity of Christ, the atonement, the resurrection, Christian ethics, or anything else. As J. P. Moreland advises, Christians should consider the strength of their beliefs regarding basic doctrines and then begin to study carefully those issues that concern them, keeping a journal of their progress. Simply feeling doubts and letting them linger is the worst behavior. They may then form into unbelief, even though they were not adequately addressed.¹²

So, what was the essential difficulty for Schaeffer?

In going further, I saw something else which made a profound difference in my life. I searched through what the Bible said concerning reality as a Christian. Gradually I saw that the problem was that with all the teaching I had received after I was a Christian, I had heard little about what the Bible says about the meaning of the finished work of Christ for our present lives. Gradually the sun came out and the song came. Interestingly enough, although I had written no poetry for many years, in that time of joy and song I found poetry beginning to flow again — poetry of certainty, an affirmation of life, thanksgiving, and praise. Admittedly, as poetry it is very poor, but it expressed a song in my heart that was wonderful to me.¹³

Notice what Schaeffer writes: “I searched through what the Bible said concerning reality as a Christian.” He did not ask the Bible to meet his subjective wants or validate his religious feelings. He did not edit the Bible according to his tastes or preferences. He did not deconstruct the Bible but rather asked what he might do to obey God’s voice as revealed in the Bible. In a sense, he deconstructed himself. What was he missing in the Christian life that took away his peace and joy, his “reality”? He sought out the Bible’s true teaching about the Christian life.

Schaeffer had been rightly taught that we are reconciled to God through Christ’s death on the Cross and that this makes us justified before God. We are now deemed not guilty by God because of Christ’s vicarious substitutionary death.¹⁴ But “the finished work of Christ” must be applied “moment-by-moment” in our lives as we die to ourselves, take up our cross, and live for God in the Spirit’s power in order to bear fruit. This is the controlling theme of True Spirituality.

We find in this work that he felt his initial book should have been True Spirituality, since without the truths he learned by grappling with his doubts, his later ministry would not have flourished. He explains, “This was and is the real basis of L’Abri. Teaching the historic Christian answers and giving honest answers to honest questions are crucial, but it was out of these struggles that the reality came, without which an incisive work like L’Abri would not have been possible. I, and we, can only be thankful.”¹⁵

Lessons for Today. How God met Schaeffer in his crisis of faith in the early 1950s teaches us several lessons on how to address doubt, uncertainty, and disappointment in the Christian life. First, Schaeffer realized that he had to practice what he preached. He could not continue as a minister of God if he lost the sense of God’s living truth in his life. Along these lines, given all the reasons to believe, he encourages those reading The God Who Is There in this way: “It is hard to understand how an orthodox, evangelical, Bible-believing Christian can fail to be excited. The answers in the realm of the intellect should make us overwhelmingly excited. But more than this, we are returned to a personal relationship with the God who is there. If we are unexcited Christians, we should go back and see what is wrong.”¹⁶

This brings to mind Jesus’s statement in Revelation to the church at Ephesus: “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first” (Revelation 2:4–5 NIV; see also Romans 12:11). Authentic zeal is not optional for the Christian.

Second, Schaeffer faced the real possibility that Christianity was not true, that he was mistaken in being a Christian. In fact, he said, “There is no reason to believe in Christianity if it isn’t true.”¹⁷ At the last L’Abri conference before his death, he responded this way when someone asked him the reason to be a Christian: “There’s one reason and only one reason to be a Christian, which is that you’re convinced it is the truth of the universe.”¹⁸ Christians should never try to preserve faith through ignorance. Schaeffer did not. He honestly faced the great issues in his crisis and went on to write many books defending the Christian faith and applying its truth to various areas of life.¹⁹ All the while, he engaged unbelievers, skeptics, and doubting Christians with the Christian worldview through his ministry at L’Abri. As he wrote, “I am not an apologist if that means building a safe house to live in, so that we Christians can sit inside with safety and quiescence. Christians should be out in the midst of the world as both witnesses and salt, not sitting in a fortress surrounded by a moat.”²⁰ In practice, Schaeffer engaged people by listening and responding thoughtfully over an entire ministry. He was not a “professional apologist” who only develops theories and compares them with other theories.

Third, Schaeffer’s own wrestling with the legitimacy of his faith helped him to be gentle, caring, and competent with those with similar struggles. As Edith wrote about his time of struggle, “If he hadn’t had the ‘asbestos protection’ of the honest answers to his own honest questions, he couldn’t have coped with the blast of questions coming at him at times like a surge of heat from a steel furnace.”²¹ Those who knew him best said he was compassionate and patient with all who came to L’Abri for spiritual reality, even those who were antagonistic. His younger colleague, Jerome Barrs, wrote this about Schaeffer’s approach to unbelievers: “But no matter who they were or how they spoke, Schaeffer would be filled with compassion for them. He would treat them with respect, take their questions seriously (even if he had heard the same question a thousand times before), and answer them gently. Always he would pray for them and seek to challenge them with the truth. But this challenge was never given aggressively.”²²

Today, when so many are deconstructing, we can look to Francis Schaeffer’s spiritual wilderness experience to find hope and the principles for addressing a lack of “reality” in one’s Christian life. His entire life after this event testifies to the reality of God acting through him.

I concur that soberly addressing whatever doubts or questions you have about Christianity is the best way to grow as a Christian. Deconstruction is nothing to play with, given the consequences of apostasy (Hebrews 6). While I have not experienced anything as traumatic as what Schaeffer endured, I have known times of spiritual dryness, anxiety, questioning God, and even anger at the Lord. I speak to that in my book, Walking Through Twilight: A Wife’s Illness — A Philosopher’s Lament.²³ God has brought me through all of it with an increased zeal for this saving and living and “flaming truth,” as Schaeffer put it — echoing the spirit of Jeremiah 20:9 and Acts 20:24.²⁴

Those who are stronger in the faith given once for all to the saints (Jude 3) should have mercy on those who doubt (Jude 22), gently encouraging them to find solid ground, Jesus Christ, who is the Rock of Ages (Psalm 18:2). One of Francis Schaeffer’s favorite verses should inspire us. Speaking of the coming Messiah, Isaiah writes, “The Sovereign Lord has given me a well-instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary” (Isaiah 50:4 NIV).

Douglas Groothuis, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at Cornerstone University and Cornerstone Theological Seminary.

NOTES

1. On today’s deconstruction, see Sean McDowell and John Marriott, Set Adrift: Deconstructing What You Believe Without Sinking Your Faith (Zondervan, 2023).
2. The best biography of Schaeffer is Colin Duriez, Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (Crossway, 2008).
3. See Edith Schaeffer, L’Abri, new expanded edition (Crossway, 1992).
4. I write of The God Who Is There (InterVarsity Press, 1968) and three others that have shaped my life in Douglas Groothuis, “A Christian Philosopher’s Path to Truth,” World, August 15, 2024, https://wng.org/articles/a-christian-philosophers-path-to-truth-1722989174.
5. Douglas Groothuis, “Francis Schaeffer: Pastor, Evangelist, Apologist, Prophet,” Christian Research Journal 39, no. 4 (2016), https://www.equip.org/articles/francis-schaeffer-pastor-evangelist-apologist-prophet/
6. On Schaeffer’s apologetic method, see the fine essay by Gordon R. Lewis, “Schaeffer’s Apologetic Method,” in Reflections on Francis Schaeffer, ed. Ronald W. Ruegsegger (Zondervan, 1986). Lewis argues that Schaeffer used a verificationist method (or cumulative case method), similar to that of E. J. Carnell and his own method. This is my apologetic method as well. See Douglas Groothuis, “Apologetic Method: Evaluating Worldviews,” in Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, 2nd ed. (IVP Academic, 2022).
7. Francis A. Schaeffer, True Spirituality (Crossway, 2001), xxix. See Duriez, “Crisis and Catalyst,” in Francis Schaeffer, which recounts this crisis in some detail.
8. Schaeffer addresses and critiques what he calls “the new theology” (both neoorthodoxy and the older liberalism) in sections II and III of The God Who Is There, (IVP, 2020).
9. Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (IVP, 2020 [1968]), 174, Kindle Edition.
10. Schaeffer, True Spirituality, xxix.
11. See Groothuis, Christian Apologetics.
12. J. P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle (Zondervan, 2007), 130–36.
13. Schaeffer, True Spirituality, xxix–xxx.
14. On this, see Francis Schaeffer, The Finished Work of Christ: The Truth of Romans 1–8 (Crossway, 2013). See also John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (InterVarsity, 1986).
15. Schaeffer, True Spirituality, xxx.
16. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 187–88.
17. Quoted in Duriez, Francis Schaeffer, 106.
18. Quoted in Duriez, Francis Schaeffer, 109.
19. His three main apologetics books are The God Who Is There, He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Tyndale House, 1972), and Escape from Reason (InterVarsity, 1968). These books can be procured separately or as part of The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer (Crossway, 1981) or collected in Francis A. Schaeffer, Trilogy (Crossway, 1990). This latter collection contains an insightful and masterfully written foreword by J. I. Packer.
20. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 195.
21. Edith Schaeffer, The Tapestry (Crossway, 1981), 355.
22. Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Tyndale Elevate, 2013 [1972]), xviii–xix, Kindle Edition.
23. Douglas Groothuis, Walking Through Twilight: A Wife’s Illness — A Philosopher’s Lament (IVP Books, 2017). On the psalms of lament, see Glenn Pemberton, Hurting with God: Learning to Lament with the Psalms (Abilene Christian University Press, 2012).
24. A number of books address doubt and how to resolve it as a Christian. See Os Guinness, God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt (Crossway, 1996), which is an excellent work on the topic.