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Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008. Pp. xv + 272. $20.00.
In his intelligent intellectual biography of Francis Schaeffer (1912-84), Barry Hankins asserts that "[it] is hard to find an evangelical from the northern or midwestern United States between the ages of fifty and seventy who was not influenced by Francis Schaeffer" (xi). Hankins' examination of Schaeffer's writings, the L'Abri community, Schaeffer's lecture tours, his films, and his role in the New Christian Right shows that Schaeffer influenced evangelicals in a variety of ways. In particular, Hankins credits Schaeffer with convincing many young adults that they should become intellectually engaged. He attributes his own decision to "pursue Christian scholarship as a calling" in large part to Schaeffer's "breathtaking" ideas (xi). It is important to recognize, however, that not all young evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s felt such isolation from the general culture or ignorance of the world of ideas and the arts that they would have found Schaeffer's challenge remarkable; nor did all think that his lectures and writings were worth taking seriously.
Hankins makes impressive use of primary sources, including the papers of Allan MacRae and J. Oliver Buswell; interviews with such evangelicals and Reformed Christians as Mark Noll, John Whitehead, Os Guinness, Ronald Wells, and Arthur Holmes; and fascinating correspondence with Schaeffer from the private files of Mark Noll and George Marsden. Unfortunately, no one in Schaeffer's family would talk to him.
Schaeffer's adult life appears to fall into three phases, the second of which was an "interlude" (159) in contrast to the aggressive fundamentalism of the first and third. Schaeffer began as a militant, separatist fundamentalist who attacked Protestant liberalism as un-Christian. He was among those who...