Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices”

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason”

Taking up for Francis Schaeffer’s book Christian Manifesto

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 6 “The Scientific Age”

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age”

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 4 “The Reformation”

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance”

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Here are videos from the HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? film series: Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” ,  episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” , episode 4 “The Reformation”,  episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and  episode 1 “The Roman Age,” .

A Christian Manifesto Francis Schaeffer

“We stand today on the edge of a great abyss,” they wrote. “At this crucial moment choices are being made and thrust on us that will for many years to come affect the way people are treated. We want to try to help tip the scales on the side of those who believe that individuals are unique and special and have great dignity.”

This year marks the 25th anniversary of “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” by Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop. The anniversary serves to remind us just how unaware and unawake most evangelicals really were 25 years ago — and how prophetic the voices of Schaeffer and Koop were.

Whatever Happened to the Human Race? was both a book project and a film series, the fruit of an unusual collaboration between Francis Schaeffer, one of the truly significant figures of 20th-century evangelicalism, and C. Everett Koop, one of the nation’s most illustrious pediatric surgeons. They were an odd couple of sorts, but on the crucial issues of human dignity and the threat of what would later be called the “Culture of Death,” they were absolutely united.

Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984, was nothing less than a 20th-century prophet. He was a genuine eccentric, given to wearing leather breeches and sporting a goatee — then quite unusual for anyone in the evangelical establishment. Then again, Schaeffer was never really a member of any establishment, and that is partly why a generation of questioning young people made their way to his Swiss study center known as L’Abri.

Big ideas were Schaeffer’s business — and the Christian worldview was his consistent framework. Long before most evangelicals even knew they had a worldview, Schaeffer was taking alternative worldviews apart and inculcating in his students a love for the architecture of Christian truth and the dignity of ideas.

Key figures on the evangelical left wrote Schaeffer off as a crank, and he returned the favor by denying that they were evangelicals at all. They complained that he did not follow their rules for scholarly publication. He pointed out that people actually read his books — and young people frustrated with cultural Christianity read his books by the thousands. They were looking for someone with ideas big enough for the age, relevant for the questions of the times, and based without compromise in Christian truth. Francis Schaeffer — knee pants and all — became a prophet for the age.

Dr. C. Everett Koop, on the other hand, is a paragon of the American establishment — a former surgeon-in-chief at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia and later surgeon general of the United States under President Reagan. In 1974 Koop catapulted to international attention by performing the first successful surgical separation of conjoined twins. A Presbyterian layman, Koop lives in quasi-retirement in Pennsylvania. His surgical procedures remain textbook cases for medical students today.

Whatever Happened to the Human Race? awakened American evangelicals to the anti-human technologies and ideologies that then threatened human dignity. Most urgently, the project put abortion unquestionably on the front burner of evangelical concern. The tenor of the times is seen in the fact that Schaeffer and Koop had to argue to evangelicals in the late 1970s that abortion was not just a “Catholic” issue. They taught many evangelicals a new and urgently needed vocabulary about embryo ethics, euthanasia and infanticide. They knew they were running out of time.

“Each era faces its own unique blend of problems,” they argued. “Our time is no exception. Those who regard individuals as expendable raw material — to be molded, exploited, and then discarded — do battle on many fronts with those who see each person as unique and special, worthwhile, and irreplaceable.”

Every age is marked by both the “thinkable” and the “unthinkable,” they asserted — and the “thinkable” of late-20th-century Western cultures was dangerously anti-human. The lessons of the century — with the Holocaust at its center — should be sufficient to drive the point home. The problem, as illustrated by those who worked in Hitler’s death camps, was the inevitable result of a loss of conscience and moral truth. They were “people just like all of us,” Koop and Schaeffer reminded. “We seem to be in danger of forgetting our seemingly unlimited capacities for evil, once boundaries to certain behavior are removed.”

By the last quarter of the century, life and death were treated as mere matters of choice. “The schizophrenic nature of our society became further evident as it became common practice for pediatricians to provide the maximum of resuscitative and supportive care in newborn intensive-care nurseries where premature infants were under their care — while obstetricians in the same medical centers were routinely destroying enormous numbers of unborn babies who were normal and frequently of larger size. Minors who could not legally purchase liquor and cigarettes could have an abortion-on-demand and without parental consent or knowledge.”

Schaeffer and Koop pointed to other examples of moral schizophrenia. Disabled persons were given new access to facilities and services in the name of human rights, while preborn infants diagnosed with the same disabilities were often aborted — with the advice that it would be “wrong” to bring such a baby into the world.

Long before the discovery of stem cells and calls for the use of human embryos for such experimentation, Schaeffer and Koop warned of attacks upon human life at its earliest stage. “Embryos ‘created’ in the biologist’s laboratory raise special questions because they have the potential for growth and development if planted in the womb. The disposal of these live embryos is a cause for ethical and moral concern.”

They also saw the specter of infanticide and euthanasia. Infanticide, including what is now called “partial-birth abortion,” is murder, they argued. “Infanticide is being practiced right now in this country, and the saddest thing about this is that it is being carried on by the very segment of the medical profession which has always stood in the role of advocate for the lives of children.” Long before the formal acceptance of euthanasia in countries like the Netherlands, Koop and Schaeffer saw the rise of a “duty to die” argument used against the old, the very sick and the unproductive. They rejected euthanasia in the case of a “so-called vegetative existence” and warned all humanity that disaster awaited a society that lusted for a “beautiful death.”

“Abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are not only questions for women and other relatives directly involved — nor are they the prerogatives of a few people who have thought through the wider ramifications,” they declared. “They are life-and-death issues that concern the whole human race equally and should be addressed as such.”

How did this happen? This embrace of an anti-human “humanism” could only be explained by the rejection of the Christian worldview. “Judeo-Christian teaching was never perfectly applied,” they acknowledged, “but it did lay a foundation for a high view of human life in concept and practice.” Through the inculcation of biblical values, “people viewed human life as unique — to be protected and loved — because each individual is made in the image of God.”

Two great enemies of truth were blamed for this loss of biblical truth — modern secularism and theological liberalism. The secularists insist on the imposition of a “humanism” that defines humanity in terms of productivity, arbitrary standards of beauty and health, and an inverted system of value. Theological liberalism, denying the truthfulness of the Bible, robs the church and the society of any solid authority. The biblical concept of humanity made in the image of God is treated as poetry rather than as truth. But, “if people are not made in the image of God, the pessimistic, realistic humanist is right: The human race is indeed an abnormal wart on the smooth face of a silent and meaningless universe.”

Everything else simply follows. “In this setting, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia … are completely logical. Any person can be obliterated for what society at one moment thinks of as its own social or economic good.” Once human life and human dignity are devalued to this degree, recovery is extremely difficult — if not impossible.

The past 25 years has been a period of even more rapid technological and moral change. We now face threats to human dignity unimaginable just a quarter-century ago. We must now deal with the ethical challenges of embryo research, human cloning, the Human Genome Project and the rise of transhuman technologies. Even with many Christians aware and active on these issues, we are losing ground.

Francis Schaeffer and Everett Koop ended their book with a call for action. “If, in this last part of the twentieth century, the Christian community does not take a prolonged and vocal stand for the dignity of the individual and each person’s right to life — for the right of each person to be treated as created in the image of God, rather than as a collection of molecules with no unique value — we feel that as Christians we have failed the greatest moral test to be put before us in this century.”

In this new century, that warning is even more threatening and more urgent. The challenges of the 21st century are even greater than those faced in the century before. This should make us even more thankful for the prophetic witness of Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop — and even more determined to contend for life. Humanity still stands on the brink of that abyss.
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Adapted from the Crosswalk.com weblog of R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

What Ever Happened to the Human Race?

In “Evangelical dynasty undone,” Arkansas Times Blog, August 20, 2011,Max Brantley wrote:

Ever heard of the influential evangelical Francis Schaeffer? (Mike Huckabee once said his favorite book after the Bible was Schaeffer’s “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” and he’s been described as having a “profound” influence on Michele Bachmann.) Best reading of the morning is this New York Times article about how Schaeffer’s son, Frank, eventually turned away from his father’s politically conservative Christian ways and spurned the dynastic inheritance that could have been his. He’s written a memoir, “Sex, Mom and God.”

In 1969 my former pastor Bill Elliff was a college student and someone told him about Francis Schaeffer speaking at Wheaton college in Chicago. He drove up  there and heard him speak. He spoke about abortion and asst suicide and many of the social changes that would be happening in the next few decades. LOOKING BACK HE COULD HAVE NOT BEEN MORE RIGHT? However, the liberals like Max Brantley keep attacking him because he is dangerous because his films expose the weaknesses of the secular humanist point of view.

Francis Schaeffer is a hero of mine and I want to honor him with a series of posts on Sundays called “Schaeffer Sundays” which will include his writings and clips from his film series. I have posted many times in the past using his material.

What Ever Happened to the Human Race?

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Death is universal. Apart from the intervention of the second advent of Christ, every human being will die. But how humans should die is a point of keen debate in the history of ethics.

Christians and non-Christians have deeply disagreed over the ethical validity of “non-natural” means of human death, namely suicide, abortion, infanticide, capital punishment, war, and euthanasia. And even among Christians there have been deep disagreements over whether these means of human death are ever legitimate. Specifically, then, what should a Christian think about the surging interest in euthanasia in our largely non-Christian culture?

For a host of reasons including advancements in medical technology, the aging of America, and the increasing impact of the secularization of our society, the concept of “quality of life” continues to supplant the concept of “sanctity of life.” Not surprisingly, the practice of euthanasia, simply translated as “the good death,” is a topic of increasing interest and concern.

The stories of Karen Ann Quinlan, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Hemlock Society, and Terri Shiavo have filled the news. “Death with dignity,” “mercy killing,” “the right to die,” or “physician assisted suicide” identify some of the claims of the advocates of euthanasia.

To consider the issues surrounding euthanasia, or the alleged “good death,” it is essential to understand how we, as a society, have arrived at the point where legislators are discussing not how we are to live, but how we are to die.

The Advent of the Culture of Death

Euthanasia is not new. But its rise to the forefront of our social and political discussions can be seen as one outcome of the legalization of abortion in 1973. Claims by the critics of abortion that its legalization would naturally lead to infanticide and euthanasia were seen as scare tactics to keep women from exercising their “right to privacy” or “right to choose.” However, it was not long until these warnings were becoming realities. “Deformed” children were being starved to death or refused treatment and newborn infants were being discarded in trash bins.

Surgeon General of the U.S. Dr. C. Everett Koop responded to the euthanasia/infanticide by starvation of a Down syndrome child in a Bloomfield, Ind., hospital by writing an article in 1980 entitled “Slide to Auschwitz.” He explained that when the “quality of life” value system replaces the “sanctity of life” ethic, it is the first step to what the Nazi physicians at Auschwitz proclaimed—namely, that the unhealthy, the aged, the handicapped, the mentally incompetent, or the dying were lebensunwerten Lebens, or “life unworthy of life.”

Francis Schaeffer explained this emerging thinking when he described an article by author Charles Hartshorne in a 1981 article in The Christian Century entitled “Concerning Abortion, an Attempt at a Rational View.” Schaeffer wrote, “He [Hartshorne] begins by equating the fact that the human fetus is alive with the fact that mosquitoes and bacteria are also alive. That is, he begins by assuming that human life is not unique. He then continues by saying that even after the baby is born it is not fully human until its social relations develop (though he says the infant does have some primitive social relations an unborn fetus does not have). His conclusion is, ‘Nevertheless, I have little sympathy with the idea that infanticide is just another form of murder. Persons who are already functionally persons in the full sense have more important rights even than infants.’ He then, logically takes the next step: ‘Does this distinction apply to the killing of a hopelessly senile person or one in a permanent coma? For me it does.’ No atheistic humanist could say it with greater clarity.”

The high priest of mercy killing, Dr. Peter Singer of Princeton makes the thinking clear in his book Practical Ethics: “I do not deny that if one accepts abortion … the case for euthanasia … is strong. … euthanasia is not something to be regarded with horror. … On the contrary, once we abandon those doctrines about the sanctity of human life … it is the refusal to accept euthanasia which, in some cases, is horrific.” Thus the leaps from abortion to infanticide, to voluntary euthanasia, and ultimately to involuntary euthanasia are not leaps at all, but the natural consequence of stepping onto the slippery slope of morality apart from God.

The Unfolding Expression of the Culture of Death

To a society which no longer embraces the sanctity of human life, the natural extension of a woman’s “right to choose” is a person’s right to die at the time and under the conditions of their own choosing. Physician John M. Templeton, Jr., explains, “This right of personal autonomy regarding medical intervention can contribute to the concept of death with dignity. However, some persons have begun to try and push the concept of rights into extreme positions. In the words of Leon Kass, author of Death with Dignity and the Sanctity of Life, ‘We find people asserting a “right to die” grounded not in objective conditions regarding prognosis or the uselessness of treatment, but in the supremacy of choice itself. In the name of choice, people claim the right to choose to cease to be choosing beings. From such a right to refuse not only treatment, but life itself—that is, from a right to become dead—it is then a small step to the right to be made dead. From my right to die will follow your duty to assist me in dying, i.e., to become the agent of my death, if I am not able, or do not wish, to kill myself.’”

The ultimate expression of the culture of death is of course, the arbitrary killing of human beings based on some yet to be determined criteria, such as age, health, productivity, or cost to society. Philip E. Hughes writes, “given the evolutionist presupposition that the species is of far more consequence than the individual, that Man matters rather than man, it is far from fantastic to envisage the enactment of a law which, in the interest of mankind, would prescribe that on reaching, say, the age of 60, persons should be ‘put to sleep’—painlessly of course—by means of a pill, potion, or an injection.”

What role do physicians play in this new paradigm of the culture of death where they are called no longer to be life givers and sustainers, but instead to become managers of life and death? Templeton, in Death and Dying, writes, “The Dutch, in their research on euthanasia, found that many physicians acted with the initial intention of relieving pain and suffering, but also with the admitted ‘partial intention’ of hastening death. Now the Dutch parliament has lifted all restraints and has completely legalized active euthanasia, even in some cases without the patient’s consent.”

In the end, Peter Singer’s questions paint the road map for the culture of death. “For me, the relevant question is, what makes it so seriously wrong to take a life? Those of you who are not vegetarians are responsible for taking a life every time you eat. Species is no more relevant than race in making these judgments.” Singer posits the ultimate question, “But why should human life have special value?”

The Imago Dei

Why is human life precious and why is it wrong to take a life? For the Christian, the answer is clear. We are created by God; in fact, we are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28.). But living out that answer is not always simple or easy. This understanding of the sanctity of life is undergirded by God’s moral law, summarized in the sixth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” J. Douma writes, “When we live and die in God’s presence, we do not exercise self-determination over ourselves. When God says that we may not kill, then we must not proceed stubbornly to put an end to our own lives. The wish for death can be a Christian desire, even outside of the dying stage of life (see Philippians 1:23). We may even pray for that; but that kind of praying itself presupposes that we must leave the realization thereof to God Himself.”

Professor J. J. Davis further clarifies how euthanasia is a violation of the sixth commandment: “Human life is sacred because God made man in his own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-28). This canopy of sacredness extends throughout man’s life, and is not simply limited to those times and circumstances when man happens to be strong, independent, healthy, and fully conscious of his relationships to others. … The same God who lovingly is present in the womb can be present in the dying and comatose patient, for whom conscious human relationships are broken. The body of the dying can still be a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), and hence sacred to God. The euthanasia mentality sees man as the lord of his own life; the Christian sees human life as a gift from God, to be held in trusteeship throughout man’s life on earth: ‘You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body’ (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Determining the moment of death is God’s prerogative, not man’s (Job 14:5). Man does not choose his own death, but acquiesces in the will of the heavenly Father, knowing that for the believer, death is both the last enemy, and the doorway to eternal life. Because man bears the image of God, his life is sacred in every state of its existence, in sickness or in health, in the womb, in infancy, in adolescence, in maturity, in old age, or even in the process of dying itself.”

In a culture of death, Christians are called to be shining lights of hope to a forlorn and fallen world. When Christians choose life for themselves and/or others—offering to the suffering not deadly poisons, but rather Christ’s life-giving love in word and deed—they reflect the gospel hope of the eternal life promised by Christ’s resurrection.

Dr. Peter A. Lillback is senior pastor of Proclamation Presbyterian Church (PCA) and president of Westminster Theological Seminary.

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)

Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)