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In terms of theodicy, Frank in his works ''The Fall of the Idols'' and ''The Meaning of Life'' shows keen awareness of the suffering and disruption of Russian Orthodox life amid the unleashing of great evil, which he identifies with demonic idolatry, in its objectifying of self and others unto death. His biographer has said his approach to evil as inconsequential in the face of love may also reflect Frank's need for tranquility amid the turmoils of 20th-century refugee life. He criticized the Western Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin as a source of the disconnect from experiential Christian faith that he saw as the root of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies and a certain type of heartless Western rationalism, while upholding Orthodox Trinitarian teaching as distinct from Catholic theology. Frank disagreed with Berdyaev's brief post-World War II reconciliation with the Soviet state as naive, seeing the Soviet system as totalitarian evil, although he had earlier in exile defended the post-Tikhonite Moscow Patriarchate's situation under the Soviets. While he wrote hopefully amid Communist and Nazi threats to Christianity of a potential Christian universalism, highly praised the writings of the ancient Sufi Muslim mystical writer Hussayn ibn-Mansur al-Hallaj, and had connections in the diaspora with the YMCA press and the World Council of Churches as sources of refugee aid, he was not active in organized ecumenism, and resisted American Protestant influence on the YMCA Russian youth movement among emigres.
In 1965, some 15 years after Frank's death, Fr. Georges Florovsky, former dean of St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Harvard and professor at Princeton, wrote the Foreword to the English translation of Frank's ''Reality and Man'' in which he expressed sympathy for Frank's philosophical search but categorized it as overly pessimistic, apophatic, and Platonist, in allegedly eschewing the Cross for a Platonic escapism. Fr. Florovsky was also responding to the dismissal a critique of his own academic field of theology as overly abstract by Frank , from the latter's emphasis on Chrisitan existentialismand experiential faith. In this Frank's experiential philosophical approach partook to the Cross in effect that way could be thought of as that of the the Wise Thief's perspective on the Cross, St. Rakh in Russian tradition , who "stole Paradise" while on Golgotha. Frank's linkage, suggested in ''Reality and Man'', of a parallel between his own writings' focus on the coincidence-yet-distinction of the Kingdom of God and of human experience to and St. Gregory of Palamas' stress in Orthodox tradition on the distinction yet unity of God's Essence and the workings of the uncreated energies, . That was related also to St. Maximus' teachings on the ''logoi'' of the Logos, which again has been more deeply explored in recent theological scholarship than in Fr. Florovsky's time.
All Frank's works remain relatively little studied in 21st-century global Orthodox and secular scholarship. This perhaps reflects Frank's lack of firm academic and ecclesiastical affiliations abroad (such as those of contemporaries like Fr. Florovsky), where he often had to rely on the charity of friends and refugee aid grants; his precarious situation in Europe as an exiled ethnically Jewish Russian Orthodox philosopher who was legally stateless and a target for the Nazi Final Solution; the lack of English translations of his work until the last years of his life (his first work to be translated into English was in 1946 and he reposed in 1950), and because the nature of his work did not encourage the controversial celebrity of some other Russian emigre intellectuals, such as Fr. Bulgakov and Berdyaev. These factors and Frank's more introverted family-centered life and relatively poor health in exile limited his social networks when living in Western Europe. Besides Jakim's introductions to his English translations of some of Frank's books, Philip Boobbyer's biography, ''S.L. Frank: The Life And Work Of A Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950'' (1995) is a valuable source in English on Frank's life and work, as is a [https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/08/s-l-franks-imaginative-conservatism.html short helpful essay in English on Frank's mature social philosophy by Dylan James Pahman.] Phillip J. Swoboda also offers an interpretation of his philosophy as "expressive humanism" in his contribution on Frank to the collection ''A History of Russian Philosophy 1830-1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity'' (2010), while Boobyer has argued that Frank is best understood as an anti-utopianist Christian realist, a kind of Russian alternative to Reinhold Niebuhr in the mid-twentieth century ("A Russian Version of Christina Realism: Spiritual Wisdom and Politics in the Thought of S.L. Frank (1877-1950)," International History Review 38 (2015): 45-65).
