Francis Schaeffer Quotations | Page 2

If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.

Modern man has not only thrown away Christian theology, he has thrown away the possibility of what our forefathers had as a basis for morality and law.

Christianity is realistic because it says that if there is no truth, there is also no hope; and there can be no truth if there is no adequate base. It is prepared to face the consequences of being proved false and say with Paul: If you find the body of Christ, the discussion is finished, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. It leaves absolutely no room for a romantic answer.

Isolating the student from large sections of human knowledge is not the basis of a Christian education. Rather it is giving him or her the framework for total truth, rooted in the Creator's existence and in the Bible's teaching, so that in each step of the formal learning process the student will understand what is true and what is false and why it is true or false.

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.

The purpose of apologetics is not just to win an argument or a discussion, but that people with whom we are in contact may become Christians and then live under the Lordship of Christ in the whole spectrum of life.

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.

God has ordained the state as a delegated authority; it is not autonomous. The state is to be an agent of justice, to restrain evil by punishing the wrongdoer, and to protect the good in society. When it does the reverse, it has no proper authority. It is then a usurped authority and as such it becomes lawless and is tyranny.

The Lord is the General, and he has the right . . . the sovereign right . . . to put us where he wants in the battle.

God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the nature of God and the nature of man.

In two areas above all others the Christian demonstration of love and communication stands clear: in the area of the Christian couple and their children; and in the personal relationships of Christians in the church. If there is no demonstration in these two places, on the personal level, the world can conclude that orthodox Christian doctrine is nothing but dead, cold words.

Our trusting the Lord does not mean that there are not times of tears. I think it is a mistake as Christians to act as though trusting the Lord and tears are not compatible.

The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.

Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, an all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state.

Tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.

The church's or Christian group's methods are as important as its message.

When my conscience under the Holy Spirit makes me aware of a specific sin I should at once call that sin sin and bring it consciously under the blood of Christ.

The moral absolutes rest upon God's character. The moral commands He has given to men are an expression of His character. Men as created in His image are to live by choice on the basis of what God is. The standards of morality are determined by what conforms to His character, while those things which do not conform are immoral.

Thank God for the reality for which we were created, a moment-by-moment communication with God himself.

To fail to exhibit that we take truth seriously at those points where there is a cost in our doing so, is to push the next generation in the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us.

As evangelical Christians, we have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life. The rest of human life we feel is more important. Despite our constant talk about the Lordship of Christ, we have narrowed its scope to a very small area of reality. We have misunderstood the concept of the Lordship of Christ over the whole of man and the whole of the universe and have not taken to us the riches that the Bible gives us for ourselves, for our lives, and for our culture.

If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ... , the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.

Ignorance is in relationship to content; it is not just a spirit of ignorance. In verse 21 it speaks of "the truth in Jesus." Truth is content, truth has something to do with reason. Truth has something to do with the rational creature that God has made us. The dilemma here in the internal world is not just some sort of grey fog, it is in relationship to content.

The great distinction of a true Christian is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. How careful should he be, lest anything in his thoughts or feelings would be offensive to the Divine Guest.!

Belief does not change what is.

And the purpose of our creation, in which all our subsidiary purposes fit, is to be in a personal relationship to God, in communion with him, in love, by choice, the creature before the Creator.

The modern concept of separation is an argument for a total separation of religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of the doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil government.

The soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important.

How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.

I hesitate to add, but I will, that this is fun. God means Christianity to be fun. There is to be a reality of love and communication in the Christian-to-Christian relationship, individually and corporately, which is completely and truly personal.

If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.

Hudson Taylor said, "The Lord's work done in the Lord's way will never fail to have the Lord's provision." ...The Lord's work done in human energy is not the Lord's work any longer. It is something, but it is not the Lord's work.

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.

Reformation is a return to the sound doctrine of the Bible. Revival is the practice of that sound doctrine under the power of the Holy Spirit.

Any denomination or church group that forsakes inerrancy will end up shipwrecked. It is impossible to prevent the surrender of other important doctrinal teachings of the Word of God when inerrancy is gone.

With the Fall all became abnormal. It is not just that the individual is separated from God by his true moral guilt, but each of us is not what God made us to be. Beyond each of us as individuals, human relationships are not what God meant them to be. And beyond that, nature is abnormal - the whole cause-and-effect significant history is now abnormal. To say it another way: there is much in history now which should not be.

If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.

We should not view men with a cynical eye, seeing them only as meaningless products of chance, but, on the other hand, we should not go to the opposite extreme of seeing them romantically. To do either is to fail to understand who men really are--creatures made in the image of God but fallen.

The ordinary Christian with the Bible in his hand can say that the majority is wrong.

We must stress that the basis for our faith is neither experience nor emotion but the truth as God has given it in verbalized, prepositional form in the Scripture and which we first of all apprehend with our minds.

He who loses the arts loses the culture.

We as Bible-believing evangelical Christians are locked in a battle. This is not a friendly gentleman's discussion. It is a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ.

As my son Frankie put it, Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm: They began - I am my shepherd. Then - Sheep are my shepherd. Then - Everything is my shepherd. Finally - Nothing is my shepherd.

Sadly enough, there is a kind of an anti-intellectualism among many Christians: spirituality is falsely pitted against intellectual comprehension as though they stood in a dichotomy. Such anti-intellectualism cuts away at the very heart of the Christian message. Of course, there is a false intellectualism which does destroy the work of the Holy Spirit. But it does not arise when men wrestle honestly with honest questions and then see that the Bible has the answers. This does not oppose true spirituality.

This is not an age in which to be a soft Christian.

Sometimes the greatest deterrent to a great marriage is believing you have a perfect marriage.

We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state.

We must not only be True. We must be Beautiful.

I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.

Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose - to be in relationship to God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.

There is no place in God's world where there are no people who will come and share a home as long as it is a real home.

This shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.

The beginning of men's rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.

If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just 'dogmatically' true or 'doctrinally' true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.

Preaching the gospel without the Holy Spirit is to miss the entire point of the command of Jesus Christ for our era. In the area of "Christian activities" or "Christian service," how we are doing it is at least as important as what we are doing.

No work of art is more important than the Christian's life, and every Christian is called to be an artist in this sense... The Christian's life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.

Today the separation of church and state is America is used to silence the church... The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent... It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas... To have suggested the state separated from religion and religious influence would have amazed the Founding Fathers.

Truth always carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation nevertheless. If our reflex action is always accommodation regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong.

Art is a reflection of God's creativity, an evidence that we are made in the image of God.

No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God's revelation. Because the Christians had an absolute, universal standard by which to judge not only personal morals but the state, they were counted as enemies of totalitarian Rome and were thrown to the beasts.

If we do not show love to one another, the world has a right to question whether Christianity is true.

If Christians win a battle by using worldly means, they have really lost.

Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful - Christian community is the final apologetic.

There is a sad myth going around today - the myth of neutrality. According to this myth, the secular world gives every point of view an equal chance to be heard. And it works fairly well - unless you are a Christian.

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.