Douglas R. Groothuis, Philosophe und Apologet des Denver Seminary, schrieb eine ausgezeichnete Buchreview über zwei biografische Darstellungen von Francis Schaeffers, die ein Vierteljahrhundert nach seinem Tod erschienen sind: Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2009), und Colin Duriez, Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (Crossway: Wheaton, 2008).
Seinem Schlussvotum stimme ich unumgeschränkt zu:
I fear that the younger generation of evangelicals do not know enough about the remarkable life and achievements of Francis Schaefer; instead they are opting for the trendy but intellectually barren hype of much of the emergent church movement-which claims to be “authentic.”
Ebenso pflichte ich Groothuis bei: Jede Sicht auf die wichtigsten Fragen des Lebens muss lebbar sein!
Schaeffer taught that worldviews need to be compared on the basis of objective criteria. That is, one does not simply presuppose one’s worldview apart from rational testing. Every worldview-or basic perspective on life’s deepest questions-needs to pass three individually necessary and jointly sufficient tests. First, it must be internally consistent. That is, its defining beliefs must cohere with one another. Second, a worldview needs to fit the facts of reality; it must be “true to what is,” as Schaeffer put it. A worldview needs to match the external facts of history and science. (This shows that Schaeffer held to the correspondence view of truth, not the “coherency theory of truth,” as Hankins claims [91].) Third, a worldview needs to be livable to be credible. This means that it must pass the existential test of fitting the facts of the internal world. For example, any worldview that denies the objective reality of evil (such as secular relativism or Eastern monism) cannot be lived out consistently, since we intuitively know that rape, murder, and racism are wrong. These three apologetic criteria can be nuanced and made much more sophisticated, but they form the backbone of any solid apologetic method. These truths are far from outdated!
