The Apologist: Materialistic Christians

Christianity is not just a mental assent that certain doctrines are true—not even that the right doctrines are true. This is only the beginning. This would be rather like a starving man sitting in front of great heaps of food and saying, “I believe the food exists; I believe it is real,” and yet never eating it. It is not enough merely to say, “I am a Christian,” and then in practice to live as if present contact with the supernatural were something far-off and strange. Many Christians I know seem to act as though they come in contact with the supernatural just twice—once when they arejustified and become a Christian and once when they die. The rest of the time they act as though they were sitting in the materialist’s chair.  —Francis Schaeffer, Death in the City