Francis Schaeffer (47)
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The distinction between the news columns and the editorial page has, in many of the most influential papers, become much less clear.
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.How Should We Then Live
As the memory of the Christian consensus which gave us freedom within the biblical form increasingly is forgotten, a manipulating authoritarianism will tend to fill the vacuum.
the fall of Constantinople in 1453 resulted in an exodus of Greek scholars who brought manuscripts with them to Florence and other northern Italian cities. It was the humanists of that time who, under the enthusiasm for the classics, spoke of what had immediately preceeded them as a "Dark Age" and talked of a "rebirth" in their own era.How Should We Then Live, 64
It is important to realize what a difference a people's worldview makes in their strength as they are exposed to the pressure of life. That it was the Christians who were able to resist religious mixtures, syncretism, and the effects of the weakness of Roman culture speaks to the strength of the Christian worldview.How Should We Then Live, 19
Each cycle of inflation, attempted control, the threat of economic recession, and finally, released control has increased inflation; yet politically, with most people dominated by the concept of an ever-expanding affluence, it is difficult or impossible to face the danger of economic recession.
To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.How Should We Then Live, 297
History indicates that at a certain point of economic breakdown people cease being concerned with individual liberties and are ready to accept regimentation.How Should We Then Live, 284
In order to justify the early taking of the needed kidneys and other organs, the criterion for death is now generally accepted as a flat brain wave over a twenty-four-hour period.
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 a 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.How Should We Then Live, 260
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.How Should We Then Live, 260
Existentialism and linguistic analysis are both antiphilosophies in that neither gives the basis people need for the answers to the big and fundamental questions. Not only do they not give the answers people need, but each in its own way generates confusion about meaning and values.
I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.
The new liberal theology, because it says that the Bible does not touch the cosmos or history, has no real basis for applying the Bible's values in a historic situation, in either morals or law. Everything religious is in the area of nonreason, and since reason has no place there, there is no room for discussion; there are only arbitrary pronouncements.How Should We Then Live, 199
in his theology Karl Barth made his own kind of dichotomy and brought the existential methodology into theology.How Should We Then Live, 196
We have also seen a tremendous rash of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope. Though demons do not fit into modern man's concepts on the basis of his reason, many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine. People put the occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having some kind of meaning, even if it is a horrendous one.How Should We Then Live, 193
it is not only that we need absolutes in morals and values; we need absolutes if our existence is to have meaning--my existence, your existence, Man's existence. Even more profoundly, we must have absolutes if we are to have a solid epistemology (a theory of knowing--how we know, or how we know we know).How Should We Then Live?, 160-161
If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values.How Should We Then Live?, 160
We must never think that the Christian base hindered science. Rather, the Christian base made modern science possible.How Should We Then Live, 152
In his later years, Newton wrote more about the Bible than about science, though little was published. Humanists have said that they wish he had spent all of his time on his science. They think he wasted the hours he expended on biblical study, but they really are a bit blind when they say this. As Whitehead and Oppenheimer stressed, if Newton and others had not had a biblical base, they would have had no base for their science at all.How Should We Then Live, 150
because the early scientists believed that the world was created by a reasonable God, they were not surprised to discover that people could find out something true about nature and the universe on the basis of reason.How Should We Then Live?, 147
The foundation for modern science can be said to have been laid at Oxford when scholars there attacked Thomas Aquinas's teaching by proving that his chief authority, Aristotle, made certain mistakes about natural phenomena.How Should We Then Live?, 144
How quickly all the humanist ideals came to grief! In September 1792 began the massacre in which some thirteen hundred prisoners were killed... Before it was all over, the government and its agents killed forty thousand people, many of them peasants. Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), the revolutionary leader, was himself executed in July 1794. This destruction came not from outside the system; it was produced by the system. As in the later Russian Revolution, the revolutionaries on their humanist base had only two options--anarchy or repression.How Should We Then Live?, 135
The utopian dream of the Enlightenment can be summed up by five words: reason, nature, happiness, progress, and liberty. It was thoroughly secular in its thinking. The humanistic elements which had risen during the Renaissance came to flood tide in the Enlightenment. Here was man starting from himself absolutely.How Should We Then Live?, 132
Calvin himself in Geneva did not have the authority often attributed to him... Calvin's influence was moral and informal... For example, he preferred to have the Lord's Supper given weekly, but he allowed the will of the majority of the pastors in Geneva to prevail. Thus the Lord's Supper was celebrated only once every three months.How Should We Then Live?, 122
In 1860 Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy pointed out a crucial difference between the Renaissance and the Reformation... He indicated that freedom was introduced both in the north by the Reformation and in the south by the Renaissance. But in the south it went to license; in the north it did not. The reason was that in the Renaissance humanism man had no way to bring forth a meaning to the particulars of life and no place from which to get absolutes in morals. But in the north, the people of the Reformation, standing under the teaching of Scripture, had freedom and yet at the same time compelling absolute values.How Should We Then Live, 112
to Thomas Aquinas the will was fallen after man had revolted against God, but the mind was not. This eventually resulted in people believing they could think out the answers to all the great questions, beginning only from themselves. The Reformation, in contract to Aquinas had a more biblical concept of the Fall.How Should We Then Live, 85
The Francis I, who in 1516 took Leonardo to France (where Leonardo died), is the same Francis I to whom Calvin (1509-1564) addressed his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536.How Should We Then Live, 85
Among the Greek philosophers, Thomas Aquinas relied especially on one of the greatest, Aristotle. In 1263 Pope Urban IV had forbidden the study of Aristotle in the universities. Aquinas managed to have Aristotle accepted, so the ancient non-Christian philosophy was reenthroned.How Should We Then Live, 52
it was all too easy for Greek and Roman thought-forms to creep into the cracks and chinks of a faith which was less and less founded on the Bible and more and more resting on the authority of church pronouncements. By the thirteenth century the great Aquinas (1225-1274) had already begun, in deference to Aristotle (384-322 BC), to open the door to placing revelation and human reason on an equal footing.How Should We Then Live, 42
During the persecution of the Christians under the Roman emperors, the action of the Roman military commander Maurice is a good example of a possible response. When he received an order to direct a persecution of Christians, he handed his insignia to his assistant in order to join the Christians and be killed as a fellow believer. This action took place in the Rhone valley in Switzerland about AD 286How Should We Then Live, 32
Rome did not fall because of external forces such as the invasion by the barbarians. Rome had no sufficient inward base; the barbarians only completed the breakdown-- and Rome gradually became a ruin.How Should We Then Live, 26
As the Roman economy slumped lower and lower, burdened with an aggravated inflation and a costly government, authoritarianism increased to counter the apathy. Since work was no longer done voluntarily, it was brought increasingly under the authority of the state, and freedoms were lost.How Should We Then Live, 26
Even though Emperor Constantine ended the persecution of the Christians and Christianity became first (in 313) a legal religion, and then (in 381) the official state religion of the Empire, the majority of the people went on in their old ways. Apathy was the chief mark of the late empire.How Should We Then Live, 26
As the Empire ground down, the decadent Romans were given to a thirst for violence and a gratification of the senses. This is especially evident in their rampant sexuality.How Should We Then Live, 24
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.How Should We Then Live, 22
The Caesars would not tolerate this worshiping of the one God only. It was counted as treason. Thus their worship became a special threat to the unity of the state during the third century and during the reign of Diocletian (284-305).How Should We Then Live, 22
just as a Roman bridge would cave in under the weight of a modern six-wheeled truck. Culture and the freedoms of people are fragile. Without a sufficient base, when such pressures come only time is needed--and often not a great deal of time--before there is a collapse.How Should We Then Live, 20
These gods depended on the society which had made them, and when this society collapsed the gods tumbled with it.How Should We Then Live, 18
The gods were amplified humanity, not divinity.How Should We Then Live, 17
The Greeks and later the Romans also tried to build society upon their gods. But these gods were not big enough because they were finite, limited.How Should We Then Live, 17
The Greeks tried first to build their society upon the city-state, that is, the polis. The city-state, both in theory and fact, was comprised of all those who were accepted as citizens. All values had meaning in reference to the polis.How Should We Then Live, 17
People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize.How Should We Then Live, 15
The civil government, as all of life, stands under the Law of God...but when any office commands that which is contrary to the Word of God, those who hold that office abrogate their authority and they are not to be obeyed. And that includes the state.
In almost every place where the Reformation flourished there was not only religious noncompliance; there was civil disobedience as well.A Christian Manifesto
We are now losing those freedoms and we can expect to continue to lose them if this other world view continues to take increased force and power in our county. We can be sure of this. I would say it again -- inevitably, mathematically, all of these things will come forth. There is no possible way to heal the relativistic thinking of our own day, if indeed all there is is a universe out there that is silent about any values. None, whatsoever! It is not possible. It is a loss of values and it is a loss of freedom which we may be sure will continually grow.https://peopleforlife.org/francis.html
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