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
Category: Heroes
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
The Apologist: The Glory of the Christian System: The Personal-Infinite God
The Christian system is consistent as no other system that has ever been. It is beautiful beyond words, because it has that quality that no other system completely has—you begin at the beginning, and you can go to the end. It is as simple as that. And every part and portion of the system can be related back to the beginning. Whatever you discuss, to understand it properly, you just go back to the beginning and the whole thing is in its place. The beginning is simply that God exists and that He is the personal-infinite God. Our generation longs for the reality of personality, but it cannot understand it. But Christianity says personality is valid because personality has not just appeared in the universe, but rather is rooted in the personal God who has always been.
All too often, when we are talking to the lost world, we do not begin at the beginning and therefore the world stops listening. Without this emphasis on personality we cannot expect people really to listen, because without this the concept of salvation is suspended in a vacuum.
If we understand this, we understand the meaning of life. The meaning of life does not end with justication, but is seen in the reality that when we accept Christ as our Savior in the true biblical sense, our personal relationship with the personal God is restored. Every place we turn in Christianity we find that we are brought face to face with the wonder of personality—the very opposite of the dilemma and the sorrow of modern man who finds no meaning in personality. Consider the words of Paul, ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all.’ It is the personal to which we are brought. First of all there is the personal relationship with God Himself—this is the most wonderful, and is not just in Heaven but is substantially real in practice now. When we understand our calling, it is not only true but beautiful—and it should be exciting. It is hard to understand how an orthodox, evangelical, Bible-believing Christian can fall to be excited. The answers in the realm of the intellect should make us overwhelmingly excited. But more than this, we are returned to a personal relationship with the God who is there. If we are unexcited Christians, we should go back and see what is wrong. We are surrounded by a generation that can find ‘no one home’ in the universe. If anything marks our generation, it is this. In contrast to this, as a Christian I know who I am; and I know the personal God who is there. I speak, and He hears. I am not surrounded by mere mass, nor only energy particles, but He is there. And if I have accepted Christ as my Savior, then though it will not be perfect in this life, yet moment by moment, on the basis of the finished work of Christ, this person to person relationship with the God who is there can have reality to me. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There
The Apologist: The Only Answer to the Mystery of Love
Nevertheless, he [modern man] faces a very real problem as to the meaning of love. Though modern man tries to hang everything on the word love, love can easily degenerate into something very much less because he really does not understand it. He has no adequate universal for love.
On the other hand. the Christian does have the adequate universal he needs in order to be able to discuss the meaning of love. Among the things we know about the Trinity is that the Trinity was before the creation of everything else and that love existed between the persons of the Trinity before the foundation of the world. This being so, the existence of love as we know it in our makeup does not have an origin in chance, but from that which has always been. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There
The Apologist: The Only Infinite-Personal God
The God who is there according to the Scriptures is the personal-infinite God. There is no other god like this God. It is ridiculous to say that all religions teach the same things when they disagree at the fundamental point as to what God is like. The gods of the East are infinite by definition—the definition being ‘god is all that is’. This is the pan-everything-ism god. The gods of the West have tended to be personal but limited; such were the gods of the Greeks, Romans and Germans. But the God of the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, is the infinite-personal God. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There
The Apologist: Innie or an Outie?
Probably the best way to describe this concept of modern theology is to say that it is faith in faith, rather than faith directed to an object which is actually there. Some years ago at a number of universities I spoke on the topic, ‘Faith v. faith,’ speaking on he contrast between Chrsitian faith and modern faith. The same word, faith, is used, but it has an opposite meaning. Modern man cannot talk about the object of his faith, only about the faith itself. So he can discuss the existence of his faith and its ‘size’ as it exists against all reason, but that is all. Modern man’s faith turns inward.
In Christianity the value of faith depends upon the object towards which the faith is directed. So it looks outward to the God who is there, and to the Christ who in history died upon the cross once for all, finished the work of atonement, and on the third day rose again in space and in time. This makes Christian faith open to discussion and verification. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There
No Other Boast 