Kristin Rudolph February 7, 2012
Frank Schaeffer has been telling audiences across America that he “[faults] fundamentalism, all fundamentalism for any kind of absolute certainty.” To Schaeffer, the son of L’Abri founders and evangelical leaders, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, “absolute certainty” is dangerous because “with absolute certainties go blanket generalizations.” He claims that “progressive Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics, and other people tend to generalize about their opponents and their own faith with as much absolute certainty sometimes as the very people they are criticizing for absolute certainty.”
The elder Francis Schaeffer, before his 1984 death, was a major intellectual influence on conservative evangelicals in the U.S. Originally his son, Frank was active in conservative evangelical circles. But in recent years he has specialized in scorching critiques of evangelicals and more broadly of Christianity, despite his active participation in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Frank Schaeffer’s solution to the supposed pitfalls of faith evidently is to believe nothing at all. He told an audience at Countryside Community Church in Omaha, Nebraska on January 26, 2012 that “what matters is not belief, because you can never believe correctly because life is not long enough to know anything ... but what you can do is work on the content of your own character given the journey you’ve got.”
Schaeffer was once a self-described “founder” of the “religious right,” which he now vehemently opposes. His transition from “fundamentalism” to unbelief “wasn’t a crisis of faith, but a crisis of identity,” after he became deeply involved with the “religious right.” After reaching adulthood and leaving his parents’ home in Switzerland and coming to the United States, Schaeffer found himself “all of a sudden in Jerry Falwell’s private jet,” on a “high powered conveyor belt … that whisked us off to another planet of the religious right.” Schaeffer claimed it ultimately “turned out to be a mixture of power hungry lunatics, absolute flakes, money grubbing in a context that just blew me away … because my father was not a flake.” The major problem, he explained, was that “I was turning into a real jerk … I didn’t believe it anymore ... I’m not talking about a big theological deal, I just didn’t believe in this life.” After his father died in 1984, Schaeffer said he “began to ask questions I had never asked before, [like] what does it mean to follow Jesus? Does it mean billion dollar publishing business? Does it mean private jets?”
Instead of leading to a deeper faith apart from the “religious right,” Schaeffer’s searching brought him to complete unbelief. “So I think the process of learning and going away from fundamentalism is that every day you get up you know less, you hope more,” he said. Despite his disillusionment and departure from faith, Schaeffer claimed “I don’t bring a critical spirit to people within fundamentalism” because what mattered to him “wasn’t the intellectual ideas, it never was the fundamentalism, it was who my parents were as people.”
“It had to do with how [my parents] treated people back in the day when nobody was famous and it wasn’t all a big happening commercial enterprise, that part had stuck. Watching my mother clean up vomit at three in the morning from a drug addict on our kitchen floor, seeing the 16 year old girl she brought into the house … and she lived with us for 3 years and had her child, that pro-life message stuck,” Schaeffer said. Today, Schaeffer goes “to a Greek Orthodox church not because I’m Greek Orthodox … I just happen to like Byzantine liturgies because it’s mostly in Greek so I can’t understand them. It’s good because it’s the words that bother me.” He explained that “to me, worship is finding a space to be quiet in, and not think clever thoughts … you just do the liturgy, and everyone can bring their own interpretation to it.”
To Schaeffer, “to be a Christian is not to believe in Jesus in terms of who he was, whether he is the Son of God, rose from the dead or not, it is to believe in that life as an example.” He claimed “there’s a difference between following the person, the teaching, and the example and belief in. Belief is useless … but doing is very difficult.” Although he holds no belief in the basic tenets of Christianity, Schaeffer still receives the communion every week. When asked by an audience member how his priest could give him communion despite his lack of faith, he sharply replied, “If we think that sincerity or correct theology will get you anywhere, good luck with that, because it won’t.”
So why does Schaeffer bother going to church and receiving communion when he does not believe any of it? He answered, because “I can find the redemption, and in the circle of my church community I can find the redemption that eluded me when I was chasing it trying to have correct ideas about God rather than just working on the content of my own character, and the only place you can work on that is in the relationships with the people around you.”
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