“Come, Christian Triune God Who Lives” (Francis Schaeffer)
Listen to Francis Schaeffer’s words from his 1972
book True Spirituality. In the chapter entitled “The Supernatural
Universe” he says:
Little by little, many Christians in this
generation find the reality slipping away. The reality tends to get covered by
the barnacles of naturalistic thought. Indeed, I suppose this is one of half a
dozen questions that are most often presented to me by young people from
Christian backgrounds: where is the reality? Where has the reality gone? I have
heard it spoken in honest, open desperation by fine young Christians in many
countries. As the ceiling of the naturalistic comes down upon us, as it invades
by injection or by connotation, reality gradually slips away.
Schaeffer was in earnest about this cry for
reality. He was not just reporting the “honest, open desperation” of “fine
young Christians” who came to him in the early seventies; he had also asked
these questions himself, in almost the same language, twenty years before. In
the very next sentence he gives the answer as he had found it:
But the fact that Christ as the Bridegroom brings
forth fruit through me as the bride, through the agency of the indwelling Holy
Spirit by faith ““this fact opens the way for me as a Christian to begin to
know in the present life the reality of the supernatural. This is where the
Christian is to live. Doctrine is important, but it is not an end in itself.
There is to be an experiential reality, moment by moment. (True Spirituality,
from Schaeffer’s Works volume III, p. 264)
It would be easy to overlook one of the most
important elements in this answer: the Trinitarian element. The road to
spiritual reality, according to Schaeffer, is through an experienced reality of
God, but specifically of the fact “that Christ “¦ brings forth fruit through me
“¦ through the agency of the indwelling Holy Spirit.” The reality Schaeffer
invites us to understand and experience is a trinitarian reality, an experience
of God the Father through the Son and the Spirit. And the God who Schaeffer
points to in all his most popular writings, the God who is there and is not
silent, is not God in general, but God the Holy Trinity. Schaeffer goes on,
becoming more insistently trinitarian as he develops the thought:
This experiential result, however, is not just an
experience of “bare” supernaturalism, without content, without our being able
to describe and communicate it. It is much more. It is a moment-by-moment,
increasing, experiential relationship to Christ and to the whole Trinity. We
are to be in a relationship with the whole Trinity. The doors are open now: the
intellectual doors, and also the doors to reality. (True Spirituality, Works III:264)
Schaeffer attributes his effectiveness in later
ministry to his encounter with the Trinity. In his 1974 position paper for the
Lausanne congress on evangelization, Schaeffer tells the story of the deep
period of doubt and perplexity in his life in 1951 and 1952. Troubled by the
lack of spiritual reality in the Christian groups he worked with, Schaeffer
began asking why. He thought his way all the way back to his original
agnosticism, and put all of his beliefs and commitments back on the table for
re-negotiation. He paced back and forth for months, or took long walks when the
weather permitted. He notified his wife Edith that if he didn’t find what he
needed in Christianity, he would reject it and then do something else with his
life. His conclusion:
I came to realize that indeed I had been right in
becoming a Christian. But then I went on further and wrestled deeper and asked,
“But then where is the spiritual reality, Lord, among most of that which calls
itself orthodoxy?” And gradually I found something. I found something that I
had not been taught, a simple thing but profound. I discovered the meaning of
the work of Christ, the meaning of the blood of Christ, moment by moment in our
lives after we are Christians “the moment-by-moment work of the whole Trinity
in our lives because as Christians we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. That is
true spirituality.” (III:416-417).
Writing about this turning point in his life,
Schaeffer later said: “Gradually the sun came out and the song came.
Interestingly enough, although I had written no poetry for many years, in that
time of joy and song I found poetry beginning to flow again “¦ admittedly, as
poetry it is very poor, but it expressed a song in my heart which was wonderful
to me.” (preface to True Spirituality, Works III:196). And there is a
bit of poetry, first published in 1960 and later reprinted in the preface to
1974′s No Little People, which captures what Schaeffer was seeking and
what he found:
To eat, to breathe
to beget
Is this all there is
Chance configuration of atom against atom
of god against god
I cannot believe it.
Come, Christian Triune God who lives,
Here am I
Shake the world again.
“The Christian Triune God who lives” did answer
that prayer, and shook the world through Schaeffer’s ministry.
In 1951, Francis Schaeffer had an encounter with
the Trinity that revolutionized his life. I wrote about that discovery in “’Come,
Christian Triune God Who Lives’ (Francis Schaeffer).” It sparked the phase of
his ministry that we all remember him for, and put him in touch with a sense of
spiritual reality he had lacked before: “a moment-by-moment, increasing,
experiential relationship to Christ and to the whole Trinity. We are to be in a
relationship with the whole Trinity.”
But when this change came over him, he didn’t sit
down and write a treatise on the Trinity; instead, he famously started writing
about everything else under the sun. As a result, if you want the details of
Schaeffer’s trinitarian view of salvation (his soteriology), you have to piece
it together from a few places scattered around his writings. The most
programmatic statement of Schaeffer’s Trinitarian soteriology is in his book True
Spirituality (also reprinted in Vol. III of the Collected Works, p.
270-271). He connects the dots this way:
“¦the Holy Spirit indwelling the individual
Christian is not only the agent of Christ, but he is also the agent of the
Father. Consequently, when I accept Christ as my Savior, my guilt is gone, I am
indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and I am in communication with the Father and the
Son, as well as of the Holy Spirit ““the entire Trinity. Thus now, in the
present life, if I am justified, I am in a personal relationship with each of
the members of the Trinity. God the Father is my Father; I am in union with the
Son; and I am indwelt by the Holy Spirit. This is not just meant to be
doctrine; it is what I have now. (True Spirituality; Works III:271)
If you want even more detail on trinitarian
salvation, you have to follow Schaeffer into the land of direct, personal Bible
study. His basic course in Bible knowledge has been published as the series Basic
Bible Studies (found in the Collected Works, Vol. II, pp. 325ff). The
striking simplicity of these studies is underlined by the direct appeal
Schaeffer makes to the reader:
It would be my advice that each time you do these
studies, you speak to God and ask Him to give you understanding through the use
of the bible and the study together. If someone pursues these studies who does
not believe that God exists, I would suggest that you say aloud in the
quietness of your room: “O God, if there is a God, I want to know whether You
exist. And I ask You that I may be willing to bow before You if You do exist.”
(Works, II:323)
What else would you expect from a Christian
writer whose message was summed up in the affirmation, “He is there, and He is
not silent”?
According to Schaeffer, every Christian who
wanted to understand salvation and the Christian life was obligated to come to
grips with the biblical revelation on the subject: “It is central and important
to our Christian faith to have clearly in mind the facts concerning the
Trinity.” His Basic Bible Studies were designed to deliver those
facts.
The first point in Schaeffer’s Bible study on the
Trinity is that the God of the Bible is personal: God has plans which he
considers in advance and then carries out with purpose (Eph. 1:4). Not only
does he think but he takes action, real action in space and time (Gen. 1:1).
And not only does he think and act, but he feels. He loves the world (John
3:16). “Love is an emotion. Thus the God who exists is personal. He thinks,
acts, and feels, three distinguishing marks of personality. He is not an
impersonal force, nor an all-inclusive everything. He is personal. When He
speaks to us, He says “I” and we can answer Him “You.”
One of Schaeffer’s favorite phrases for the
personhood of God was that he was “personal on the high order of Trinity,” and
the next step in his basic trinitarian Bible study is to state all the biblical
evidence about unity and diversity in the God of the Bible. The Old Testament
teaches, and the New Testament reaffirms, that there is only one God (Deut. 6:4;
James 2:19). “But,” Schaeffer goes on, “the Bible also teaches that this one
God exists in three distinct persons.” His first line of evidence for this
claim is the divine plurals used in the language of the Old Testament: “Who
will go for us” (Isa. 6:8), “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26), “Let us
go down and confuse their language” (Gen. 11:7). “In this verse, as in in 1:26,
the persons of the Trinity are in communication with each other.”
These Old Testament plurals, it seems to me,
would not be enough to prove the Triunity of the one God all by themselves.
They are odd enough to require some explanation: Why would a consistently
monotheistic revelation use words like we, us, and ours? And they might point
to a certain fullness or richness of God’s inner life. But solid trinitarianism
has to wait until the Son and the Spirit are directly revealed in the events of
the New Testament. What Schaeffer primarily wants us to learn from these
passages, however, is not triunity itself but the fact that it pre-exists
creation. Combined with a few New Testament insights (“you loved me before the
foundation of the world,” said Jesus to his Father in John 17:24), these
plurals show that “Communication and love existed between the persons of the
Trinity before the creation.” And that matters a lot to Schaeffer, because it
means that when God reveals himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, he is revealing
who has always been.
When he turns to the New Testament, Schaeffer
highlights the baptism of Christ (Matt. 3:16-17) because of the clarity with
which each of the three persons is shown there. He also points to a few of the
passages where all three persons are named in a single verse: Matt. 28:19; John
15:26; I Peter 1:2.
With this biblical doctrine of God as his
foundation, Schaeffer’s soteriology is explicitly trinitarian. Under the
heading of salvation, the Trinity is not the very first thing Schaeffer
teaches. That priority is reserved for a classic Protestant statement of the
biblical doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. But from
that all-important point of entry, the very next thing Schaeffer wants to say
is that what this justification introduces us into is a new relationship, or
web of relationships, to the Triune God:
This new relationship with the triune God is, then, the second of the blessings of salvation, justification being the first. This new relationship, as we have seen, is threefold:
1. God the Father is the Christian’s Father.
2. The only begotten Son of God is our Savior and Lord, our prophet, priest and king. We are identified and united with Him.
3. The Holy Spirit lives in us and deals with us. He communicates to us the manifold benefits of redemption.
In summary, commenting on 2 Cor 13:14, Schaeffer
says “The work of each of the three persons is important to us. Jesus died to
save us, the Father draws us to Himself and loves us, and the Holy Spirit deals
with us.”
Moment by Moment Christian
Experience
After the
believer is placed in a saving relationship with the persons of the Triune God,
three consequences follow: (1) Relationship to brothers and sisters in the
church, (2) assurance of salvation, and (3) a Christian life characterized by
the process of sanctification. In these studies, Schaeffer devotes several
sections to sanctification, equipping his readers with a good survey of the
things they will need to know to live an intelligent Christian life. He
highlights the difference between the event of justification and the process of
sanctification, which is “a flowing stream involving the past”¦, the present,
and into the future.” Salvation, as he had said In True Spirituality,
“is a single piece, and yet a flowing stream.” Schaeffer also rounds out his
teaching on sanctification with a great deal of practical advice about how
Christians are to deal with sin, and an introduction to the basic spiritual
disciplines.
True to trinitarian form, though, one of the main
things Schaeffer wants to say is that sanctification is a project of the entire
Trinity, and he does so by surveying the way each of the three persons is
related to Christian holiness:
God the Father is active in our sanctification as
the one who will accomplish it, and who sets the standard of it: “May the God
of peace himself sanctify you” and “equip you with everything good that you
may do his will, working in you what is pleasing in his sight.” (I Thess. 5:23;
Hebrews 13:20-21). Elsewhere (in True Spirituality, Works III:275)
Schaeffer says, “When we accept Christ as our Savior, we are immediately in a
new relationship with God the Father. “¦ but, of course, if this is so, we
should be experiencing in this life the Father’s fatherliness.”
God the Son is involved in our sanctification in
that it is the purpose for which he died: “Christ gave himself for the church,
that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with
the word”¦ gave himself to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for
himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.” (Ephesians
5:25-26; Titus 2:11-14)
God the Spirit is the holy one who makes us holy:
“you were washed, you were sanctified”¦by the Spirit of our God”¦ and are being
transformed from glory to glory”¦ by the Lord who is the Spirit “¦ and we are saved
through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.” (I Cor 6:11; II
Cor 3:18; II Thess 2:13)
“Never Mechanical and Not Primarily
Legal”
Most of this richly trinitarian understanding of
salvation recedes into the background of Schaeffer’s writing. Outside of the Basic
Bible Studies, he does not often work through the details of trinitarian
soteriology. But Schaeffer always spoke from a depth of insight that flowed
from his 1951 experience of the reality of the Trinity in salvation. He wrote
and spoke with a sense of God’s presence that was deeply personal, and which he
did manage to communicate to sympathetic listeners in all that he taught after
1951. Schaeffer’s trinitarian awakening left its mark on his work in the strong
sense of the personhood of God that colored all his expressions. It may be hard
for evangelical Christians to hear the phrase “a relationship with God” as a
radically trinitarian claim, but that is how the language functioned for
Schaeffer. Whenever he said “relationship,” you can bet there was
trinitarianism ringing in his ears: “Our relationship is never mechanical and
not primarily legal. It is personal and vital. God the Father is my Father; I
am united and identified with God the Son; God the Holy Spirit dwells within
me. The Bible tells us that this threefold relationship is a present fact, just
as it tells us that justification and Heaven are facts.”
Of course, as the story of Schaeffer’s 1951
trinitarian awakening makes clear, not every Christian is aware of the trinitarian
depths waiting beneath their spiritual lives. “It is,” Schaeffer warned,
“possible to be a Christian and yet not take advantage of what our vital
relationship with the three persons of the Trinity should mean in living a
Christian life. We must first intellectually realize the fact of our vital
relationship with the triune God and then in faith begin to act upon that
realization.” And immediately after this warning, he invited his readers to
review the Basic Bible Study on the three new relationships that
constitute the Christian life.
