Quotes by Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) — Apologet · Evangelikal · USA
Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) war ein US-amerikanischer presbyterianischer Pastor und Apologet, der ab 1955 in der Schweiz die Lebens- und Studiengemeinschaft L’Abri aufbaute. Bekannt wurde er durch seine Auseinandersetzung mit säkularer Philosophie und Kulturgeschichte, wobei Fachkollegen seine Darstellungen teils als stark vereinfachend und wegbereitend für die politisierte christliche Rechte einstuften. Für Bibelleser steht er für den Anspruch, den christlichen Glauben im intellektuellen Dialog mit zeitgenössischen Fragen rational zu begründen.
Era: The 20th Century
Recurring topics: Love, Church & Congregation, God, Jesus & the Holy Spirit, Ethical Questions, Freedom & Truth, The Bible & the Word of God, Discipleship, Faith & Trust
Quotes by Francis Schaeffer
Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.
Francis Schaeffer
If God created the flowers, then they are worth painting or writing about.
Francis Schaeffer
When the absolute becomes relative, the relative becomes absolute.
Francis Schaeffer
Tell me what the world is saying today, and I’ll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.
Francis Schaeffer
Who can do more? We with our own energy and wisdom, or the God who created heaven and earth and who can work in space-time history with a power which none of us has?
Francis Schaeffer
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.
Francis Schaeffer
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.
Francis Schaeffer
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.
Francis Schaeffer
Humanism, man beginning only from himself, had destroyed the old basis of values, and could find no way to generate with certainty any new values. In the resulting vacuum the impoverished values of personal peace and affluence had come to stand supreme.
Francis Schaeffer
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.
Francis Schaeffer
A good hymn book is a wonderful companion to the Bible.
Francis Schaeffer
But someone will say, “Didn’t Jesus say that, to be saved, you have to be as a little child?” Of course he did. But did you ever see a little child who didn’t ask questions? People who use this argument must never have listened to a little child or been one. My four children gave me a harder time with their endless flow of questions than university people ever have… What Jesus was talking about is that the little child, when he has an adequate answer, accepts the answer. He has the simplicity of not having a built-in grid whereby, regardless of the validity of the answer, he rejects it.
Francis Schaeffer
State officials must know that we are serious about stopping abortion, which is a matter of clear principle concerning the babies themselves and concerning a high view of human life.
Francis Schaeffer
The creature's love for the Creator necessarily requires obedience; otherwise it is meaningless.
Francis Schaeffer
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.
Francis Schaeffer
In John 13 the point was that, if an individual Christian does not show love toward other true Christians, the world has a right to judge that he is not a Christian. Here (in John 17:21) Jesus is stating something else which is much more cutting, much more profound: We cannot expect the world to believe the Father sent the Son, that Jesus’ claims are true, and that Christianity is true, unless the world sees some reality of the oneness of true Christians.
Francis Schaeffer
We must ask, Do I fight merely from doctrinal faithfulness? This is like the wife who never sleeps with anybody else but never shows love to her own husband. Is that a sufficient relationship in marriage? No, ten thousand times no. Yet if I am a Christian who speaks and acts for doctrinal faithfulness but do not show love to my divine bridegroom, I am in the same place as such a wife. What God wants from us is not only doctrinal faithfulness, but our love day by day. Not in theory, mind you, but in practice.
Francis Schaeffer
Here is the great evangelical disaster – the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this – namely accommodation. The evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age. First, there has been accommodation on Scripture, so that many who call themselves evangelicals hold a weakened view of the Bible and no longer affirm the truth of all the Bible teaches – truth not only in religious matters but in the areas of science and history and morality… This accommodation has been costly, first in destroying the power of the Scriptures to confront the spirit of our age; second, in allowing the further slide of our culture. Thus we must say with tears that it is the evangelical accommodation to the world spirit around us, to the wisdom of this age, which removes the evangelical church from standing against the breakdown of our culture.
Francis Schaeffer
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.
Francis Schaeffer
21 quotes in total — browse the collection.
Sources: wikipedia.org, sermonindex.net, thenation.com, mountvernonnews.com
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