The Church Before the Watching World

Published by InterVarsity Press in 1971 with the subtitle A Practical Ecclesiology (105 pages). Schaeffer holds that two biblical principles must be practised together in the visible church: purity of doctrine and observable love among Christians. This book takes up purity, and its companion, The Mark of the Christian (1970), takes up love. The first chapter is a historical critique of theological liberalism, tracing it to naturalism in the German universities and setting out his objections to a criticism that decides which parts of Scripture to accept. Schaeffer wrote from his own part in the division of American Presbyterianism in the 1930s, when he left Westminster Seminary for Faith Theological Seminary and the Bible Presbyterian Church. The book was later printed with The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century and collected in the fourth volume of The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer (1982), A Christian View of the Church.