Kevin Cawley reproduces a helpful word by J. I. Packer on what made Francis Schaeffer so unique:
What gave Schaeffer his importance among evangelicals? The brief answer is that he embodied to an outstanding degree qualities of which mid-twentieth-century English-speaking evangelicalism was very short, and so brought a measure of depth to themes on which in that era of English-speaking evangelicalism was very shallow. He was not original in any far-reaching sense; he was a conservative Presbyterian who professed what was in essence the old-Princeton system of theology, with some garnishings of detail from Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til, and he had no fault to find with any part of this doctrinal heritage.
But Schaeffer was felt to be original because he did seven things (at least) that other evangelicals, by and large, were not doing.
First, with his flair for didactic communication he coined some new and pointed ways of expressing old thoughts. [...]
Second, with his gift of empathy he listened to and dialogued with the modern secular world as it expressed itself in literature and art, which most evangelicals were too cocooned in their own subculture to do.
Third, he threw light on the things that today's secularists take for granted by tracing them, however sketchily, to their source in the history of thought, a task for which few evangelicals outside the seminaries had the skill.
Fourth, he cherished a vivid sense of the ongoing historical process of which we are all part [...]
Fifth, he felt, focused, and dwelt on the dignity and tragedy of sinful human beings rather than their grossness and nastiness
Sixth, he linked the passion for orthodoxy with a life of love to others as the necessary expression of gospel truth, and censured the all-too-common unlovingness of front-line fighters for that truth [...]
Seventh, he celebrated the wholeness of created reality under God and stressed that the Christian life must be a corresponding whole-- that is, a life in which truth, goodness, and beauty are valued together and sought with equal zeal
(Introduction, Reflections on Francis Schaeffer, 8-9).
