AGAINST THE GRAIN HAS MOVED!
Our new address is http://christopherblosser.blogspot.com.
It would be greatly appreciated if you could update your bookmarks and links and kindly inform your readers (the content of this old blog has been moved as well).
Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Did Francis Schaeffer advocate the 'violent overthrow' of the U.S. government?

In a Vox Nova post, Gerald Campbell claims the following of Francis Schaeffer:
In 1982, Frank’s father (Francis Schaeffer) wrote a book called A Christian Manifesto in which he called for the use of force if all other means of stopping abortion failed. He compared the United States and its practice of legalized abortion to Hitler’s Germany and argued that whatever means might have removed Hitler could be used to stop abortion here. In 1984, Frank Schaeffer wrote ,i.A Time for Anger,/i. in which he argued the same point. His book became a national best seller with the help of the evangelical movement. Dr. James Dobson alone gave away 100,000 copies.
Gerald is not only wrong, but I believe -- having corrected him once already on this very matter -- he joins Frank Schaeffer in wilful slander of his father.

The charge that Francis Schaeffer advocated "the violent overthrow" of the U.S. government was previously made by Frank in the Huffington Post in March 2008, in which Frank cites the following "passages" from A Christian Manifesto:

There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate... A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion... It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates it's authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation...
The only problem is: Francis Schaeffer never advocated "the violent overthrow" of the government.

As I demonstrated in my March 2008 response to Gerald / Vox Nova, Frank Schaeffer makes his charge only by cobbling together a smattering of partial sentences by his father from some 25-30 pages of his book, taken out of context.

Rather, in response to the grave scandal of abortion -- the state-sanctioned murder of innocent children -- Francis Schaeffer actually asserted the following:

Christians must come to the children's defense, and must come to the defense of human life as such. The defense should be carried out on at least four fronts:

First, we should aggressively support a human life bill or a constitutional amendment protecting unborn children.

Second, we must enter the courts seeking to overturn the Supreme Court's abortion decision.

Third, legal and political action should be taken against hospitals and abortion clinics that perform abortions. [...]

The 'fourth front', according to Schaeffer, consisted of presenting a Christian alternatives to abortion, in the form of crisis pregnancy centers.

According to Schaeffer, the pursuit of legal-political restrictions on abortion must be accompanied by the provision and witness of Christian alternatives -- and vice versa. (To rely solely on the latter, neglecting the legal route, he thought utopian).

As far as the use of armed force, Schaeffer commented:

“If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force, and if there is a vigilant precaution against its overreaction in practice, then at a certain point the use of force is justifiable. We should recognize, however, that overreaction can too easily become the ugly horror of sheer violence. [p. 106]
The "force" that Schaeffer goes on to entertain is that of civil disobedience -- such as refusing to pay a portion of our taxes:
Of course, this would mean a trial. Such a move would have to mean the individual’s choice under God. Happily, at the present time the Hyde amendment has removed the use of national tax money for abortions, but that does not change the possibilty that in some cases such a protest would be the only way to be heard. One can think of, for example, tax money going to Planned Parenthood . . .
Finally, Schaeffer contemplates the "bottom line" for Christians, after such efforts at civil disobedience fail:
"If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been put in the place of the Living God, because then you are to obey it even when it tells you in its own way to worship Caesar. And that point is exactly where the early Christians performed their own acts of civil disobedience even where it costs them their own lives. [p. 130]
Ever the disgruntled son, Frank Schaeffer never met an opportunity which he didn't take to slander, misrepresent and otherwise publicly dishonor his dead father.

And to the extent that Campbell parrots Frank in such libelous behaviour, we have every reason to be wary of them both.

Related

Bookmark and Share

Labels:



Sunday, March 06, 2005

Marvin Olasky on Francis Schaeffer's "Political Legacy"

Writing for Townhall.com, Marvin Olasky (author of Compassionate Conservatism) attributes the election of evangelical Christian George W. Bush not to strategists like Karl Rove but rather the political legacy of Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), the Presbyterian theologian who founded the Christrian community of L'Abri in Switzerland.

According to Olasky, it was Francis Schaeffer's warning to Christians in How Should We Then Live? that they should not remain aloof from political life, and his later urging that they should "bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to government" (in A Christian Manifesto) which paved the way for subsequent political organization of evangelical Christians:

. . . It was largely the U. S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which opened the door to legal abortions on demand, that drew Schaeffer's interest back to America. In the book How Should We Then Live?, Schaeffer addressed the foundational problems which led to this devaluing of human life.

Such a breakdown of values can eventually lead to further violations of human life in the forms of euthanasia (the killing of the elderly) and infanticide. With former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and his son Franky, Schaeffer published Whatever Happened To The Human Race?, which tackled these social issues specifically. [Source]

When Francis Schaeffer died in 1984, President Reagan praised him: "It can rarely be said of an individual that his life touched many others and affected them for the better; it will be said of Dr. Francis Schaeffer that his life touched millions of souls and brought them to the truth of their Creator."

As a student in college I recall reading Schaeffer's Pollution and the Death of Man: A Christian View of Ecology, which situates the environmental movement in a Christian context. I appreciated the way Schaeffer criticized "the establishment" in a manner which could charm both the radical activist and the most jaded conservative:

. . .the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too. . . More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature. . . As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side.

Later on I read, and was rather less impressed by, Schaeffer's criticism of Aquinas in Escape from Reason -- by then I was well on my way to the Catholic Church.

I'm not educated enough in Schaeffer's works to comment further, but my father spent some time at L'Abri during his hippie days. If you ask him politely, he may be persuaded to share a personal story or two of his experiences. =)

Labels:



From the new blog Against The Grain

About This Blog

Against The Grain is the personal blog of Christopher Blosser - web designer and all around maintenance guy for the original Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club (Now Pope Benedict XVI).





Pope Benedict XVI Fan Club
Pope John Paul II
Benedict In America
Catholic Church and Liberal Tradition
Henri de Lubac
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Cardinal Avery Dulles

Catholic Just War Tradition
Catholic Friends of Israel
Pope Pius XII
Fr. John Courtney Murray
Tolkien
Walker Percy

Blogroll

Religiously-Oriented

"Secular"

Blogroll Me!

[Powered by Blogger]

Locations of visitors to this page









Ignatius Press - Catholic Books

<< # St. Blog's Parish ? >>