I have any father, we want to thank you for the wonderful way you work into our lives that you touch us through other people, as well as directly by your spirit and through your word. We think of all the people you've used to impact our lives over the years, and the wonderful way you have a sovereignty over our life, to bring us into contact with those people we need, and then to make us in turn a blessing to others. Father your word is truly a fragrance of life, which spreads all around this world. And as we think of this, we think of the ministry of the shafers and the way you use it to be a fragrance for life to so many, many people. And we praise you for that. And as we continue to think about the way you used their work, we pray Father that you will teach us to glorify you for the wonderful things you do among us. And that it may give us confidence as well to know that you can work in our lives and enable us to be a blessing to other people. And we ask this Father for Jesus' sake. Amen. Okay, whoever has any questions, please fire ahead Rob, why don't you start. That's a good question. I'll repeat the question. The question was, one can read Shafers' books, and there's all this material in them that he's brought together from many different sources. He's talking about different writers and painters and musicians and just all kinds of people. And these books show a great depth of understanding across many, many fields. And yet I have said in my last lecture, I've described the very busy life that he led. When did he have time to study? That's the essence of your question, isn't it? Yes. That's a very good question, because he certainly did live an extraordinarily busy life. He would read all the time that he wasn't doing other things. He's a very hardworking man. That was one of the things I said he got from his father throughout his life. He was a very, very hardworking person. He had, indeed, studied very hard in college. He had a very good memory. I think he was probably the top graduating student of his seminary and he won prizes at his college. And so when he was formally studying, he was studying hard. And he always read very widely. When he went to Europe on that first trip, that just sparked a sort of latent interest that was there, but hadn't had a chance to flourish before it sparked a latent interest in the arts. And he would then, you know, he had all kinds of fascinating books in his room. People were always sending him things, too. He would try to keep abreast with magazines and articles and so on that he got and that other people would send him. On many of his days off, on many of their holidays, they would go and visit museums and read them and do things which he normally didn't have time to do because he really enjoyed that. I mean, it was a great source of pleasure for him to go somewhere and to look at some museums or to read about some artist or musician or whatever. So he carried on, if you like, becoming a more and more cultured person to use that word in its right sense throughout his life. But it's an important question because it raises an issue which we all have to come back to as we're looking at some of his books. One of the areas where he's been most strongly criticized by other Christians, not so much by non-Christians, but by other Christians, is that he wasn't academic enough. You will find that criticism in all of the critical essays or books that have been written about him. But there weren't enough footnotes in his books that sometimes he would summarize a person's work in a way which didn't do them justice. There are particular examples which have come up many, many times. Two of them are what he said about Kierkegaard and the other is Thomas Aquinas. But in both of those in terms of what he said about them, he's been very, very strongly criticized by other Christians. I think there are several responses one could make. He never claimed to be an academic. He wasn't writing an academic history of the development of Western culture with all the necessary footnotes, etc. He was a popularizer and he understood himself very clearly that way. I think the second thing one should say was that his gift was painting in broad strokes rather than in dealing in minute detail with the development of a particular thinker or a particular period or whatever. Let me give you an illustration. When I first heard him lecture, he came to speak at Manchester University where I was a student. I wasn't a Christian at the time. I was studying English literature. Well, I'm sure even as an undergraduate student of English literature, I had read more than he had in terms of English literature. I mean that was my field. But his lecture, even though it didn't have a lot of detail, was like an illumination over the history of English literature and was far more helpful than anything I'd heard from any of my lecturers at university, though it didn't have the detail because he was what my lecturers refused to deal with as typical modern secular men was the meaning of literature. We spent all our time looking at structure and form and language and nobody ever dealt with the ideas that the great writers have themselves struggled with simply because those writers were raising questions that my teachers didn't have answers to themselves. And therefore they weren't prepared to look at those issues. I had found in my three years at university in England studying English literature, my self-increasingly frustrated by the fact that we spent all our time thinking about the details and never dealing with the real issues of literature. So that by the end of our three years and one way we were no closer to understanding what literature was really a bad thing when we started. And that's where Shafer's lecture, and he certainly wasn't a specialist in English literature, that wasn't one of his fields, I mean you could say he knew far more about philosophy and about the arts, about painting than he did about English literature. But what he said was just so helpful because he painted in very broad brush strokes and gave a kind of summary of what had happened in English literature over a 500-year period which was accurate as a broad summary. You could find individual exceptions to it but he would have acknowledged that. But he really did describe the direction in which English literature had flowed over that period of 500 years in terms of its approach to reality and where it's come to today. So that's my second point, he was painting in broad brush strokes. The third is this, that some of the areas where he's been particularly criticized like on Kierkegaard and Thomas Aquinas, you will find many scholars who study those many in great detail who would actually agree with his definition. In terms of Kierkegaard, he is a person where there is a huge amount of disagreement over exactly where he stood. What Schaeffer said about Kierkegaard for example was that Kierkegaard was the father of both secular and theological existentialism and then he made some careful qualifications about Kierkegaard himself and that he wouldn't probably approve at all of some of the things that were done with his approach. Now many Christians have taken exception to that and said no Kierkegaard was really a faithful believing Christian and he was simply reacting against dead orthodoxy and so on because Kierkegaard is such an outstanding figure as a human being that I think many evangelical Christians want to be able to say yes he is one of us because he has so many wonderful insights. Now if however you go and look at secular existentialists they will tell you that they see Kierkegaard as the father of their thinking. I mean Schaeffer's insight is not inaccurate. He is quite correct and the same if you go to theological existentialists they will see Kierkegaard as their father. Now there is no question about it. Now Schaeffer wasn't making a judgment about whether he was an individual Christian or not that's another issue but the same is true with Thomas Aquinas. You could find many scholars who would agree with Schaeffer's analysis of Thomas Aquinas. There are others who would disagree but these points where he's usually strongly criticized are areas which are actually areas of academic disagreement anyway rather than simply that he has made some gross error here. It's easier to dismiss what he says as an error because he does paint with such broad strokes. Having said that though I think that in the great majority of what he says he can't actually be faulted but it is true he wasn't an academic admission. He didn't do a great deal of really detailed work but I don't think there's any doubt that most of what he said is an accurate representation of what other people thought and certainly of the effects of their thinking on those around them on the generations that came later. But he did study a lot. You know you say when did he have time? He took the time whenever he had it. People used to ask me the same question working in Lebrie. When do you study? How do you have fine time to prepare these lectures and so on? And I would say well to be quite frank I study when I go to the bathroom. I study when I'm in the bath. I know I study on holiday wherever I go on a train anywhere or catch a plane anywhere. I take books to read. You do it whenever you can because in that kind of life you don't have a formal time. You can say to Anna Redan say I am going to spend four hours studying today and he never had that. He never had that. His study was squeezed in everywhere he could squeeze it but I think God gave him a gift of being able to see very clearly and very quickly the heart of an issue and to go past the details. Now that led him sometimes to make mistakes but he most clearly had a gift of being able to see what was the heart of an issue that came before him and that's why many people have spoken with him as a prophet in the sense that he said things about what was happening in our society long before most evangelical Christians were even aware of what was happening. You know somebody would send him an article in Time magazine and he would see the value of it and he would use that as the basis for electron something. And you know where many people would read it and say oh that's interesting and knock of it another thought he would say well that's where our culture is going. That's where we're going. And there's a very interesting little thing I showed everybody in the course on his early years that something he wrote back in 1945-46 was the first Kinsey report on sexuality in America and he wrote a little pamphlet of that time called Sin is normal. Just looking at the way the Kinsey report was basically saying you know what the American people do is what is right there is no sin what is natural is right. There are many Christians who still don't think about that issue today you know and he saw that very clearly right then in 1945 and that really was I think a gift that God gave the ability to really discern what was the fundamental issue at stake in a writer and a painting in music whatever. I think the other thing one should add though is this that when you find him making generalized statements about somebody it is important to remember that he's not thereby dismissing the person or saying that was all they said he is trying to say something which can accurately be said but it doesn't tell you everything you can say you know and he would have acknowledged that himself very very clearly in fact you sometimes find little notes to that effect in his books as you go. Okay that's a good question in fact it helps me to answer the first question more as well and that was in Lebrie now most of the branches of Lebrie now close for several weeks each year and that gives the workers time to study and to work on lectures and so on and Larry's question is how did those of us in Lebrie choose what subject we would study during a study period we had. You know that helps me to say something extra about Schaeffer as well in the early years of Lebrie there were patches where there was nobody there those became increasingly less frequent but in the first few years of Lebrie they had people every weekend but there were often patches during the week when there were very few people and sometimes nobody except one or two people who were staying with them as helpers and during that period he had far more time to study now if you take for example one set of tapes we've got in there which were never put in book form where tapes he did on the second Vatican Council and he traveled down to Italy several times to actually attend some of those sessions and read a great deal about it at the time and then came back and gave a series of lectures on the second Vatican Vatican Council where he did a great deal of thinking and study about modern-run Catholicism at that time and and where it was going what Vatican II was really about so during those early years he had far more time to study than he did later and I think much of the foundation for many of the things he said later was laid during the fifties during the fifties and early sixties before Lebrie became just packed out all the time you know in relationship to Larry's question once when we started the English Lebrie in 1971 we had no time when nobody was there we always had people all the time all the around I mean you were always there was Lebrie operates by tyranny of the immediate you know the most important thing is the people who were staying with you and their needs and that's what you try and meet it means study gets squeezed out now for for shaper in the first years of Lebrie he had long patches of time when there weren't people around all the time when most of the people of my generation the second generation of people working in Lebrie got there was never there was never time when there weren't people there and it was about I suppose 1983 1984 we decided we would have to start closing if we hadn't we'd have all died I think apart from anything else it wasn't just a question of needing time to study it was also a question of just needing time time just to be a human being and time with your family and time with yourself time with your children time with your wife and and just time to do the ordinary ordinary things that you need to do just to just to just to function as a human person I think we would have all had no breakdowns if we hadn't started closing it seemed a very radical idea at first but basically we were open all the year round except for a week of Christmas and and our holiday times were the worst times of the year because we'd go away for three weeks holiday and we come back and all our colleagues would be on holiday so the effects of your holiday were demolished in two days because you were doing three times as much as usual because everyone else was on holiday and because it was the summer there was more people there than usual so you just would die very quickly as soon as you got back but the suggestion which actually came from Richard Winter who works at the English library originally came from Richard that we should start closing at first seems such a radical suggestion and there were people who said oh we've been completely unfaithful to the history of the bribe and this kind of thing and but it saved everybody's life basically and it also did give people a chance to study and I think certainly in some of the branches the quality of lectures has risen dramatically since that time now in terms of what people study during those periods and how they choose
sometimes it's a matter of of of areas which an individual is particularly interested in more often though it's a response to the kinds of questions that people are asking or most all the lectures I gave throughout my years in the bribe I think every single one of them was in response to somebody's question I would often sit at the table on Monday morning at breakfast and say what would you like to have a lecture on and not with any guarantee that they could have one the next day on that subject but at some time I would do something on it and that's very stretching because people would ask you kinds of things you'd never thought about and you'd say okay well I'll try and do something on that so you're constantly having to stretch your own thinking and your own reading but it's a very good discipline and I'd recommend every pastor and teacher in the church to do it and say actually what do you want to hear what do you need to hear not what do I feel like saying but what do you need to hear and let's let's let's study that and that's certainly how I did my own study always was was finding out where people had their questions where people were struggling where they had their dads and where they felt they needed a lecture and then I would go and work on it do something in that area and both immediately and in terms of the long term of a project I thought well this is an area where I need to do some more thinking on this as an area where I do need to do some reading would be always in response to somebody's questions that's a good question what shape a criticized by people by people in the establishment in the established church for being too involved in the culture maybe by a few but he spoke so clearly about having some careful guidelines I remember him saying actually it's interesting you raised the example of the Beatles I was at in Switzerland in 1967 I think that was the year that Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out that album of the Beatles a wonderful album and we all went down and listened to it one evening with Schaefer and then we had a discussion about it and he said very carefully afterwards when you listen to something like this you need to take a bath afterwards and then he explained what he meant and people would often ask him you know you write you write and speak about Bergman's films but I use Bergman as an example if you think of his film the silence I remember going to see that as a non-Christian and it almost made me commit suicide on the spot it was just so devastating but you go see a film like that and Schaefer's response would have been if you go to see something like that you need to have a spiritual bath afterwards what he meant by that was among other things you both need to you need to pray about its effect on you you also need to sit down with somebody and talk about it what is being said in this how is it being said how effective is it is my thinking like that already because this is part of the culture in which I live and what is the truth that stands over against this and he recommended that's what one always did use the illustration of John stop because he's doing the same kind of thing all the time he has this group of friends that he meets with every month or two in London and they choose a film a book a piece of music or whatever and they go and they read it together or they go watch the film together or they go to the play together it's always something very contemporary which lots and lots of people in the culture are seeing or reading and then they go and have an evening to discuss it and that's really what Schaefer was saying not that you need to do that in some formal sense though I would recommend it for those of you who are students here who are single to get together with a group of other students and go and watch a film together and then come home and discuss it afterwards or a play or for those of you who are married to go with your wife and a couple of other friends and see something but discuss it afterwards don't just see it as entertainment you see that is where Christians really make a mistake if I go see a Woody Allen film it is entertaining I mean he's my favorite filmmaker but I don't go and see it justice entertainment I know I need to think about it afterwards because he's a very profound creator and he's wrestling with very profound ideas and if we don't think about them they will affect us you know communication doesn't have to go in directly through your mind and being rational about it to affect you sitting in front of the television all day or sitting in front of movies all day or listening to musical day will change the way you think especially if you don't think about it it will change it far more if you don't think about it because it will shape you unconsciously with your being completely unaware and that's what shape I meant by having a bar he emphasized that thinking the people are at liberty yes he did over and over and over again because obviously especially with young people it's very easy to overreact suppose you're coming from and many young people did who came from Christian backgrounds come from situations where the culture was a complete no-no oh it's completely ungodly to go to movies you should never listen to rock music it's all of the devil etc obviously there were many young people like that he was very careful to try to be responsible and say don't just kick over your parents rules and your churches rules you have got to be responsible yourself yes Christ has set us free for freedom and he would quote Paul in Galatians but don't use your freedom either to be either just to react against other people and hurt them that's not loving and he constantly kept emphasizing that about speaking the truth in love and for your own self realize that it's dangerous just to go and throw yourself into something just as a matter of reaction you need to be really aware of your own spiritual health and of the powerful effectiveness of these things so he would speak about it all the time yes as something that people ought to be careful of now I'm sure some young people left the breed and went overboard and there were a few people who who criticized him very strongly for thinking understanding the culture was important even Martin Lloyd Jones for example who he knew personally thought that his emphasis on culture was a complete distraction from evangelism and and he said so publicly but I think so many many people in America who could have been people who might have been critical were so thankful the fact that there were so many of their own children and young people from their own churches who were really helped by going to Switzerland and were helped by Shae for that they didn't criticize him there were many people who felt their own children were drifting away from the faith I mean I'm talking about seminary professors and Christian college teachers and pastors who felt they were losing their own children who went to the tree and they got really helped and they came back and those people weren't prepared to criticize them of course they weren't yeah because they they were just so thankful that somebody had helped their kids when they felt they were losing them and so I think most people saw very clearly that he had a really balanced and carefully thought out position here and he would say that very often he hadn't even seen some of these movies that he talked about that he had read reviews of them he was quite honest about that he certainly went to see some of them that he didn't see every movie that he spoke about about that's an excellent question I miss a very important issue but it is quite interesting in a way because coming out of the separatist background that he came from these things really were an absolute no but as I said you know his his own background was non-Christian he never bought into that personal legalism edith had a real problem with it as a young Christian herself she loved to dance which was a complete no no so she never bought into that and they just learned quite quickly to have a very sensible attitude towards these things Rebecca yeah where did where does one draw the line in terms of finding out about the culture and and where did she for draw the line
I think he would have made several responses to to that question and I'll try to think in his shoes for a moment that I think the first thing he would have said is you have to be aware of what is happening to you in terms of your own status and individual that your own thinking as a person and that will vary depending on your maturity as a Christian and many other things let me use an illustration for my own life before I was a Christian I had two favorite kinds of music that I listened to a great deal one was rhythm and blues a lot of which is very sad and a lot of which speaks very painfully and acutely about the brokenness of the human condition and I listened to it because I identified with it completely and when that's where I was it described where I was as a person the other kind of music I listened a lot to was was classical music from composers like Richard Strauss and Marla and again I listened to it for some of the same reasons and Debussy because again it laments the human condition in a very acute way if you've ever heard for example the music from Strauss's opera electric it's it's from that famous Greek story and the the opera is partly about the futility of life in this world and about the way people are driven to desperation by feeling trapped in their existence in the end of that opera if you remember the Greek story arrestes has to kill his mother he's required to do so because she has committed adultery and had her husband murdered his father by his culture he's required to put his mother to death as an act of justice quite a nester but then the fury it's also a sin to kill your mother I mean he's caught in his culture he's caught by the gods and he is driven to madness then by the furies and there's no escape for him and all Greek drama is like that people are absolutely trapped in this web of fate from which they cannot escape they have the duty which they have to carry out and they'll be punished if they don't and if they do they'll be punished anyway and there's no escape well for where I was as a non-Christian who is basically in a very existentialist position that music summarized exactly where I was as a person and I listened to it because it confirmed my understanding of reality you might say well that's rather morbid making yourself feel even more miserable yes it most certainly is and I think for anybody in that position there is an element of an ugly kind of self-centeredness and self-pity which is bound up into into digging yourself ever deeper into the mire in which you find yourself but I didn't know anything else to make an excuse myself now when I became a Christian I wasn't able to listen to either of those kinds of music for several years without them immediately having the same kind of impact on me that they'd had before because music is very powerful and it evokes all kinds of feelings in you over which you have very little control particularly when you've given yourself to that music as I had done as a young Christian I had to stop listening to it because it was very destructive to me personally in terms of just syncing me into into a state of despair and self-pity now within five years I could listen to it with no problem at all and it didn't have the same effect I was able to be a little more objective about it now I just used that as an illustration to make the point that it is very important that we understand how things are affecting us that we don't think my Christian freedom means that I can go to any movie I can listen to any music no matter what it does to me we really need to be aware I remember another young man who came to stay with us who who was coming from a kind of existential position and he loved to read Kamu and Kafka well again when he was converted he had to stop reading it for a couple of years because it had shaped his whole understanding of reality and he admired those writers so much that to start reading them again for a while had the same effect you just have to be sensible the other thing I would say for all of us whether we've got any particular background like that or not we all need to be aware of our own sinfulness I've seen movies for example which I wish I had never been to see movies are a very powerful medium they create images which are there on the screen and they stay in your mind and they make your mind dirty they can do and some of them we can do without let me give you an illustration I went to see James Joyce Ulysses I wish I had never seen it I cannot forget it now I wish I hadn't seen it because of some of the images that were in that movie I don't need that all of us are sinful enough anyway without having having things paraded on a screen in a dramatic way which you will never forget you know there are certain films I simply would not go to see I have no desire to see them because I know I'm aware of my own weaknesses and I think it's very important that we that we that we acknowledge that I think she would have said that very strongly he did say that very strongly the freedom must never become a basis for the indulgence of one's sinful nature so those are the first two things in relationship to ourselves I think the second thing he would have said is that we have to be very careful not to put a stumbling block in the way by the people that he was he was he tried to be careful how he expressed this though because the Pharisees in the church use that argument to impose their views on everybody else the legalists say we don't think you should do this so nobody should do it and you're causing me to be offended if you do it they're turning Paul's argument about not causing an offense on its head when they do that what he's talking about is people who know they have freedom like he did himself as as a believer mature questions who know they have freedom not being a stumbling block to add a younger struggling believers who really would offend their own conscience if they joined in with this behavior not to the Pharisee who's just making rules for everybody and who's not going to stumble at all who's just going to in fact use it as a means to judge somebody if they do something now I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about the legalist we ought to love everyone including the legalist but sometimes we need to challenge them with their legalism rather than allow them to dictate to the whole church about how everybody else should live Paul's argument about being an offense is addressed to making sure we don't cause other people to stumble who are not clear in their own conscience about what is right let's use an illustration suppose I think that it's perfectly or right for a Christian to dance or to drink or to go to a movie or or whatever it happens to be and I do those things in moderation but I have some young Christian coming to stay with us who has been brought up in a home and in a church where they have been told that all of those things ever drinking alcohol ever going to a movie ever dancing are really sinful I may discuss the subject with a person who comes to stay with me but the last thing I will do is serve him wine at the table or take him to a movie or take him to a dance
because when somebody's first coming to deal with an issue like this their own conscience isn't clear and Paul says if you sin against your own conscience even if your conscience is wrong that's a sin you mustn't offend your own conscience even if it's misinformed so you need to be very careful always for the younger Christian but you're not doing things which are going to really put trouble in somebody else's life and cause them to offend their own conscience the third is it's very important to not out of go out of our way to offend people and there it becomes a matter of principle or rather it becomes a matter of prudence to know when to stand on a principle and when to give up whatever it is one does or knows one has the freedom to do for the sake of others and you can think of Paul here and shape use this example many times there's one occasion you remember where Paul is it has Timothy was it Titus circumcised because the Judaizers will be offended if he isn't who is it Titus Timothy or Titus Timothy thank you he has Timothy circumcised now just Paul do that because he thinks everybody should be circumcised and no he says neither circumcision run circumcision is anything just a new creation but he does it because he doesn't want to upset anybody so he's prepared to do all kinds of things which are not necessary for the sake of a gospel he'll be a Jew to the Jew and a Greek to the Greeks for the sake of a gospel even if it means doing all kinds of things that he wouldn't normally do himself which he has the freedom not to do but if it's made a principle by these other people and they say everybody has got to be circumcised or nobody must ever go to a movie or nobody must ever drink a glass of wine because that's really wicked or whatever the issue happens to be then is the time to stand up like Paul said and say hold on a minute you're preaching another gospel you're preaching another gospel there is only one way of salvation that is through Jesus Christ there is only one measure of spirituality and that is a person's relationship with the Lord not whether they do this particular thing or not whether it's having somebody circumcised or going to a movie or not going to a movie or a bang some rules that somebody's set up about this or that or anything else one has to stand on the matter of principle at some point you know when it becomes an issue which threatens to cloud the nature and freedom of the gospel and that's where that's where we have to pray for the wisdom of the Holy Spirit to know when to stand and when to just quietly go along and and do whatever one's going to do like Paul says I won't eat meat till the world ends it's going to upset somebody even though I have perfect freedom to eat meat but if they make it a principle and say anybody who eats meat cannot be a true believer then you say hold on a minute that's not the gospel at all that would be the second whole area of what you could call a fence and being wise and prudent there and really praying for God's wisdom about when's freedom as a Christian to be involved in the culture the third area I think is equally important and that is it was precisely because he was prepared to be involved in the culture that shape was able to communicate to so many non-Christians and there is a biblical command there which we're going to be talking about a lot in apologetics but if we are really going to communicate to people we have to understand the culture in which they live and there's no way to understand it if I say I will never read anything written by a non-Christian I will never listen to any music produced by a non-Christian I will never go to a movie unless it's made by a Christian that is one of the very serious problems of the church today that it has built a wall around itself of involvement in only Christian things to keep ourselves safe from the world to keep ourselves safe from this wicked culture around us and it's no wonder that evangelism is so difficult while somebody has got to break that wall down and start actually trying to understand the culture to communicate with people and that's what shape it did and it's very important to be able to do that but with these other Provisors in mind all the time but if somebody comes to you and says well I don't care how many non-Christians you reach out to no Christians should ever have anything to do with this culture at all you have to say hold on a minute here there's something really basic at stake which is the fulfillment of the great commission which I'm afraid is far more important than your rules
and in the end it it demonstrates a very serious insecurity about the gospel if we don't think that it has the power to confront the culture and to deal with it I mean this is the truth we don't need to be bothered about what other people are saying we should have every confidence in fact I would say exactly that you the more you begin to understand the culture in which we live the more we read and see and be involved in what our culture is producing the more we will become acutely aware of the powerful truth of the gospel and its liberating nature and how little our culture has to offer people I think that exposure to the culture strengthens Christians rather than weakens them we'll be see what the alternatives are and I would add finally in really relationship to this it's a matter of compassion to the unbeliever it's simply that I am very thankful that there were some Christians like Shaefer and Mike Timstack the first and I was converted through who had spent time at Libri and who played Shaper's takes I'm very thankful that God raised up people like that who were prepared to understand the culture because I wouldn't be a Christian today if there wasn't somebody who had done that and there were a lot of other people in the same position okay I know there's a couple more of you had questions here Rob I know you had a question you haven't had a chance to to ask okay