*The following is an excerpt from my article published by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. I was asked to reflect on an author who had changed the way I think.
My parents had a hardback version of Francis Scaheffer’s How Should We Then Live? sitting on a shelf in our house. It was a large, beautiful book, but I never took the time to read it. Honestly, the title never made sense to me as a child, and I had little interest in reading anything that I thought could be difficult to understand.
Years later I enrolled in a Ph.D. program and once again encountered Schaeffer’s work. An entire seminar focused on the ethics of Schaeffer, and I had the task of reading virtually everything that Schaeffer had published. That seminar changed my life and the way I think.
One key element of Schaeffer’s work that I found especially influential was his apologetic method of “taking the roof off.” Schaeffer argued that a person’s worldview is similar to a house; however, there is only one blueprint that can effectively explain all aspects of life and be lived out consistently—a Christian worldview. All other worldviews are defective in one way or another.
The rest of my article can be found at the ERLC website.
Ethics as Worship 