Islam and Christianity: Great Quotes from Francis Schaeffer

Monday, May 25, 2015

Great Quotes from Francis Schaeffer

Schaefer really influenced me a great deal as a young Christian in college. I read all of his collected works (five volumes!)

Here are some great quotes of his:

Christianity, the Church and Responsibility

Christianity is the greatest intellectual system the mind of man has ever touched.

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

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.

Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.

Culture & History

When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, ‘not many men are in the room’ – that is although world views have many variations, there are not many basic world-views or basic presuppositions.

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

Rome did not fall because of external forces such as the invasion by the barbarians. Rome had no sufficient inward base, the barbarians only completed the breakdown – and Rome gradually became a ruin.

There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people … The results of their thought world flow through their fingers of from their tongues into the external world.

Life and Abortion

Certainly every Christian ought to be praying and working to nullify the abominable abortion law. But as we work and pray, we should have in mind not only this important issue as though it stood alone. Rather, we should be struggling and praying that this whole other total entity “(this godless) worldview” can be rolled back with all its results across all of life.

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.

But the dignity of human life is unbreakably linked to the existence of the personal-infinite God. It is because there is a personal-infinite God who has made men and women in His own image that they have a unique dignity of life as human beings. Human life then is filled with dignity, and the state and humanistically oriented law have no right and no authority to take human life arbitrarily in the way it is being taken.

Truth and Sin

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

I have come to the conclusion that none of us in our generation feels as guilty about sin as we should or as our forefathers did.

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

The inward area is the first place of loss of true Christian life, of true spirituality, and the outward sinful act is the result.

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.

Islam and Christianity