Inspirational Quotes by Francis Schaeffer
“Alfred North Whitehead has remarked that the entire history of European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. That goes too far. Nevertheless, Plato did understand something crucial—not only in theoretical thought but in practical life. He saw that if there are no absolutes, then the individual things (the particulars, the details) have no meaning.”
“By particulars we mean the individual things which are about us. The individual stones on a beach are particulars. The molecules that make up the stones are particulars. The total beach is a particular. I am made up of molecules and the molecules are particulars. And I as an individual and you as an individual are particulars.”
“Plato understood that regardless of what kind of particulars one talks about, if there are no absolutes—no universal—then particulars have no meaning. The universal or absolute is that under which all the particulars fit—that which gives unity and meaning to the whole.”
“Non-Christian philosophers from the time of the Greeks until just before our modern period had three things in common. First, they were rationalists. That is, they assumed that man (though he is finite and limited) can begin from himself and gather enough particulars to make his own universals. Rationalism rejects any knowledge outside of man himself, especially any knowledge from God.”
“Как только люди начали мыслить в этом направлении, больше не оставалось места для Бога и для человека как такового. Когда психология и социология стали частью закрытой причинно-следственной системы наравне с физикой, астрономией и химией, скончался не только Бог. Скончался человек. И в рамках этого мировоззрения умерла любовь. В пределах полностью закрытой причинно-следственной системы нет места для любви. В этой системе нет места для нравственности, в ней нет места для человеческой свободы. Человек превращается в нуль. Люди, вместе со всем, что они совершают, становятся частью механистической структуры.”
“To the Reformation thinkers, authority was not divided between the Bible and the church. The church was under the teaching of the Bible—not above it and not equal to it. It was Sola Scriptura, the Scriptures only. This stood in contrast to the humanism that had infiltrated the church after the first centuries of Christianity. At its core, therefore, the Reformation was the removing of the humanistic distortions which had entered the church.”
“Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen that beginning humanistically with mathematics one has only particulars and will never come to universals or meaning, but will end only with mechanics. It”
“Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains!” Rousseau saw the primitive as innocent and autonomous freedom as the final good. We”
“This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau’s writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,”
“People function on the basis of their world view. Therefore, society has changed radically. This is the reason—and not a less basic one—that it is unsafe to walk at night through the streets of many of today’s cities. As a man thinketh, so is he.”
“radually, that which had become the basic thought form of modern people became the almost totally accepted viewpoint, an almost monolithic consensus. And as it came to the majority of people through art, music, drama, theology, and the mass media, values died. As the more Christian-dominated consensus weakened, the majority of people adopted two impoverished values: personal peace and affluence.”
“What is is right. Thus”
“At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement, in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike. Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898–). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist teaching of the “Frankfurt School,” along with Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Max Horkheimer (1895–) and Jürgen Habermas (1929–).”
“For some time, young people were fighting against their parents’ impoverished values of personal peace and affluence—whether their way of fighting was through Marcuse’s New Left or through taking drugs as an ideology. The young people wanted more to life than personal peace and affluence. They were right in their analysis of the problem, but they were mistaken in their solutions.”
“However, in contrast to the Renaissance humanists, they refused to accept the autonomy of human reason, which acts as though the human mind is infinite, with all knowledge within its realm. Rather, they took seriously the Bible’s own claim for itself—that it is the only final authority. And they took seriously that man needs the answers given by God in the Bible to have adequate answers not only for how to be in an open relationship with God, but also for how to know the present meaning of life and how to have final answers in distinguishing between right and wrong. That is, man needs not only a God who exists, but a God who has spoken in a way that can be understood.”
“After the turmoil of the sixties, many people thought that it was so much better when the universities quieted down in the early seventies. I could have wept. The young people had been right in their analysis, though wrong in their solutions. How much worse when many gave up hope and simply accepted the same values as their parents—personal peace and affluence. Now drugs remain, but only in parallel to the older generation’s alcohol, and an excessive use of alcohol has become a problem among the young people as well. Promiscuous sex and bisexuality remain, but only in parallel to the older generation’s adultery. In other words, as the young people revolted against their parents, they came around in a big circle—and often ended an inch lower—with only the same two impoverished values: their own kind of personal peace and their own kind of affluence.”
“The High Renaissance in the south and the Reformation in the north must always be considered side by side. They dealt with the same basic problems, but they gave completely opposite answers and brought forth completely opposite results.”
“Wycliffe’s and Huss’s views were the basic views of the Reformation which came later, and these views continued to exist in parts of the north of Europe even while the Renaissance was giving its humanist answers in the south.”
“First, in the south, much of the High Renaissance was based on a humanistic ideal of man’s being the center of all things, of man’s being autonomous; second, in the north of Europe, the Reformation was giving an opposite answer.”
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Francis August Schaeffer was an American Evangelical Christian theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor. He is most famous for his writings and his establishment of the L'Abri community in Switzerland. Opposed to theological modernism, Schaeffer promoted a more traditional Protestant faith and a presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics, which he believed would answer the questions of the age. A number of scholars credit Schaeffer's ideas with helping spark the rise of the Christian Right in the United States.
Covenant Theological Seminary has established the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute directed by a former English L'Abri member, Jerram Barrs. The purpose of the school is to train Christians to demonstrate compassionately and defend reasonably what they see as the claims of Christ on all of life.
Schaeffer popularized, in the modern context, a conservative Puritan and Reformed perspective. He is credited with helping spark a return to political activism among Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially in relation to the issue of abortion.
Christian Right leaders such as Tim LaHaye have credited Schaeffer for influencing their theological arguments urging political participation by evangelicals. Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, also acknowledged the influence of Schaeffer.
Francis A. Schaeffer wrote twenty-two books, which cover a range of spiritual issues.
Francis August Schaeffrer was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and became a Christian in 1930 at the age of eighteen, and graduated magna cum laude from Hampden-Sydney College, VA in June, 1935. Schaeffer entered Westminster Theological Seminary in 1935 and transferred to the newly formed Faith Theological Seminary in 1937, graduating from there in 1938.
Following graduation, he was by some accounts the first person ordained by the Bible Presbyterian Church and became pastor of the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Grove City, PA. In 1941 he was elected moderator of the Great Lakes Presbytery [BPC] and began serving as associate pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church in Chester, PA. From 1943 to 1947, he pastored First Bible Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, MO, and served as moderator of the Midwest Presbytery [BPC].
During this time Schaeffer and his wife founded the Children for Christ ministry in St. Louis, which soon became widely adopted by other evangelical churches. In 1947 he traveled throughout Europe as a representative of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions and as the American Secretary for the Foreign Relations Department of the American Council of Christian Churches. In 1948 he moved with his family to Lausanne, Switzerland to begin mission work, and moved the following year to Champery, Switzerland, where he wrote Basic Bible Studies.
In 1953 he returned to the United States on furlough and began an extensive speaking tour. Later that same year, he returned to Switzerland and moved to Huemoz, Switzerland. By 1955 he had resigned from the mission board and began L'Abri Fellowship, which became the primary focus of his life. In 1971 he received the honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Gordon College, Wenham, MA.
In 1981 he reedited and pubished The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer. The Simon Greenleaf School of Law awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1983, but he was forced to return in critical condition from Switzerland to the Mayo Clinic. Despite the debilitating illness, he was able in 1984 to complete The Great Evangelical Disaster and a seminar tour. On May 15, 1984, he died at his home in Rochester, MN and was buried at Oakwood Cemetary in Rochester.