Five Must-Read Quotes from Francis Schaeffer

Schaeffer’s thought is always of vital importance and relevance:

In some 22 books the late great Christian thinker, apologist and evangelist Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) said so many important things. Obviously his earlier books making the case for theism, for the Christian gospel, and the plight of modern man are among them. These include his trilogy, Escape from Reason (1968), The God Who is There (1968), and He is There and He is Not Silent (1972).

But he was never just a theorist or abstract theologian. His feet were firmly planted on earth, and he always sought to offer practical wisdom and guidance on how the believer should live in an ever-darkening world. Thus he wrote quite a bit on what we now call the culture wars, political involvement, and related matters.

So the five quotes I present here have more to do with the church being what the church is meant to be, including confronting our culture and sharing truth to a truth-starved world. These five quotes from five books are presented in the order in which they were written.

Death in the City, 1969

The church in our generation needs reformation, revival, and constructive revolution. At times men think of the two words reformation and revival as standing in contrast one to the other, but this is a mistake. Both words are related to the word restore. Reformation refers to a restoration to pure doctrine; revival refers to a restoration in the Christian’s life. Reformation speaks of a return to the teachings of Scripture; revival speaks of a life brought into its proper relationship to the Holy Spirit.

The great moments of church history have come when these two restorations have simultaneously come into action so that the church has returned to pure doctrine and the lives of the Christians in the church have known the power of the Holy Spirit. There cannot be true revival unless there has been reformation; and reformation is not complete without revival.

Such a combination of reformation and revival would be revolutionary in our day – revolutionary in our individual lives as Christians, revolutionary not only in reference to the liberal church but constructively revolutionary in the evangelical, orthodox church as well. May we be those who know the reality of both reformation and revival, so that this poor dark world may have an exhibition of a portion of the church returned to both pure doctrine and Spirit-filled life. (p. 12)

How Should We Then Live?, 1976

I believe the majority of the silent majority, young and old, will sustain the loss of liberties without raising their voices as long as their own lifestyles are not threatened. And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things. Politics has largely become not a matter of ideals–increasingly men and women are not stirred by the values of liberty and truth–but of supplying a constituency with the frosting of personal peace and affluence. They know that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least an illusion of them.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome. (p. 227)

Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (with C. Everett Koop), 1979, 1980

But when we accept Christ as Saviour, we must also acknowledge and then act upon the fact that if He is our Saviour, He is also our Lord in all of life. He is Lord not just in religious things and not just in cultural things such as art and music, but in our intellectual lives and in business and our attitude toward the devaluation of people’s humanness in our culture. Acknowledging Christ’s Lordship and placing ourselves under what is taught in the whole Bible includes thinking and acting as citizens in relation to our government and its laws. We must know what those laws are and act responsibly to help to change them if they do not square with the Bible’s concepts of justice and humanness. The biblical answers have to be lived and not just thought.

We must live under the Lordship of Christ in all the areas of life—at great cost, if need be. It is moving to think of the Christians in China, paying a great price for their loyalty to Christ, but that does not relieve each of us from being under the Lordship of Christ in regard to our own country. (p. 152)

A Christian Manifesto, 1981

We live in a democracy, or republic, in this country which was born out of the Judeo-Christian base. The freedom that this gives is increasingly rare in the world today. We certainly must use this freedom while we still have it. There was a poll done by a secular group a few years ago which looked across the world to determine where there were freedoms today out of the 150 or so nations. Less than twenty-five were rated as today having significant freedom. We still have it. And it is our calling to do something about it and use it in our democracy while we have it.

Most fundamentally, our culture, society, government, and law are in the condition they are in, not because of a conspiracy, but because the church has forsaken its duty to be the salt of the culture. It is the church’s duty (as well as its privilege) to do now what it should have been doing all the time – to use the freedom we do have to be that salt of the culture. If the slide toward authoritarianism is to be reversed we need a committed Christian church that is dedicated to what John W. Whitehead calls “total revolution in the reformative sense.” (pp. 55-56)

The Great Evangelical Disaster, 1984

Make no mistake. We as Bible-believing evangelical Christians are locked in a battle. This is not a friendly gentleman’s discussion. It is a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ. It is a conflict on the level of ideas between two fundamentally opposed views of truth and reality. It is a conflict on the level of actions between a complete moral perversion and chaos and God’s absolutes. But do we really believe that we are in a life and death battle? Do we really believe that the part we play in the battle has consequences for whether or not men and women will spend eternity in hell? Or whether or not in this life people will live with meaning or meaninglessness? Or whether or not those who do live will live in a climate of moral perversion and degradation? Sadly, we must say that very few in the evangelical world have acted as if these things are true. Rather than trumpet our accomplishments and revel in our growing numbers, it would be closer to the truth to admit that our response has been a disaster. (pp. 31-32)

The truth is, I could easily have offered 50 of his quotes here. But if you are not yet familiar with the man and his work, these five should give you a good idea of his heart and mind. And see this introductory piece for more information: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2009/10/14/notable-christians-francis-schaeffer/

God bless you Francis Schaeffer.

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