I respect Guinness, and I respect Schaeffer and this short interview transcript is enlightening. Of Schaeffer, Guiness says:
I often say simply that I have never met anyone with such a passion for
God, combined with a passion for people, combined with a passion for
truth. That is an extremely rare combination, and Schaeffer embodied
it. It is also why so many of his scholarly critics completely miss the
heart of who he was, and why his son’s recent portrayal of his father
is such a travesty and an outrage.
Further,
When almost no Evangelicals were thinking about culture and connecting
unconnected dots, Schaeffer not only did it himself but blazed a trail
for countless others to follow. Many who trumpet their disagreements
with him today owe their very capacity to disagree to his influence a
generation ago. A little man in stature, he was a giant in influence,
and many who have gone further have done so only by standing on his
shoulders. I for one owe far more to Francis Schaeffer than I can ever
say, and I live daily in his debt.
Me: I never personally made it to L'Abri, but Schaeffer and his books introduced me as a young man to Christian worldview thinking and to the wider world of literature, art, music and philosophy. We may take issue with various points of Schaeffer's summaries and generalizations, but as Guinness says, we do so only because it was Schaeffer, or one of his intellectual descendants, who introduced and legitimized the wider world of scholarship to us in the first place.