Since racial tensions were extremely high in the 1960’s I am adding a part two to my last post. I grew up in Memphis and was a resident when MLK Jr. was unfortunately assassinated. Just two months later Paul McCartney wrote the song BLACKBIRD because of this assassination. Francis Schaeffer also spoke out strongly against racial segregation.

Francis Schaeffer: The Man and His Message
Jerram Barrs 
Professor of Christian Studies and Contemporary Culture and
Resident Scholar of the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute 

Introduction 

Francis Schaeffer never presented himself as an academic apologist, as a philosopher, as a theologian, or as a scholar. Instead, he spoke of himself as an evangelist and a pastor, and this truly is how he thought about the ministry that God had graciously given him.

Racial Equality 

This sense of the unique dignity of all human persons also filled Schaeffer with a deep passion for racial equality and reconciliation, both in his own personal life and in his teaching. We can readily see this in examples from his college days when, as a very young believer, he would walk across the fields from the college to teach a class of African-American children each Sunday afternoon; and when he regularly visited the African-American janitor from the college when he became ill—Schaeffer would go to the man’s home to read the Scriptures and to pray with him.

This valuing of all men and women showed too in the way people of all races were welcomed to the Schaeffers’ home at L’Abri in Switzerland. He was happy to take the wedding service of Interracial couples, despite, in the case of two special friends of ours, the anger of the white parents (a minister in Britain and his wife) at Schaeffer’s “aiding and abetting marriage between blacks and whites.” I well remember how disturbed some white Christians were by his words in Whatever Happened to the Human Race?—at his speaking with such passion about the injustice and wickedness of slavery and the slave trade. These views on race may have seemed, particularly at that time, unusual for someone of Schaeffer’s strongly conservative views about the Bible and about moral and social issues. But he never felt constrained by a “system,” whether it was some particular detail of a theological system that seemed imposed on Scripture rather than drawn from it,15 or a political system of thought that had undermined evangelical concern for those who were discriminated against or downtrodden.

Human Life 

This approach of always going back to biblical foundations enabled Schaeffer to have the freedom to think about subjects that were not normally matters of discussion or concern among evangelical Christians. This is true with regard to human life issues. He began to address the problems of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia long before most other evangelicals. The reason for this was his deep sense that human persons are made in the image of God and are therefore to be treasured by us.

Just two years before his death, Schaeffer said in a lecture entitled “Priorities”: “We must understand that human life stands at a unique place. Human life stands at a crucial place because there is an unbreakable link between the existence of the infinite personal God and the unique dignity, intrinsic dignity of people. If God does not exist and he has not made people in his own image, there is no basis for an intrinsic, unique dignity of human life.”13 For Schaeffer, his conviction that Scripture teaches that we are God’s image-bearers continually fed his passion to help alienated young people see that they had dignity and value, and also challenged him to speak up for the unborn, for the newborn, for the handicapped, and for the elderly.

© 2006 Jerram Barrs. This article originally appeared in the November 2006 edition of Reformation 21: The Online Magazine of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. It is used by permission. For more information or permission to reprint, contact covenantseminary@covenantseminary.edu. 

The Seminary of the Presbyterian Church in America 

12330 Conway Road, Saint Louis, MO 63141 

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The Beatles – In my Life

Published on Feb 25, 2011

Here Comes The Sun – The Beatles Tribute

Not sung by George but good nonetheless!!

Francis Schaeffer’s favorite album was SGT. PEPPER”S and he said of the album “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.”  (at the 14 minute point in episode 7 of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? ) 

How Should We Then Live – Episode Seven – 07 – Portuguese Subtitles

Francis Schaeffer

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The Beatles – Revolution

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The Beatles – Blackbird (official video)

Lyrics-
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Black bird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to be free

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

THE SCHAEFFER LEGACY PROJECT – INTERVEW WITH SYLVESTER JACOBS

L’Abri 1974 (England) – Sylvester & Simone Jacobs

THE GOOD SOCIETY AND THE MORAL LAW

I’m Eric Metaxas. Today on BreakPoint we re-present Chuck Colson’s commentary on Martin Luther King Day and Dr. King’s dramatic defense of the moral law.

More than forty years ago, on August 28, 1963, a quarter million people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. They marched here for the cause of civil rights. And that day they heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, a speech in which he challenged America to fulfill her promise.

“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ ”

While we know of the speech, most people are unaware that King also penned one of the most eloquent defenses of the moral law: the law that formed the basis for his speech, for the civil rights movement, and for all of the law, for that matter.

In the spring of 1963, King was arrested for leading a series of massive non-violent protests against the segregated lunch counters and discriminatory hiring practices rampant in Birmingham, Alabama. While in jail, King received a letter from eight Alabama ministers. They agreed with his goals, but they thought that he should call off the demonstrations and obey the law.

King explained why he disagreed in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “One might well ask,” he wrote, “how can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer “is found in the fact that there are two kinds of laws: just laws … and unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” King said, “but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobeyunjust laws.”

How does one determine whether the law is just or unjust? A just law, King wrote, “squares with the moral law of the law of God. An unjust law … is out of harmony with the moral law.”

Then King quoted Saint Augustine: “An unjust law is no law at all.” He quoted Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law not rooted in eternal or natural law.”

This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters argue, simply whatever courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?

Many think of King as a liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was a great conservative on this central issue, and he stood on the shoulders of Augustine and Aquinas, striving to restore our heritage of justice rooted in the law of God.

Were he alive today, I believe he’d be in the vanguard of the pro-life movement. I also believe that he would be horrified at the way in which out of control courts have trampled down the moral truths he advocated.

From the time of Emperor Nero, who declared Christianity illegal, to the days of the American slave trade, from the civil rights struggle of the sixties to our current battles against abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and same-sex “marriage,” Christians have always maintained exactly what King maintained.

King’s dream was to live in harmony with the moral law as God established it. So this Martin Luther King Day, reflect on that dream—for it is worthy of our aspirations, our hard work, and the same commitment Dr. King showed.

The original commentary first aired on August 28, 2003.

How Christians Ended Slavery

Dinesh D’Souza | Jan 14, 2008

Isn’t it remarkable that atheists, who did virtually nothing to oppose slavery, condemn Christians, who are the ones who abolished it?

Consider atheist Sam Harris, who blames Christianity for supporting slavery. Harris is right that slavery existed among the Old Testament Jews, and Paul even instructs slaves to obey their masters. During the civil war both sides quoted the Bible. We know all this. (Yawn, yawn.)

But slavery pre-dated Christianity by centuries and even millennia. As we read from sociologist Orlando Patterson’s work, all known cultures had slavery. For centuries, slavery needed no defenders because it had no critics. Atheists who champion ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome somehow seem to forget that those empires were based on large-scale enslavement.

Atheist Michael Shermer says Christians are “late comers” to the movement against slavery. Shermer advanced this argument in our Cal Tech debate in December. That debate is now online, and you can watch it at michaelshermer.com.

But if what Shermer says is true, who were the early opponents of slavery who got there before the Christians did? Actually, there weren’t any. Shermer probably thinks the Christians only got around to opposing slavery in the modern era.

Wrong. Slavery was mostly eradicated from Western civilization–then called Christendom–between the fourth and the tenth century. The Greco-Roman institution of slavery gave way to serfdom. Now serfdom has its problems but at least the serf is not a “human tool” and cannot be bought and sold like property. So slavery was ended twice in Western civilization, first in the medieval era and then again in the modern era.

In the American South, Christianity proved to be the solace of the oppressed. As historian Eugene Genovese documents in Roll, Jordan, Roll, when black slaves sought to find dignity during the dark night of slavery, they didn’t turn to Marcus Aurelius or David Hume; they turned to the Bible. When they sought hope and inspiration for liberation, they found it not in Voltaire or D’Holbach but in the Book of Exodus.

The anti-slavery movements led by Wilberforce in England and abolitionists in America were dominated by Christians. These believers reasoned that since we are all created equal in the eyes of God, no one has the right to rule another without consent. This is the moral basis not only of anti-slavery but also of democracy.

Jefferson was in some ways the least orthodox and the most skeptical of the founders. Yet when he condemned slavery he found himself using biblical language. In Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson warned that those who would enslave people should reflect that “the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” Jefferson famously added, “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep for ever.”

But wasn’t Jefferson also a man of science? Yes he was, and it was on the basis of the latest science of his day that Jefferson expressed his convictions about black inferiority. Citing the discoveries of modern science, Jefferson noted that “there are varieties in the race of man, distinguished by their powers both of body and of mind…as I see to be the case with races of other animals.” Blacks, Jefferson continued, lack the powers of reason that are evident in whites and even in native Indians. While atheists today like to portray themselves as paragons of equal dignity, Jefferson’s scientific and skeptical outlook contributed not to his anti-slavery sentiments but to his racism. Somehow Harris and Shermer neglect to point this out.

In the end the fact remains that the only movements that opposed slavery in principle were mobilized in the West, and they were overwhelmingly led and populated by Christians. Sadly the West had to use force to stop slavery in other cultures, such as the Muslim slave trade off the coast of Africa. In some quarters the campaign to eradicate slavery still goes on.

So who killed slavery? The Christians did, while everyone else generally stood by and watched.

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The Inspirations Behind “I Have a Dream”

Vera Chan and Max Zimbert 2 hours ago

On Aug. 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people peaceably gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Attendant celebrities lent their Hollywood credentials. The media coverage was international. More than 22,000 police officers, guards, soldiers, and paratroopers were placed on alert.

Yet all this has been submerged into the backdrop to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words in “I Have a Dream.” The speech was an afterthought, one that King crafted in the final hours before the momentous convocation, working its rhythms like a poem. It is one of the finest speeches delivered on American soil — the distillation of Old Testament wisdom, Shakespearean drama, the Founding Fathers’ vision, and King’s own sermons and his emergent understanding of what it meant to be free, equal, and American.

With the help of Stanford University’s King Papers Project, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, and “Voice of Deliverance” author Keith Miller, the following is an examination of key passages in “I Have a Dream” and a look at the historic origins that shaped them.

The “greatest demonstration in history”

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom still ranks as the largest civil rights assembly in the country’s history. Before then, America’s largest demonstration had been in 1925, when an estimated 35,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. King’s powerful oration was the “first of its kind” broadcast live on all three networks and around the world via the Telstar satellite.

“Five score years ago”: Abraham Lincoln and Psalms

King noted the Emancipation Proclamation’s centennial but referenced the first line — and its ideals — from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” King linked democratic values to biblical imagery of hellfires and then salvation, notably Psalms 30:5: “For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”

The “chains of discrimination”: Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, John Donne, and Exodus

This passage packs in several key literary influences. Abolitionists long evoked the images of chains to depict slavery’s dehumanizing nature. Frederick Douglass did so in his oft-repeated historic speech “The Meaning of of July Fourth for the Negro.” King’s link to Douglass is even more fundamental, points out Arizona State University English professor Keith Miller, author of “Voices of Deliverance.” Douglass “basically uses the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to indict slavery.” Other speakers who linked the Bible with America’s founding documents included journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, who also alluded to the lyrics of the patriotic song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“America”).

King, who wrote of the “paralyzing chains of conformity” in his pivotal “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” also referred to “twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty” in that letter. In this speech, though, the single man on the “lonely island of poverty” harks back to John Donne’s renowned poem, “No Man Is An Island.”

The notion of the exile points to Exodus — when the Jews lived in exile — and an allegory that King evokes throughout “I Have a Dream.”

To “cash a check”: The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Clarence B. Jones

Besides the two documents that laid out America’s foundation, this passage includes a more contemporary metaphor about check-cashing and a promissory note. This decidedly mundane metaphor was suggested by his counsel and speechwriter, Clarence B. Jones. The religious link, however, reinforces the principles of equality not just as a contract but, as many scholars point out, as a covenant — a moral right, as much as a civil one.

The “Negro’s legitimate discontent”: Shakespeare, Gospel, and blunt words

“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.” The homage to William Shakespeare’s play “Richard III” is clear. Scholars have dug for more comparisons — the troubled relationship between brothers Richard and Edward is echoed in the troubled relationships between black and white brothers.

In the midst of Shakespearean allusions and Gospel-tinged language (“whirlwinds of revolt”), King plunks a cliché-laden sentence smack in the middle (“blow off steam,” “rude awakening,” “business as usual”). It’s as though he has stepped off the trail to the mountaintop for a moment for some blunt talk.

“[U]ntil justice rolls down like water”: Old Testament prophets

The audience of 1963 would have been far more versed in the Bible then today’s secular audiences.  The next few passages dip heavily into the Old Testament, from Jeremiah to Amos. King’s talk about suffering finally gets to a New Testament reference, one he touched on his 1959 sermon “Unfulfilled Hopes” on the Apostle Paul. And in his repeated urgings to “go back” lay the sorrowful hope of Exodus — the dream of home.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson wrote those key words in the Declaration of Independence, which King cited here. Of course, Jefferson was an active slave owner. But here, King is following the precedent that Abraham Lincoln established with the Gettysburg Address: He extended the Declaration and transformed it into an accountability doctrine to amend the Constitution.

The Constitution permitted slavery and the slave trade. There’s nothing explicit about privacy, sexual orientation, nor racial equality. The Constitution even rewarded the South’s political power by counting slaves as a fraction of one person, which greased census numbers.

“[It] had no legal power as a source to justify the moral imperative of blocking the expansion of slavery, and later, for emancipation,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

“I have a dream”: Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence

King told an interviewer that he ad-libbed the speech’s most famous repetition.

“I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point…the audience response was wonderful that day … And all of a sudden this thing came to me that … I’d used many times before … ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here … I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”

Of course, by the time King turned away from his scripted speech, he had spoken about this dream many times before. History professor Clayborne Carson, who oversees Stanford’s collection of King’s papers, said the phrase riffs on the song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“America”), a device that other speakers (see above) used, as did King’s family friend Archibald Carey. The Chicago lawyer, minister, and diplomat also referenced the lyrics while speaking in support of Dwight Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican Convention.

It is the emphasis on basic and universal appeals that makes the speech so memorable. Historians say that had King spoken of specifics — the March on Washington had been a rally for jobs and freedom, focusing on wages, among other issues — historical memory would be different.

“It’s about a direction, but it doesn’t have the same specific bite that some of his other speeches have, which makes it a lot more acceptable for a lot of people who don’t want to do anything specific or feel like we’ve already done it,” Orfield said.

The “dream” moves the speech’s movement from fiery Old Testament prophets to the New Testament. Its repetition echoes the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus instructs his followers: Blessed are those who hunger and search after justice; blessed are those who suffer persecution for justice’s sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Let freedom ring”: Samuel Francis Smith’s “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“America”)

These words have their origins in Samuel Francis Smith’s “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

Freedom is “probably the most fundamental American value,” Orfield said. “Even as the opponents of civil rights were fighting for ‘freedom’ from government, King wanted Americans to understand that government had to act and that civil rights law and the social and cultural changes that would come with it would bring a great expansion of freedom.”

King’s geographic references, such as the mention of Stone Mountain in Georgia, were intended to take topological high ground away from resurgent antagonists, such as the KKK.

“Free at last, free at last:” Negro spirituals and the Book of Exodus

Some of King’s thinking can be traced back to the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament. King sometimes began his Sunday sermons reading from the book. Listeners recognized the symbolism in Pharaoh, hardship going through Egypt, and the arrival at the Promised Land.

“It’s very congruent with King’s speeches,” he said. “When you were listening to Dr. King, you would hear about how we were making the path to freedom and we’re going to take down the walls of Jericho. All of this had an incredibly powerful resonance in the black churches where he was organizing people, where it was in their hearts and their souls and it became redemptive politically.”

King’s speech had a powerful inflection point at its end. After his martyrdom, King became associated with street names, public schools and more widespread honors. Lost amid the celebrations, Orfield said, was the recognition, which King held, that the work is never finished.

“The arc [of history] doesn’t bend automatically toward justice,” he said. “Plessy v. Ferguson was the law of the land for 60 years. It took a long struggle to get to Brown v. Board of Education. Every generation has to win its own rights. Anyone who thinks it ends with a big speech 50 years ago is saying something Dr. King would’ve never believed for a second.”

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My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. On both records you can hear references to other music — R&B, Dylan, psychedelia — but it’s not done in a way that is obvious or dates the records. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors in the picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera . . . and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, it would be “And Your Bird Can Sing” . . . no, “Girl” . . . no, “For No One” . . . and so on, and so on. . . .

Their breakup album, Let It Be, contains songs both gorgeous and jagged. I suppose ambition and human frailty creeps into every group, but they delivered some incredible performances. I remember going to Leicester Square and seeing the film of Let It Be in 1970. I left with a melancholy feeling.

 

Featured Photographer is  Jürgen Vollmer

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