Christianity is the easiest and the hardest religion in the world — Francis A. Schaeffer

"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.

People are living against the revelation of themselves. They are denying the revelation of God they themselves and all reality are.  They are denying it and yet they have to live with it. When the person comes to see that there are good and sufficient reasons, then he or she is faced with a problem; either they bow before those good and sufficient reasons, and bow to the Person behind the reasons, or they refuse to bow.
It is not that the answers are not good, adequate and sufficient.  Unless one gives up one’s autonomy, one cannot accept the answers."

— Francis A. Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.

suffering, futility, sin and hope — John Piper

Sermon text: Romans 8:18–25

"The meaning of all the misery in the world is that sin is horrific. All natural evil is a statement about the horror of moral evil. If you see a suffering in the world that is unspeakably horrible, let it make you shudder at how unspeakably horrible sin is against an infinitely holy God. The meaning of futility and the meaning of corruption and the meaning of our groaning is that sin – falling short of the glory of God – is ghastly, hideous, repulsive beyond imagination.

Unless you have some sense of the infinite holiness of God and the unspeakable outrage of sin against this God, you will inevitably see the futility and suffering of the universe as an overreaction. But in fact the point of our miseries, our futility, our corruption, our groaning is to teach us the horror of sin. And the preciousness of redemption and hope."

— John Piper, Subjected to Futility in Hope, Part 1

Without absolutes, morals as morals cease to exist — Francis A. Schaeffer

"From the biblical answer flow four important facts.

Firstly, the God who is there is a good God.

Secondly, there is a hope of a solution to the dilemma of man.

Thirdly, there is a sufficient basis for morals. Nobody has ever discovered a way of having real “morals” without a moral absolute. If there is no moral absolute, we are left with hedonism (doing what I like) or some form of the social contract theory (what is best for society as a whole is right). However, neither of these alternatives corresponds to the moral motions that men have. Talk to people long enough and deeply enough, and you will find that they consider some things are really right and some things are really wrong.  Without absolutes, morals as morals cease to exist, and humanistic man starting from himself is unable to find the absolute he needs.  But because the God of the Bible is there, real morals exist.  Within this framework I can say one action is right and another wrong, without talking nonsense.

Fourthly, there is an adequate reason for fighting wrong.  The Christian never faces the dilemma posed in Camus’ book La Peste.  It simply is not true that he either has to side with the doctor against God by fighting the plague, or join with the priest on God’s side and thus be much less than human by not fighting the plague. If this were an either-or choice in life, it would indeed be terrible. But the Christian is not confined to such a choice.  Let us go to the tomb of Lazarus.  As Jesus stood there, He not only wept, but He was angry.  The exegesis of the Greek of the passages John 11:33 and 38 is clear. Jesus, standing in front of the tomb of Lazarus, was angry at death and at the abnormality of the world the destruction and distress caused by sin.  In Camus’ words, Christ hated the plague.  He claimed to be God and He could hate the plague without hating Himself as God.

A Christian can fight what is wrong in the world with compassion and know that as he hates these things, God hates them too.  God hates them to the high price of the death of Christ.

But if I live in a world of nonabsolutes and would fight social injustice on the mood of the moment, how can I establish what social justice is?  What criterion do I have to distinguish between right and wrong so that I can know what I should be fighting?  Is it not possible that I could in fact acquiesce in evil and stamp out good?  The word love cannot tell me how to discern, for within the humanistic framework love can have no defined meaning.  But once I comprehend that the Christ who came to die to end “the plague” both wept and was angry at the plague’s effects, I have a reason for fighting that does not rest merely on my momentary disposition, or the shifting consensus of men.

But the Christian also needs to be challenged at this point.  The fact that he alone has a sufficient standard by which to fight evil, does not mean that he will so fight.  The Christian is the real radical of our generation, for he stands against the monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative.  But too often, instead of being the radical, standing against the shifting sands of relativism, he subsides into merely maintaining the status quo.  If it is true that evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross, and that there is a moral law fixed in what God is in Himself, then Christians should be the first into the field against what is wrong — including man’s inhumanity to man."

— Francis A. Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.

no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from nonpersonal sources — Francis Schaeffer

"The Bible states that this God who is personal created man in His own image.… God is personal, & man is also personal.

It might be helpful to illustrate the situation in this way.
Imagine you are in the Alps, and from a high vantage point you can see three parallel ranges of mountains with two valleys in between.  In one valley there is a lake, but the other is dry.  Suddenly you begin to witness what sometimes happens in the Alps; a lake forming in the second valley where there was none before.  As you see the water rising, you may wonder what its source is.  If it stops at the same level as the lake in the neighboring valley, you may, after careful measurements, conclude that there is a possibility that the water has come from the first valley.  But if your measurement shows that the level of the second lake is twenty feet higher than the first, then you can no longer consider that its source may be from the neighboring valley and you would have to seek another explanation.  Personality is like that; no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from nonpersonal sources.

Therefore, biblical Christianity has an adequate and reasonable explanation for the source and meaning of human personality.  Its source is sufficient — the personal God on the high order of Trinity.  Without such a source men are left with personality coming from the impersonal (plus time, plus chance).

The two alternatives are very clearcut.  Either there is a personal beginning to everything, or one has what the impersonal throws up by chance out of the time sequence.  The fact that the second alternative may be veiled by connotation words makes no difference.  The words used by Eastern pantheism; the theological words such as Tillich’s “Ground of Being”; the secular shift from mass to energy or motion — all eventually come back to the impersonal, plus time, plus chance.  If this is really the only answer to man’s personality, then personality is no more than an illusion, a kind of sick joke which no amount of semantic juggling will alter.  Only some form of mystical jump will allow us to accept that personality comes from impersonality.  This was the position into which Teilhard de Chardin was forced. His answer is only a mystical answer of words.

Because these men will not accept the only explanation which can fit the facts of their own experience, they have become metaphysical magicians.  No one has presented an idea, let alone demonstrated it to be feasible, to explain how the impersonal beginning, plus time, plus chance, can give personality.  We are distracted by a flourish of endless words, and lo, personality has appeared out of the hat!  This is the water rising above its source.  No one in all the history of humanistic, rationalistic thought has found a solution.  As a result, either the thinker must say man is dead, because personality is a mirage; or else he must hang his reason on a hook outside the door and cross the threshold into the leap of faith which is the new level of despair.

A man like Sir Julian Huxley has clarified the dilemma by acknowledging, though he is an atheist, that somehow or other, against all that one might expect, man functions better if he acts as though God is there.  This sounds like a feasible solution for a moment, the kind of answer a computer might give if you fed the sociological data into it.  God is dead, but act as if He were alive.  However, a moment’s reflection will show what a terrible solution this is.  Ibsen, the Norwegian, put it like this: if you take away a man’s lie, you take away his hope. These thinkers are saying in effect that man can only function as man for an extended period of time if he acts on the assumption that a lie (that the personal God of Christianity is there) is true.  You cannot find any deeper despair than this for a sensitive person.  This is not an optimistic, happy, reasonable or brilliant answer.  It is darkness and death.

Imagine that a universe existed which was made up only of liquids and solids, and no free gases.  A fish was swimming in this universe.  This fish, quite naturally, was conformed to its environment, so that it was able to go on living.  But let us suppose that by blind chance, as the evolutionists would have us believe, this fish developed lungs as it continued swimming in this universe without any gases.  Now this fish would no longer be able to function and fulfill its position as a fish.  Would it then be higher or lower in its new state with lungs?  It would be lower, for it would drown.  In the same way, if man has been kicked up by chance out of what is only impersonal, then those things that make him man — hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication — are ultimately unfulfillable and are thus meaningless.  In such a situation, is man higher or lower?  He would then be the lowest creature on the scale.  The green moss on the rock is higher than he, for it can be fulfilled in the universe which exists.  But if the world is what these men say it is, then man (not only individually but as a race), being unfulfillable, is dead.  In this situation man should not walk on the grass, but respect it — for it is higher than he!"

— Francis A. Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.