“The dilemma of modern man is simple: he does not know why man has any meaning, he is lost, man remains a zero. This is the damnation of our generation, the heart of modern man’s problem.”
– Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer
Christians have largely shut …
“Christians have largely shut up their spirituality into a small corner of life—Sunday church or their Bible studies—instead of realizing the lordship of Christ is to permeate the whole spectrum of life. They have coasted along complacently, often serving up such dogmas as, “You can’t mix religion and politics”, or “You can’t legislate morality”, or “We just need to pray and witness to people”—when what they really meant was, “We just don’t want to be disturbed”. They were content in their ‘comfort zone.'”
– Francis Schaeffer
the Bible is not simply a set of timeless truths…
“The late Francis Schaeffer maintained that the Bible is not simply a set of timeless truths but is itself total truth. What did he mean? He said, “Biblical Christianity is not simply a series of truths in the plural, but rather truth spelled with a capital ‘T’—Truth about total reality, not just about religious things.” In other words, the Bible is not simply a manual for understanding things of a spiritual nature. It’s earthier than that. It provides us with a comprehensive framework for understanding all of reality. It presents an entire worldview, a complete perspective on all of life.“
—Tullian Tchividjian
Christianity is realistic because it says that if there is no truth, there is also no hope…
“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.“
– Francis Schaeffer
“The church is something beautiful” by Francis Schaeffer.
“The church is something beautiful” by Francis Schaeffer.
“One cannot explain the explosive power of the early church apart from the fact that they practiced two things simultaneously: the orthodoxy of doctrine and orthodoxy of community in the midst of the visible church, a community which the world could see.
By the grace of God, therefore, the church must be known simultaneously for its purity of doctrine and the reality of its community. Our churches have so often been only preaching points with very little emphasis on community. But the exhibition of the love of God in practice is beautiful and must be there.
We have, then, two sets of parallel couplets: (1) the principle of the purity of the visible church, and yet the practice of observable love among all true Christians; and (2) the practice of orthodoxy of doctrine and observable orthodoxy of community in the visible church.
The heart of these sets of principles is to show forth the love of God and the holiness of God simultaneously. If we show either of these without the other, we exhibit not the character, but a caricature of God for the world to see.
If we stress the love of God without the holiness of God, it turns out only to be compromise. But if we stress the holiness of God without the love of God, we practice something that is hard and lacks beauty. And it is important to show forth beauty before a lost world and a lost generation.
All too often people have not been wrong in saying that the church is ugly. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are called upon to show a watching world and to our own young people that the church is something beautiful.
Several years ago I wrestled with the question of what was wrong with much of the church that stood for purity. I came to the conclusion that in the flesh we can stress purity without love or we can stress the love of God without purity, but that in the flesh we cannot stress both simultaneously.
In order to exhibit both simultaneously, we must look moment by moment to the work of Christ, to the work of the Holy Spirit. Spirituality begins to have real meaning in our moment-by-moment lives as we begin to exhibit simultaneously the holiness of God and the love of God.”
“We must understand
“We must understand that the question of the dignity of human life is not something on the periphery of Judeo-Christian thinking, but almost in the center of it (though not the center because the center is the existence of God Himself). 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 that it is being taken.
…
And beyond this as the material-energy-chance humanistic world view takes over increasingly in our country, the view concerning the intrinsic value of human life will grow less and less, and the concept of compassion for which the country is in some sense known will be further gone.“-from “A Christian Manifesto” by Francis A. Schaeffer
Glory to God Alone 