Theology in Public Life: Why the Lordship of Christ Covers All of Society
A Christian Manifesto
A Study of Francis Schaeffer’s Book and a Search for Applications
Week 1: Introduction and Overview Week 2: All problems are within one category (p. 19) Week 3: The extreme of materialism - Humanism Week 4: The extreme of spiritualism – Gnosticism Week 5: Witherspoon, Penn, Rutherford life overview and context Week 6: The First Amendment Week 7: What Happened? (Humanism and Gnosticism is back!) Week 8: The Religion of Humanism Week 9: Revival, Revolution, and Reform (p. 71) Week 10: An open window Week 11: Civil obedience Week 12: Civil disobedience Week 13: When to stand against the state Week 14: Recap and overview
Davis L. Moore
8/8/2026
I want to begin this class series by throwing some hot-topic words that will likely make you squirm in your seat: Homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, pornography, euthanasia, artificial intelligence, and for theology nerds, universalism. These are all topics that we have a tendency to separate in our minds. Homosexuality? That’s a sin issue. Abortion? That’s a political issue. Ai? That's a technological issue. Universalism? That’s a theological issue.
Over the next few months or so, we’re going to be studying Francis Schaeffer’s book, A Christian Manifesto. He points out at the very beginning of his book “The basic problem of Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so,” (or now in the last 120 years), “... is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals” (Schaeffer, p. 17). The more I’ve thought about this, the more accurate it’s been. Because we are constantly splitting hairs over what type of issue a particular problem is, we miss the total of the actual problem! If I brought my car into the shop complaining about a weird noise in the engine, it would be entirely inappropriate for you as the mechanic to not inform me that the entire chassis was missing. As the Theological and philosophical mechanic, Schaeffer is attempting to get past the squeaking noises in our minds and get to the root of the issue. He wants us to see that all these issues are not the actual problem, but the symptoms of a much larger problem.
Schaeffer is going to walk us through a lot of really difficult topics as we go through this book. Some of these topics will make you uncomfortable, so for this first lesson, I want to introduce the book, give context on who Schaeffer was and the political and theological climate he was part of.
As we enter these more difficult topics including Pietism, True spirituality, reality, humanism, Gnosticism, and pushback against an authoritative government, I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts. This class is the Applications class, and not the “shut up and listen to Davis talk about stuff” class. We’ll be ordering copies of the book later this week and hopefully can have them in by next week. So, I’d like you to engage with the material, read the book, and bring your thoughts with you each week. I’ll have a lesson prepared, and I’ll bring enough material to speak the whole time, but it’s important for us to discuss specifically what Schaeffer is trying to get across in each section.
But, since we don’t have copies of the book yet and I think it’s important to introduce Schaeffer, today, I want to give a short biographical-type introduction, give a brief overview of what he believed, and then give a short overview of the book and how we’ll be working through the book.
First, who was Schaeffer? “Francis Schaeffer was a brilliant man,” one biographer says of him, “His method of learning was less the careful study of textbooks with footnotes and more an informal collecting of insights from Scripture, people, articles, clippings, and his own hunches. He had a ‘nose’ for generalizations. Occasionally they were oversimple or even mistaken. But mostly he had a sense of what was reasonable and what was not, and would explore his ideas accordingly. He possessed a considerable knowledge of the arts and was able to converse about them or most any other subject with just about anybody who would come across his path” (Edgar, p. 25-26). Schaeffer was a man of many interests, but his primary interest was in the faith of others.
Schaeffer was born on January 30, 1912, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and was of both German and American descent. He attended Hampden-Sydney College before enrolling at Westminster Theological Seminary. During his time there, he studied under influential theologians Cornelius Van Til and John Gresham Machen, later completing his formal education at Faith Theological Seminary in 1938. Later, Schaeffer served as a Presbyterian pastor and was a notable presuppositionalist philosopher and theologian. After a period with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, he transitioned to the Bible Presbyterian Church, where he served as its first ordained minister, helping to establish the denomination.
Alongside his professional work, he was married to Edith Schaeffer, and together they raised four children. Throughout his career, he received at least four honorary doctorate degrees in recognition of his theological contributions. He passed away on May 15, 1984, at the age of 72, following a battle with cancer.
Theologically, although one of Schaeffer’s most important topics was how to live as a Christian, he was primarily focused on truth in general. As his biographer wrote, “Fran did not enter this struggle looking for ‘true spirituality.’ His struggle was more basic: is Christianity true? But what emerged was inextricably tied to his conclusions about the Christian life, and these became a major theme for his speaking and writing down through the years” (p. 55). And so, the subject of truth was paramount to his theology.
Faith was also a focal point of the Schaeffers. There is a story of them about their need for money as young people... a relatable dilemma. They were in need of $1,000. “She prayed that $1,000 would show up miraculously. In the mail the next day came a letter with such a check, and the explanation from the donor that they had sense an urgency about the Schaeffers’ needs and had a special trip to the mailbox during bad weather so that the letter could arrive in a timely fashion.” In a second story very similarly, they needed 8,000 Swiss francs to make a down payment on a home. “This was a considerable amount of money at the time,” the biographer wrote, “and for the Schaeffers it was humanly impossible. Yet, counting all the gifts that came in over the next few weeks, they had 8,011 francs in hand” (p. 58)! Faith was a very important part of their lives, and it was a focal point of Schaeffer’s life.
In terms of salvation, Schaeffer was clear. “Salvation comes to those who lift the empty hands of faith and receive Jesus Christ. Immediately upon turning to the Lord in faith, we are justified” (p. 90). He believed that anyone could be saved through the Lord Jesus Christ.
Shaeffer also had a very high view of Christ. His biographer writes, “Jesus Christ is central to all of Schaeffer’s Theology. He is the Son of God. He became man through the incarnation” (p. 89). Later in his book True Spirituality, he also points out that there is no Christian life at all – that it is impossible – unless one is a Christian. He says, “The first point which we must make is that it is impossible even to begin living the Christian life, or to know anything of true spirituality, before one is a Christian” (bio, p. 83). Without Christ, it is impossible to experience the Christian life. He goes on to say that the only way to become a Christian is not through a religious experience, but ‘by accepting Christ as Savior.’
Spiritual issues, or has he coined it True Spirituality, is also a very important part of Schaeffer’s Theology, and one we’ll see a lot through the book. Now, we spent several months last summer talking about Sanctification and Holiness, so I hope those things are still fresh in your mind. One of the things we talked about there was Progressive Sanctification. This is a very important part of what Schaeffer meant by True Spirituality. “Occasionally, when addressing the issue of sanctification, he would say things such as, ‘Sanctification is a process not an act, and yet there are often one or more crises along the way as a Christian gains new knowledge of the meaning and the work of Christ in his present life and as he begins to act on that knowledge.’ but this never means either a normative experience or a qualitative leap puts someone in a higher plane” (p. 83). In another place, we read, “While Schaeffer taught that we should expect progress in the Christian life, he strongly warned against perfectionism... Schaeffer could never approve of any form of perfectionism, yet he nevertheless thought Wesley was seeking something right: aspiring to experiencing the reality of the present value of Christ’s finished work.” (p. 93, 110). Clearly, Schaeffer was approaching the doctrine of Sanctification Biblically.
Continuing in understanding his views of spirituality, Schaeffer also believed in the power of prayer. “They would be nothing without the reality of prayer,” (p. 122) he wrote. “Besides the intellectual content and the warmth of the community, what struck visitors... was that everything was bathed in an atmosphere of prayer” (p. 125). Schaeffer also believed that faith and prayer were connected together. “Where do you get such faith? When your view of God is right, then your faith will just grow. Prayer is living proof of our living belief in our God” (p. 133).
Two other key notes on what Schaeffer believed are his strong views of the Christian in the church and in the world. He believed that every Christian not only had the right, but had the obligation to be fully engaged and participating in both the Church by serving with your gifts, tithing, etc., and being fully engaged with the world by monitoring political issues, participating in politics by running for office, voting, and any other way possible.
This brings us to the second area we need to understand before we dive deeply into the book: the political and theological world that Schaeffer was speaking into. Now, we’ll dive deeply into each one of these issues throughout the class because he addresses all of them in the book, but I still think it’s important to start with some context.
First, we’ll deal with the political climate. As Schaeffer looked out into the world, one of the first things he saw—something that frightened him a great deal—was a major shift in how people (especially Americans) understood reality and lived in it. In his view, society was moving from a predominantly Christian worldview to a Humanistic secular worldview. It wasn’t simply that individuals were having different beliefs; Schaeffer believed the shared moral and intellectual foundations of public life were being displaced. He argued that this move toward a human-centered ethics—without Christianity as the basis for truth and morality—would eventually undermine moral clarity, weaken social trust, and blur the cultural sense of what is genuinely good or right.
As Schaeffer watched this unfold, he wanted either to see it resisted and corrected, or at least to warn others that it was happening. He became an important reference point for evangelical political engagement, with abortion at the center of his public influence (including through film and books that criticized a culture he believed was becoming indifferent to the value of human life). For Schaeffer, abortion mattered politically because it was also institutional: it represented, in a very visible way, the moral assumptions being built into laws and public policy. In other words, it wasn’t only a personal issue; it was a sign of how society was deciding questions about personhood, human value, and legal protection through non-Christian premises. Through his books and films, he also became an influential figure of his time, helping many evangelicals develop an intellectual rationale for political involvement. Helping them move from reluctance about “getting political” toward seeing civic action as a moral responsibility.
He also saw cultural pluralism as a deeper problem; not “tolerance” in a simple sense, but the loss of a common Christian worldview that made shared moral reasoning possible in public life. In A Christian Manifesto (1981), Schaeffer diagnosed Western decline as connected to increasing pluralism: in his framing, the culture was drifting away from whatever remained of a Christian worldview inheritance and replacing it with something philosophically different. The key issue for him wasn’t merely that multiple beliefs existed, but that pluralism could push society toward the idea that truth is relative or only private. Which would mean that Christianity would no longer function as the foundation for knowledge, morals, and meaning. And once that happens, public institutions like schools, courts, media, and policy, start operating from different assumptions, which then reshapes what the culture believes about human dignity and what kinds of actions it considers legitimate or justified.
And as we’ll see through this class, Schaeffer’s concern wasn’t an isolated political hobby or a narrow policy obsession; he thought these changes were connected to a much larger shift in philosophical and cultural thinking; one that, for him, showed up simultaneously in how people thought, how communities formed, and how laws were made. If we think about what has happened since then—including many of the topics that come up in this class—you can begin to see why his diagnosis resonated: the way the culture thinks has changed, and for Schaeffer that was the real reason politics and theology were inseparable.
Now, let’s look at the theological culture of the time. One major part of the climate was the long, still-lingering conflict between “liberal” mainline Protestant theology and conservative evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity. Having been trained by Van Til and Machen as we have covered, this was certainly a major theme in his mind. In mainline circles, theological modernism had for decades reinterpreted Christianity through contemporary intellectual assumptions which often treated parts of the Bible more as historical artifacts than as authoritative revelation. Meanwhile, conservative Protestants increasingly framed modern theological trends as a drift away from the core claims that make Christianity (especially traditional Protestant Christianity) distinct: God’s truthfulness, the reliability of Scripture, and the idea that Christian doctrine is not merely inspirational but objectively true.
At the same time, there was a shift happening within conservative Christianity itself: after decades of withdrawalist instincts (separation from “the world” and sometimes from other denominations), some evangelical leaders were beginning to argue that Christians shouldn’t just defend doctrine privately—they should engage public life and public institutions. Schaeffer belongs to that broad turning point. But theologically, he wasn’t simply joining politics; he believed the same “foundational” issue driving church disputes was driving culture-wide change. In that sense, the theological climate for him wasn’t only “liberal vs conservative.” It was also about whether Christianity would be treated as a coherent worldview with intellectual foundations, or whether it would be reduced to a private religious preference.
Another aspect of the climate was the intellectual atmosphere surrounding relativism and “reason”—not only academic philosophy, but how people in churches talked about knowledge, truth, and certainty. Schaeffer pushed back hard against the idea that Christianity could survive as a set of moral or spiritual feelings while abandoning its claim to truth about reality. That’s why his apologetics and worldview language mattered: he was arguing that once a culture stops believing in real, knowable truth grounded in God, then everything else like ethics, human value, even how people read history, gets unstable.
Finally, in the late 70s/early 80s, this theological conflict was increasingly entangled with concrete cultural flashpoints, especially those involving the life and body (most famously abortion). So, the theological climate of the time didn’t look like only debates about sermons or doctrine. It looked like a whole ecosystem: seminaries, pulpits, bookstores, and media networks were converging around questions like: What is Scripture? Can we know truth? What is a human being? What should the state do? And Schaeffer’s prominence grew because he offered a way to connect those debates by turning theology into a diagnosis of cultural decline and a reason for Christians to speak publicly.
This brings us to the book we’ll be working through for the next several weeks: A Christian Manifesto. I’ve split the book into at least 13 main sections, although we can take much longer to get through those sections as needed. The book itself only has 10 chapters, so at least a few chapters we’ll spend more than one week in.
Instead of going over the handout, to introduce the book, I am going to give some of the key points of the book in no particular order that you will see throughout this entire book. First foremost, the importance and reality of Christian Truth. Schaeffer over and over and over again drives this point into our heads. He says, “True spirituality covers all of reality... When I say that Christianity is true I mean it is true to total reality-the total of what is, beginning with the central reality, the objective existence of the personal-infinite God. Christianity is not just a series of truths but Truth-Truth about all of reality” (p. 19-20).
From this point, Schaeffer drives home a few other main points. He had a Comprehensive Worldview in his Theology. Schaeffer challenges the common tendency among Evangelical leaders to embrace a "platonic, overly spiritualized" form of Christianity. This approach effectively shrinks the faith, confining it to a private, spiritual bubble. The fundamental takeaway here is that Christ’s Lordship is meant to cover the entire spectrum of life—there is no area of society, culture, or government that exists outside of His authority. If the faith is only "in your head" or restricted to church walls, it fails to influence the world as God intended.
He also gives us a Definition of Authority. This point establishes the legal and moral status of the civil government. Schaeffer argues that the state is not an autonomous entity with ultimate power; rather, it is a delegated authority that exists entirely under the law of God. Because of this, the state’s legitimacy is conditional. When a government actively commands that which violates God’s law, it ceases to be a legitimate protector of justice and instead becomes a tyranny. It has no inherent authority to override divine law, and recognizing this is essential for understanding the believer's standing before the state.
And then, finally, he gives us a Practical Response (Action): Because of the theological reality of Christ’s Lordship and the legal reality of God’s higher law, Christians have a moral duty to engage and resist when necessary. This ranges from being vigilant about our freedoms to the heavy, final step of civil disobedience when all other protest avenues are closed. If Christians accept that they can never say "no" to the state, they have essentially turned the government into an idol—putting the state in the place of God. Taking a stand is not just a political choice; it is viewed as a necessary act of faithfulness.