Inspirational Quotes by Francis Schaeffer
“Personal peace means just to be let alone, not to be troubled by the troubles of other people, whether across the world or across the city—to live one’s life with minimal possibilities of being personally disturbed. Personal peace means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the result will be in the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren. Affluence means an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity—a life made up of things, things, and more things—a success judged by an ever-higher level of material abundance.”
“Nobody cared who worshiped whom so long as the worshiper did not disrupt the unity of the state, centered in the formal worship of Caesar.”
“Among religious writings the Bible is unique in its attitude to its great men. Even many Christian biographies puff up the men they describe. But the Bible exhibits the whole man, so much so that it is almost embarrassing at times. If we would teach our children to read the Bible truly, it would be a good vaccination against cynical realism from the non-Christian side, because the Bible portrays its characters as honestly as any debunker or modern cynic ever could.”
“If they had worshiped Jesus and Caesar, they would have gone unharmed, but they rejected all forms of syncretism.”
“The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and certainly exposed by the modern world.”
“As we consider the coming of an elite, an authoritarian state, to fill the vacuum left by the loss of Christian principles, we must not think naively of the models of Stalin and Hitler. We must think rather of a manipulative authoritarian government.”
“The principle of saying no to self lies at the heart of my attitude toward the world as it maintains its alien stand in rebellion against the Creator.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from True Spirituality
“Man has failed to build only from himself autonomously and to find a solid basis in nature for law, and we are left today with Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “experience” and Frederick Moore Vinson’s statement that nothing is more certain in modern society than that there are no absolutes. Law has only a variable content. Much modern law is not even based on precedent; that is, it does not necessarily hold fast to a continuity with the legal decisions of the past. Thus, within a wide range, the Constitution of the United States can be made to say what the courts of the present want it to say—based on a court’s decision as to what the court feels is sociologically helpful at the moment. At times this brings forth happy results, at least temporarily; but once the door is opened, anything can become law and the arbitrary judgments of men are king. Law is now freewheeling, and the courts not only interpret the laws which legislators have made, but make law. Lex Rex has become Rex Lex. Arbitrary judgment concerning current sociological good is king.”
“Christ is with those in paradise now. But Christ—the same Christ, with the same reality—promises the Christian that he will bring forth fruit through us in this life now. The power of the crucified, risen, and glorified Christ will bring forth this fruit through us now.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from True Spirituality
“promises: "And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and”
“Sweeping out of the inward positive reality, there is to be a positive manifestation externally. It is not just that we are dead to certain things, but we are to love God, we are to be alive to Him, we are to be in communion with Him, in this present moment of history. And we are to love men, to be alive to men as men, and to be in communication on a true personal level with men, in this present moment of history.”
“Actually we do everything we can, whether it is in a philosophic sense or a practical sense, to put ourselves at the center of the universe.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from True Spirituality
“In Aquinas’s view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous. In one realm man was now independent, autonomous.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from Escape from Reason
“And Paul says in Romans 6 that even in the present life we are to have a substantial reality of the redemption of the whole man.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from Escape from Reason
“The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead is not an old-fashioned thing. It tells us that God loves the whole man and the whole man is important. The biblical teaching, therefore, opposes the Platonic, which makes the soul (the “upper”) very important and leaves the body (the “lower”) with little importance at all. The biblical view also opposes the humanist position where the body and autonomous mind of man become important and grace becomes very unimportant.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from Escape from Reason
“It is an important principle to remember, in the contemporary interest in communication and in language study, that the biblical presentation is that, though we do not have exhaustive truth, we have from the Bible what I term “true truth.” In this way we know true truth about God, true truth about man and something truly about nature. Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from Escape from Reason
“The point to be stressed is that, when nature is made autonomous, it is destructive. As soon as one allows an autonomous realm one finds that the lower element begins to eat up the higher. In what follows I shall be speaking of these two elements as the “lower story” and the “upper story.” LEONARDO DA VINCI AND RAPHAEL The next man to examine is Leonardo da Vinci.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from Escape from Reason
“Assim, o fluxo da história tem extraordinárias implicações para todo aspecto de nossas vidas. Encontro-me no fluxo da história. Conheço minha origem. Minha linhagem é maior que a da Rainha da Inglaterra. Não começa com a Batalha de Hastings. Não começa com a gênese de boas famílias, onde ou quando possam ter vivido. Quando me vejo no fluxo da realidade espaçotemporal, vejo minha origem em Adão e em Deus criando o homem à sua própria imagem.”
“What was the Reformation answer? It said that the root of the trouble sprang from the old and growing Humanism in the Roman Catholic Church, and the incomplete Fall in Aquinas’s theology which set loose an autonomous man. The Reformation accepted the biblical picture of a total Fall. The whole man had been made by God, but now the whole man is fallen, including his intellect and will.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from Escape from Reason
“This was true in two areas. First of all there was nothing autonomous in the area of final authority. For the Reformation, final and sufficient knowledge rested in the Bible—that is, Scripture Alone, in contrast to Scripture plus anything else parallel to the Scriptures, whether it be the church or a natural theology. Second, there was no idea of man being autonomous in the area of salvation. In the Roman Catholic position there was a divided work of salvation—Christ died for our salvation, but man had to merit the merit of Christ. Thus there was a humanistic element involved. The Reformers said that there is nothing man can do; no autonomous or humanistic, religious or moral effort of man can help. One is saved only on the basis of the finished work of Christ as he died in space and time in history, and the only way to be saved is to raise the empty hands of faith and, by God’s grace, to accept God’s free gift—Faith Alone.”
― Francis Schaeffer ,
from Escape from Reason
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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.