Francis Schaeffer Quotes

Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful - Christian community is the final apologetic.

If we do not show love to one another, the world has a right to question whether Christianity is true.

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.

Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.

The beginning of men's rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.

No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God's revelation.

If Christians win a battle by using worldly means, they have really lost.

Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose - to be in relationship to God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.

Art is a reflection of God's creativity, an evidence that we are made in the image of God.

We must not only be True. We must be Beautiful.

The ordinary Christian with the Bible in his hand can say that the majority is wrong.

This shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.

Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.

Reformation is a return to the sound doctrine of the Bible. Revival is the practice of that sound doctrine under the power of the Holy Spirit.

I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution.

He who loses the arts loses the culture.

If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.

Christianity is the greatest intellectual system the mind of man has ever touched.

This is not an age in which to be a soft Christian.

Jesus taught that the mark of the Christian is the observable love shown among all true believers.

Tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.

The church's or Christian group's methods are as important as its message.

If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.

If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.

The soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important.

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong.

The Lord is the General, and he has the right . . . the sovereign right . . . to put us where he wants in the battle.

Sometimes the greatest deterrent to a great marriage is believing you have a perfect marriage.

There is no place in God's world where there are no people who will come and share a home as long as it is a real home.

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.

And the purpose of our creation, in which all our subsidiary purposes fit, is to be in a personal relationship to God, in communion with him, in love, by choice, the creature before the Creator.

In the flesh rather than the work of the Spirit, it is easy to say we are showing holiness and it only be egotistic pride and hardness.

Apostasy must be called what it is, spiritual adultery.

Thank God for the reality for which we were created, a moment-by-moment communication with God himself.

You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand.

People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.

The great distinction of a true Christian is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. How careful should he be, lest anything in his thoughts or feelings would be offensive to the Divine Guest.!

Our trusting the Lord does not mean that there are not times of tears. I think it is a mistake as Christians to act as though trusting the Lord and tears are not compatible.

To fail to exhibit that we take truth seriously at those points where there is a cost in our doing so, is to push the next generation in the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us.

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.

Belief does not change what is.

This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith.

Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air

Modern man has not only thrown away Christian theology, he has thrown away the possibility of what our forefathers had as a basis for morality and law.

Humanism is not wrong in its cry for sociological healing, but humanism is not producing it.

A compassionate open home is part of Christian responsibility, and should be practiced up to the level of capacity.

If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals.

When my conscience under the Holy Spirit makes me aware of a specific sin I should at once call that sin sin and bring it consciously under the blood of Christ.