The Great Evangelical Disaster

Published by Crossway in 1984, about three months before Schaeffer's death. It traces what he saw as the downgrade of evangelicalism over the preceding fifty years and names its cause: accommodation, the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. He places the first accommodation in a weakened view of Scripture and the acceptance of higher-critical methods, and calls the inspiration and authority of the Bible the watershed of the evangelical world; he argues that some who used the words infallibility and inerrancy meant something different by them. He then ties the issue of Scripture to abortion and other questions of human life and to evangelical attitudes to the wider culture. Critics have objected to its treatment of inerrancy as the test of evangelical identity. It was added to the fourth volume of The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer in the second edition.