Francis Schaeffer Finds Intellectual Faith

The tent smelled of sawdust and rain on canvas. I sat three rows back on a plank bench, next to my older brother who had dragged me there because our mother insisted we needed saving. The preacher’s voice carried over the field outside Germantown, steady and sharp, the way a foreman calls out instructions on a loading dock. Lights hung from wires strung between poles. Every so often a moth hit the glass and dropped.

I had seen Francis Schaeffer around the neighborhood for two years. He worked afternoons at the print shop after classes at the high school. We had spoken once about engines. He told me he was thinking of studying engineering at Drexel. Then one afternoon he showed up at the Germantown First Presbyterian Church with a book on Greek philosophy he said he had bought by mistake. After that he stopped talking about engines.

That night in the tent he sat alone on the end of a bench, elbows on his knees, staring at the ground between his boots. The preacher finished the sermon and gave the invitation. People began moving forward. Schaeffer stayed seated until the singing started again. Then he stood and walked the short aisle without looking up. He knelt on the sawdust. The preacher placed a hand on his shoulder and prayed. When Schaeffer rose, his face was wet, but he did not wipe it. He turned and walked back to his bench. He sat the same way he had before.

After the meeting I waited near the exit. He came out carrying his jacket. I asked if he wanted to walk back toward the trolley. He said yes. We crossed the field in silence for a block. Then he said the questions he had carried since reading that philosophy book had not disappeared. They had simply found a different place to rest. He said the Bible answered them where the Greeks had left gaps. I did not know what to answer, so I said nothing.

In the weeks that followed he came to every service at the church. Two older men there, both elders, began lending him books. One had studied at Princeton years earlier. They told him about a minister named Machen who had left that seminary over questions of Scripture. Schaeffer listened and took notes on scraps of paper he kept folded in his shirt pocket. He still worked at the print shop, but now he read during lunch. The men at the shop teased him about the Greek words he muttered while setting type.

By fall the church had started a small study group that met in the basement on Tuesday nights. Schaeffer led the discussion twice. He spoke plainly about the difference between a worldview built on human reason alone and one built on the fact that God had spoken. The room stayed full. People brought friends. One night a college student from across town asked how anyone could know truth at all. Schaeffer answered that the same God who made the world had also given the mind to understand it. The student came back the next week.

Schaeffer’s mother noticed the change first. She told my mother that her son now rose before dawn to read. His father, who had left school after the third grade, said little but stopped complaining when the boy came home late from church meetings. The family attended services together for the first time in years.

In early winter the pastor asked Schaeffer to give his testimony at a youth gathering. He stood at the front of the room and described the months when he had tried to live without God. He said the attempt had left him certain that nothing mattered. Then he described the night in the tent. He did not raise his voice. When he finished, the room stayed quiet for several seconds. Afterward three young men asked him to meet with them the following week.

By spring of 1931 he had decided against engineering. The two elders arranged for him to visit Hampden-Sydney College. He took the train south and returned with application papers. He told me the school would let him work his way through. He packed his books in a single trunk and left on the morning train in September. Before boarding he handed me a note with the address of the college and asked me to write if any of the study group had new questions.