Francis Schaeffer Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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.

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
Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.

Francis Schaeffer
If the church is what it should be, young people will be there. But they will not just 'be there' - they will be there with the blowing of horns and the clashing of high-sounding cymbals, and they will come dancing with flowers in their hair.

Francis Schaeffer
What we, the Christian community, have to do is to refuse men the right to ravish our land, just as we refuse them the right to ravish our women; to insist that somebody accepts a little less profit by not exploiting nature.

Francis Schaeffer
We have the right to rid our houses of ants; but what we have no right to do is to forget to honor the ant as God made it, out in the place where God made the ant to be. When we meet the ant on the sidewalk, we step over him. He is a creature, like ourselves; not made in the image of God, it is true, but equal with man as far as creation is concerned. The ant and the man are both creatures.

Francis Schaeffer
There is no place in God's world where there are no people who will come and share a home as long as it is a real home.

Francis Schaeffer
This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith.

Francis Schaeffer
All men bear the image of God. They have value not because they are redeemed, but because they are God's creation in God's image.

Francis Schaeffer
Are you still thirsting? Christ gives the invitation not only to others but to you. He is the fountainhead. He has died and is risen. He offers the only way to eternal life, asking only that you admit your need, raise the empty hands of faith, and accept His gift. What is eternal life? It is meaning in life now as well as living one‚s life forever. Drink deep. Jesus offers a brimming cup.

Francis Schaeffer
If Christians win a battle by using worldly means, they have really lost.

Francis Schaeffer
As Christians, we must see that just because an artist-even a great artist-portrays a worldview in writing or on canvas, it does not mean that we should automatically accept that worldview. Good art heightens the impact of that worldview, but it does not make it true.

Francis Schaeffer
The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

Francis Schaeffer
We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin-who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that He created man in His image. So man is something wonderful.

Francis Schaeffer
If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals.

Francis Schaeffer
The Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils, which moves, which produces something a bit different from God's world because God made us to be creative.

Francis Schaeffer
These are the two factors that lead to the destruction of our environment: money and time-or to say it another way, greed and haste. The question is, or seems to be, are we going to have an immediate profit and an immediate saving of time, or are we going to do what we really should do as God's children?

Francis Schaeffer
Humanism is not wrong in its cry for sociological healing, but humanism is not producing it.

Francis Schaeffer
With the Fall all became abnormal. It is not just that the individual is separated from God by his true moral guilt, but each of us is not what God made us to be. Beyond each of us as individuals, human relationships are not what God meant them to be. And beyond that, nature is abnormal - the whole cause-and-effect significant history is now abnormal. To say it another way: there is much in history now which should not be.

Francis Schaeffer
No work of art is more important than the Christian's life, and every Christian is called to be an artist in this sense... The Christian's life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.

Francis Schaeffer
We must remember throughout our lives that in God's sight there are no little people and no little places. Only one thing is important: to be consecrated persons in God's place for us, at each moment.

Francis Schaeffer
If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.

Francis Schaeffer
Cambridge historians who aren't Christians would tell you that if it wasn't for the Wesley revival and the social change that Wesley's revival had brought, England would have had its own form of the French Revolution. It was Wesley saying people must be treated correctly and dealing down into the social needs of the day that made it possible for England to have its bloodless revolution in contrast to France's bloody revolution.

Francis Schaeffer
If you want a significant man, with absolutes, morality, and meaning, then you must have what the Bible insists upon - that God will judge men justly, and they will not be able to raise their voices because of the base upon which He judges them.

Francis Schaeffer
Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person as a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism.

Francis Schaeffer
I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.

Francis Schaeffer
Ignorance is in relationship to content; it is not just a spirit of ignorance. In verse 21 it speaks of "the truth in Jesus." Truth is content, truth has something to do with reason. Truth has something to do with the rational creature that God has made us. The dilemma here in the internal world is not just some sort of grey fog, it is in relationship to content.

Francis Schaeffer
But the fact that Christ as the bridegroom brings forth fruit through me as the bride, through the agency of the indwelling Holy Spirit by faith, opens the way for me as a Christian to begin to know in the present life the reality of the supernatural. This is where the Christian is to live. Doctrine is important, but it is not an end in itself. There is to be an experiential reality, moment by moment.

Francis Schaeffer
Modern multiple divorce is rooted in the fact that many are seeking in human relationships what human relationships can never give. Why do they have multiple divorce, instead of merely promiscuous affairs? Because they are seeking more than merely sexual relationship.

Francis Schaeffer
Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.

Francis Schaeffer