On The Great Evangelical Disaster (1984), By Francis Schaeffer
Bernard Pyron
When I first became a Christian I began to read the books of Francis
Schaeffer. I read almost all of them, and corresponded with him
briefly when he was still in Switzerland, before he died. Schaeffer
was Reformed, but I do not remember anything in his books about Five
Point Calvinism.
He was not a dispensationalist, but I don't remember him being
critical of dispensationalism. He is said to have been historical
premillennialist, but again, I don't remember him writing about that.
Schaeffer belonged to a small Reformed denomination, the Reformed
Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod which I think became the
Presbyterian Church in America. During his lifetime, the falling away
had not become as evident as it is now.
His last book was The Great Evangelical Disaster (1984). Schaeffer was
concerned that evangelicals were no longer standing up for the truth,
and that Christianity had lost much of its influence upon the world,
which says in the words of Daniel 12: 7 that the power of the holy
people had by 1984 been scattered. The spiritual power of Christians
had been reduced, and had Schaeffer been younger (he was born in
1912), he might by now understand that the great number of English
translations of the Bible, almost entirely based on the Alexandarian
or Egyptian Greek texts, meant to replace the Textus Receptus, has
been one cause of this, along with the almost complete takeover of the
Evangelical church by the dispensationalists.
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