Lobster in a Bucket

Frankie Goes to Switzerland

Frank Schaeffer has been making quite a splash in Reformed circles with his new book about his early life with his father Francis Schaeffer. In the Reformed and pseudo-Reformed circles of evangelicalism, where Francis Schaeffer's ideas still have a lot of traction, and devotion, Frank Schaeffer's new book has been raising the hackles of more than a couple folks. His reviews have run the gamut from sympathy to outright scolding.

I haven't read the book yet, and as a first year grad student, my pleasure reading list is going to next see attention sometime this summer, but this brief essay on the Huffington Post just makes me want to punch Frank Schaeffer in the face. The way he uses the cadence of "my dad" could not be crueler or more sensational. Boo hiss.

Francis Schaeffer, like most Christians, was not always the greatest person. I'm comfortable with this. And I think that we can't pretend to completely separate his character from his ideas. But I do think that Schaeffer was right about a lot of stuff, namely that there is a way to make Christianity a dynamic part of the story of our Western Culture, a story that extends into right now.