1. Various biographies of Schaeffer exist. In addition to the material by Edith Schaeffer, which is rather extensive, one can find a "no-warts" biography in the first few chapters of Louis G. Parkhurst, Francis Schaeffer: The Man and His Message (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1985). See also the tribute by J. I. Packer, "No Little Person," in Reflections on Francis Schaeffer (ed. Ronald W. Ruegsegger; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986) 7–17
2. Though there were conversations and miscellaneous letters, the two principal documents are "A Letter to Francis Schaeffer," dated March 11, 1969 (copy in WTS Library); and "The Apologetic Methodology of Francis A. Schaeffer," a 60–page collection of reflections on various Schaeffer texts, dated March 22, 1974 (copy in WTS Library).
3. Jack Rogers, "Francis Schaeffer: The Promise and the Problem," Reformed Journal 27 (1977) 12–13.
4. "Christian Apologetics" tape no. 13.2, listed along with many available L'Abri tapes in Parkhurst, Francis Schaeffer, 230. Many of these notions were set forth much earlier in Francis Schaeffer, "A Review of a Review," in The Bible Today 42/1 (October 1948).
5. Schaeffer himself talked of three books being fundamental to his apologetic method: Escape from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1968); The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1968); He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1972). These have been gathered into one volume: The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy: The Three Essential Books in One Volume (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1990). Though there is a sense in which the three volumes carry much weight, Schaeffer's message is much broader than what they contain. One could even speculate that his impact was not primarily because of his books, but because of personal contact, the tapes, and the seminars at L'Abri.
6. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 15 (emphasis his).
8. This episode was recounted in a personal conversation with Edmund Clowney.
9. It might be said that Van Til had more of a Continental heritage, and that he was more informed by Dordt, Heidelberg, the Belgic Confession, etc., and even by Reformed (as contrasted to Presbyterian) ecclesiology, than Schaeffer. When discussing his allegiance to Reformed theology, Schaeffer referred most often to Hodge. He shared some of Hodge's Scottish Realism, as we shall see. He also had leanings toward American fundamentalism. Still, both Schaeffer and Van Til were Presbyterians and separationists.
10. Schaeffer was, of course, more radical in his separationist leanings than Van Til. He attended Westminster Seminary for a year, but then he followed Buswell, MacRae, and MacIntyre in the forming of Faith Seminary and the Bible Presbyterian Church. This meant, among other things, renouncing the so-called Christian liberties, and believing nondispensationalist premillennialism. He would later part company with the MacIntyre movement, joining the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, which eventually merged with the Presbyterian Church in America.
11. His approach to sanctification, though basically Reformed, draws from various traditions, including the Keswick movement. He appears at times not to understand the Reformed emphasis on the sovereignty of God in the Christian life. He tends to make sanctification somewhat dependent on conscious awareness. See Schaeffer, True Spirituality (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1971) 102.
12. See Clark H. Pinnock, "Schaeffer on Modern Theology," in Reflections on Francis Schaeffer, 177; and Thomas V. Morris, Francis Schaeffer's Apologetics: A Critique (Chicago: Moody Press, 1976) 21.
13. Rookmaaker also shared the separationist ecclesiology of the Schaeffers. He would eventually found a Dutch L'Abri, which is still functioning. I once heard Schaeffer say that their thinking was so mutual that he couldn't tell where his own began and Rookmaaker's ended.
14. Schaeffer's antithetical method, which reduces worldviews to just a few (ultimately, two, the believing and the unbelieving), has frustrated his critics. Jack Rogers retorts that anthropologists have discovered thousands of worldviews, and that the responsible missionary must be trained in order to translate the gospel into these cultural modes. It is telling that for Rogers, what each worldview has in common is the religious need, not a faith commitment. He would have to have leveled the same criticism at Van Til ("Francis Schaeffer, the Promise and the Problem," 15).
15. D. G. Blomberg, "Apologetic Education: Francis Schaeffer and L'Abri," Journal of Christian Education 54 (1975) 5–6.
16. Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1968) passim. Cf. Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture (Toronto: Wedge, 1979) 15.
17. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1969) 49; The Intellectual Challenge of the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980) 17, 35.
18. See "Apologetic Methodology," 29.
20. Unpublished paper by John Mitchell entitled "A Critique of Schaeffer's The God Who Is There" (kindly provided by Robert D. Knudsen) 5–6.
21. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1976) 42.
22. Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1976) 16.
23. Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (Philadelphia: Den Dulk Foundation, 1969) 197.
24. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 27.
25. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 104.
26. Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 100.
27. This method is laid-out in The God Who Is There, 119–36.
28. Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 101.
29. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 129.
30. Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church before the Watching World (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1971) 83ff.
31. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/1 (2d ed.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) §3.
32. Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 38.
35. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 24.
37. Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1979) 152.
39. Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1969).
40. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 126.
41. Van Til's comment in the margin of Richard B. Keyes, "Christian Apologetics" (paper submitted to Cornelius Van Til for the course, Apologetics 4111, Nov. 31, 1967, on file in the author's possession) 51–52.
42. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 126.
44. Comment on Keyes' paper, "Christian Apologetics," 52.
45. Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 180.
46. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 57–8.
47. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 129.
48. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 58.
49. This is discussed in the opening section of The God Who Is There. He develops it in The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1970). It is also a central theme in How Should We Then Live? which was an eleven-episode television series as well as a book (Old Tappan: Fleming Revell, 1976).
50. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 44.
52. See Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? 130ff.
53. Ibid., 166; see also Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, 13.
54. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 39ff.
55. Robert D. Knudsen, "Progressive and Regressive Tendencies in Christian Apologetics," in Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Theology and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (ed. E. R. Geehan; Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971) 289–90.
56. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, 62.
57. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 169.
58. Francis A. Schaeffer, No Little People (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1974) 79–80.
59. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 109.
62. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 26.
63. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, 15. Schaeffer quotes the Organum Scientiarum's well-known statement about being able to repair the loss of innocence through religion and the loss of dominion through science and art. Van Til, replying to Schaeffer, refers to the Instauratio, where Bacon relies heavily on the inductive method for truth. Neither of them goes into any discussion, well-merited, I believe, of the relation of Bacon's epistemology to the rise of the scientific method. Van Til expedites Bacon by saying he "works as the typically autonomous man," but says nothing of the capital he may have borrowed from Christianity. See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meeter, 1975).
64. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 31.
65. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 179.
66. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 36, 53.
67. In He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 17, Schaeffer says, "The truth of Christianity is that it is true to what is there."
68. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 110–11. See, for a similar argument, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 5–20.
69. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 53.
70. Gordon Lewis says of Schaeffer's apologetics, "While the stress on presuppositions sounds like Van Til, the meaning of those statements is more like Carnell's hypothesis, for they are subject to testing by the coherence criterion of truth" (Testing Christianity's Truth Claims [Chicago: Moody, 1976] 298). Carnell himself was not enthusiastic about the comparison. See E. J. Carnell, "A Semi-Defense of Francis Schaeffer," Christian Scholar's Review 11 (1982) 148–49 (Bibliographer's Note: This last article mentioned was by Gordon H.Clark, not Carnell, and the article said nothing about Gordon Lewis's quote - will attempt to research for the proper note).
71. He says, "I use 'presupposition' as a base, and we can choose it" (He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 65). Even his friend Rookmaaker, more steeped in Kuyperian thinking than he, tended to accord a primacy to ideas in the arts. See his Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1970).
72. Francis A. Schaeffer, No Final Conflict (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) 44.
73. Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1970) 47.
74. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 38.
75. See for example, God and Nature (ed. D. C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Diogenes Allen points out that this view is not without its problems (Christian Belief in a Postmodern World [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1989] 23–34). The issue of how much credit Christianity should want to take for a worldview that fed into the Enlightenment may be something Van Til is concerned about in his criticism of Schaeffer.
76. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 47ff.
77. Found in Schaeffer, Death in the City, 127–43.
78. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 35.
79. Schaeffer, Death in the City, 131.
80. Van Til, "Apologetic Methodology," 35.
81. It has been very important for me as a L'Abriite to work through these critiques both because it has helped me see some important flaws in Schaeffer, and because it has helped confirm me in the transcendentalism of Van Til.