Christianity is a creation-centered teaching — Francis Schaeffer

"We always should realize, and I cannot say it often enough, that Christianity is a creation-centered teaching. It is not that suddenly for some strange reason out of nowhere if you accept Christ as Savior you are in. That is a part of a total structure. Christianity is a system, and I would say that I have no apology for using the word system, though it must not be allowed to be a mere academic system or theoretical or dead intellectualism. In the proper sense of the word, God is systematic in His creation and revelation.

It has got to be the whole man coming to know this is truth, acting upon it, living it out in his life, and worshiping God. But it is a system, it begins with the fact that there is a Creator, there is the God, the triune God who has existed forever. He has created all things, so there is nothing autonomous from Him."

— Francis Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview (Vol. 1, p. 186). Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.

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.

now I can worship God better — Francis A. Schaeffer

"A number of years ago I was at a discussion group in Detroit.  An older black pastor was there.  We discussed many intellectual and cultural problems and the answers given by Christianity.  One would have called the discussion “intellectual” rather than devotional.  As he was leaving, the black pastor shook my hand and thanked me.  If he had said, “Thank you for helping me to defend my people better,” or “Thank you for helping me to be a better evangelist,” I would have been very glad that what I had said had been helpful, and then possibly I would not have given it another thought.  But what he actually said was, “Thank you for opening these doors to me; now I can worship God better.”  I will never forget him because he was a man who really understood.  If this is not our own response first of all, and then the response of those whom we try to help, we have made a mistake somewhere."

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

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.

Ash Heap Lives - Francis A. Schaeffer

“We spend most of our time & money for things that will end up in the city dump...

Do we understand that material possessions are not necessarily good in themselves even in this life? Let me give two illustrations from our early days in Switzerland...
When I first came to Europe many women worked in the field because farm machinery was scarce. Even on the larger farms, most jobs had to be done by hand…In those days, the work was hard…And I saw women out laboring with their husbands, sometimes doing the hard work of pitching the hay. I though of all the American women who did not have to do this: “My, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Swill women could be saved from this hard physical work?” But I have changed my mind. The women who worked with their husbands shoulder to shoulder during the day & then slept with them at night had one of the greatest riches in the world. Is anything worse than our modern affluent situation where the wife has no share in the real life of her husband?
Is it really true, then, that having increased material possessions is automatically good, even in this life? No. Off all people, Christians should know this because God’s Word teaches it. We must not get caught up in practical materialism…

The perspective of our lives should be that we can lay up treasure in one of two places – earth or Heaven…

Death will strip us of all material possessions we leave upon this earth. Death is a thief. Five minutes after we die, our most treasured possessions which are invested in this life are absolutely robbed from us…

We must use money with a view to what counts in eternity…Let me say with tears that as far as material possessions, time, energy & talents are concerned, all too many Bible-believing Christians live as though their entire existence is limited to this side of the grave. We cannot ignore Jesus’ statement about these two irreconcilable reference points: “You cannot serve God & money” (Matt. 6:24). Either riches in this life, or the reality of God & the future – one of them must give the overshadowing cast to our lives…”

- Francis A. Schaeffer, No Little People, sermon “Ash Heap Lives”

http://books.google.com/books?id=f-uy7hbFCh8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=No+Little+People&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

http://www.wtsbooks.com/product-exec/product_id/2860/nm/No+Little+People

"No Little People, No Little Places" - Francis A. Schaeffer

“As a Christian considers the possibility of being the Christian glorified (a topic I discuss in True Spirituality), often his reaction is, “I am so limited. Surely it does not matter much whether I am walking as a creature glorified or not.” Or, to put it in another way, “It is wonderful to be a Christian, but I am such a small person, so limited in talents—or energy or psychological strength or knowledge— that what I do is not really important.” The Bible, however, has quite a different emphasis: with God there are no little people.

One thing that has encouraged me, as I have wrestled with such questions in my own life, is the way God used Moses’ rod, a stick of wood… Just a stick of wood—but when Moses obeyed God’s command to toss it to the ground, it became a serpent, and Moses himself fled from it. God next ordered him to take it by the tail and when he did so, it became a rod again. Then God told him to go and confront the power of Egypt and meet Pharaoh face to face with this rod in his hand. Exodus 4:20 tells us the secret of all that followed: the rod of Moses had become the rod of God…

Watch the destruction of judgment which came from a dead stick of wood that had become the rod of God. Pharaoh’s grip on the Hebrews was shaken loose, and he let the people go. But then he changed his mind and ordered his armies to pursue them. When the armies came upon them, the Hebrews were caught in a narrow place with mountains on one side of them and the sea on the other. And God said to Moses, “Lift thou up thy rod” (Ex. 14:16). What good is it to lift up a rod when one is caught in a cul-de-sac between mountains and a great body of water with the mightiest army in the world at his heels? Much good, if the rod is the rod of God. The waters divided, and the people passed through. Up to this point, the rod had been used for judgment and destruction, but now it was as much a rod of healing for the Jews as it had been a rod of judgment for the Egyptians. That which is in the hand of God can be used in either way. Later, the rod of judgment also became a rod of supply…
There was nothing in the rod itself. The rod of Moses had simply become the rod of God… The rod also brought military victory as it was held up. It was more powerful than the swords of either the Jews or their enemy (Ex. 17:9)…

Consider the mighty ways in which God used a dead stick of wood. “God so used a stick of wood” can be a banner cry for each of us. Though we are limited and weak in talent, physical energy, and psychological strength, we are not less than a stick of wood. But as the rod of Moses had to become the rod of God, so that which is me must become the me of God. Then I can become useful in God’s hands. The Scripture emphasizes that much can come from little if the little is truly consecrated to God. There are no little people and no big people in the true spiritual sense, but only consecrated and unconsecrated people. The problem for each of us is applying this truth to ourselves: is Francis Schaeffer the Francis Schaeffer of God?...

The people who receive praise from the Lord Jesus will not in every case be the people who hold leadership in this life. There will be many persons who were sticks of wood that stayed close to God and were quiet before Him, and were used in power by Him in a place which looks small to men.

Each Christian is to be a rod of God in the place of God for him. 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. Those who think of themselves as little people in little places, if committed to Christ and living under His Lordship in the whole of life, may, by God’s grace, change the flow of our generation. And as we get on a bit in our lives, knowing how weak we are, if we look back and see we have been somewhat used of God, then we should be the rod “surprised by joy.”

Francis A. Schaeffer, No Little People, No Little Places

http://static.crossway.org/excerpts/1581345186.1.pdf

http://books.google.com/books?id=f-uy7hbFCh8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=No+Little+People&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false