Schaeffer's prose is clunky, and I have my doubts about how well he understands some other philosophers, but still a book worthy of consideration, IMHO. And if Schaeffer is a poor introduction to other philosophers, he has suffered his fair share of being misunderstood. In the book itself, and in its first appendix, Schaeffer makes it as plain as possible that this is not an apologetics work in the sense of Bill Bright's Four Spiritual Laws, where you go through the steps and, Shazzam!, salvation. But some people still try to "sell" it on those grounds.

Instead, this is Shaeffer's discussion of where he felt the average Western secular thinker of the mid-twentieth century was at, and some ideas for Christians to consider in light of that reality. It always seemed to me that his primary goal was to get Christians to "think outside the box" and to work harder at understanding positions and philosophies they did not hold. Granted, Schaeffer himself sometimes failed to do this effectively, but OTOH it is not an easy thing to do.

Learning to see the world from someone else's perspective is a challenge in itself -- Schaeffer is arguing that Christians not only learn to see the world from another perspective, but also that they need to truly listen to everyone they talk to, in order to see the world from that person's perspective, and to help that individual see where their unspoken assumptions logically lead. This is a huge challenge and, as Schaeffer rightly points out, can only be done through profound love.

Schaeffer does not precisely say so, but in light of his Reformed background, I think I can safely say that he figured Christians who truly loved, and who truly opened themselves to others, would receive aid from the Holy Spirit, because the challenge Schaeffer sets is not one people can do very often on their own. It is more a matter of creating a habit of openness and understanding, and a willingness to grapple with a multitude of ideas and philosophies, than it is an intellectual exercise per se. It is more a position of being open to foreign teaching than one of being highly educated, because knowing the broad positions of various philosophers is much less important than being able to see what philosophies the person you are actually speaking to uses to form their own personal world view.

I suspect that Schaeffer's understanding of some philosophers was gleaned more from listening to people's interpretations of said philosophers than from reading the philosophers for himself. Schaeffer was more of a populist than a deep thinker -- yet for a populist, he had some very deep thoughts. More importantly, he understood that Christianity is about love, and he honestly expressed God's love to many people. His intellectual accuracy may have been iffy, but he truly cared, and people responded to that.

Schaeffer's dislike of emotionalism and insistence on grounding ideas in reality were two of his strengths that come through pretty clearly in this book. I'm less convinced that his caring does, or the fact that it was crucial to his success, although I think both the caring and the necessity of it are there if you look for them.