Prior to the Fall, Adam in coming to God only had to bow once—as a creature before the Creator. But now, after the Fall of Adam, we must bow twice—as a creature before the Creator and as a sinner coming to a holy God through Jesus’ work. —Francis Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time
Category: Francis Schaeffer
The Apologist: The Ultimate Separation of the Fall
We recall that numerous separations came about because of the Fall. There were alienations between God and man, man and himself, man and other men, man and nature, and nature and nature. The last separation is the separation between the Father and the Son when Jesus died on the cross. The separations that resulted from man’s Fall were brought to their climax as Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, being bruised and bearing our sins in substitution, cried aloud: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46). —Francis Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time
The Apologist: Proof of God’s Existence as Inescapable as Yourself
Each time one man communicates with another, whether he knows it or not, even if he is the greatest blasphemer that ever lived or the atheist swearing at God, even when he swears, even when he says, “There is no God”—he bears testimony to what God is. God has left himself a witness that cannot be removed. —Francis Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time
The Apologist: There Are Only a Few Possible Answers and Only One Intelligent Answer
Man is shut up to relatively few answers. I think we often fail to understand that the deeper we go into study at this point, the simpler the alternatives become. In almost any profound question, the number of final possibilities is very few indeed. Here there are four: (1) Once there was absolutely nothing and now there is something, (2) Everything began with an impersonal something, (3) Everything began with a personal something, and (4) There is and always has been a dualism. —Francis Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time
The Apologist: They’re Living Defeats their Believing
The fact is that if we are going to live in this world at all, we must live in it acting on a correlation of ourselves and the thing that is there, even if we have a philosophy that says there is no correlation. There is no other way to live in this world. Even the person who holds theoretically the most consistent concept of unrelatedness (for example, Hume) lives in this world on the basis of his experience that there is a correlation between the subject and the object and cause and effect. He not only lives that way, he has to live that way. There is no other way to live in this world. That is the way the world is made. So just as all men love even if they say love does not exist, and all men have moral motions, even though they say moral motions do not exist, so all men act as though there is a correlation between the external and the internal world, even if they have no basis for that correlation.
What I am saying is that the Christian view is exactly in line with the experience of every man. But no other system except the Judeo-Christian one—that which is given in the Old and New Testaments together—tells us why there is a subject-object correlation. Everybody does act on it, everybody must act on it, but no other system tells you why there is a correlation between the subject and object. In other words, all men constantly and consistently act as though Christianity is true. —Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He is not Silent
The Apologist: I Don’t Think that Word Means What you Think It Means
Epistemology is the theory of the method or grounds of knowledge—the theory of knowledge, or how we know, or how we can be certain that we know. Epistemology is the central problem of our generation; indeed, the so-called “generation gap” is really and epistemological gap, simply because the modern generation looks at knowledge in a way radically difference from previous ones. —Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent
The Apologist: God Isn’t a Romantic Shouting “You Complete Me”
If this were not so, we would have had a God who needed to create in order to love and communicate. In such a case, God would have needed the universe as much as the universe needed God. But God did not need to create; God does not need the universe as the universe needs him. Why? Because we have a full and true Trinity. The Persons of the Trinity communicated with each other, and loved each other, before the creation of the world. —Francis Schaeffer, He is There and He Is Not Silent
The Apologist: The Mystery of the Trinity Is the Only Source for Answers
Every once in a while in my discussions someone asks how I can believe in the Trinity. My answer is always the same. I would still be an agnostic if there was no Trinity, because there would be no answers. Without the high order of personal unity and diversity as given in the Trinity, there are no answers. —Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent
The Apologist: Apologetics a Subset of Evangelism
Thus apologetics, as I see it, should not be separated in any way from evangelism. I wonder if “apologetics” which does not lead people to Christ as Savior, and then on to their living under the Lordship of Christ in the whole of life really is Christian apologetics. —Francis Schaffer, The God Who Is There
The Apologist: Why the Easiest is the Hardest
We must realize that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world, because it is the only religion in which God the Father and Christ and the Holy Spirit do everything. God is the Creator; we have nothing to do with our existence, or existence of other things. We can shape other things, but we cannot change the fact of existence. We do nothing for our salvation because Christ did it all. We do not have to do anything. In every other religion we have to do something—everything from burning a joss stick to sacrificing our firstborn child to dropping a coin in the collection plate—the whole spectrum. But with Christianity we do not do anything; God has done it all: He has created us and He has sent His Son; His Son died and because the Son is infinite, therefore He bears our total guilt. We do not need to bear our guilt, nor do we even have to merit the merit of Christ. He does it all. So in one way it is the easiest religion in the world.
But now we can turn that over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason. The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand there before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Savior plus nothing—it is a complete denial of being autonomous. Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in the most brilliant people it is occasionally conscious), when they see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they suddenly are up against their innermost humanness—not humanness as they were created to be human, but human in the bad sense since the Fall. That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There
No Other Boast 