Top 60 Francis A. Schaeffer Quotes
#1. What kind of judgment does one apply, then, to a work of art? I believe that there are four basic standards: (1) technical excellence, (2) validity, (3) intellectual content, the world view which comes through and (4) the integration of content and vehicle.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#2. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be a vehicle for self-conscious evangelism. Christians ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. The Christian is the really free man. He is free to have imagination.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#3. But our world at the end of the twentieth century has so much destruction without Christian artists so emphasizing the minor theme in the total body of their work that they add to the poorness and destruction of our generation.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#4. As a Christian I do not have to find my validity in my status, or by thinking myself above other men. My validity and my status are found in being before the God who is there.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#5. When a man comes under the blood of Christ, his whole capacity as a man is refashioned. His soul is saved, yes, but so are his mind and his body. True spirituality means the lordship of Christ over the total man.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#7. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois failure.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#8. 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.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#10. There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#11. Christ is with those in paradise now. But Christ - the same Christ, with the same reality - promises the Christian that he will bring forth fruit through us in this life now. The power of the crucified, risen, and glorified Christ will bring forth this fruit through us now.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#12. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau's writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,
Francis A. Schaeffer
#13. A quiet disposition and a heart giving thanks at any given moment is the real test of the extent to which we love God at that moment.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#15. The Cross of Christ is to be a reality to me not only once for all at my conversion, but all through my life as a Christian. True spirituality does not stop at the negative (death), but without the negative - in comprehension and in practice - we are not ready to go on.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#16. The Christian should be the man with the flaming imagination and the beauty of creation.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#17. 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.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#18. in the absence of a biblical morality a new elite will always come forward to dictate arbitrary absolutes to society
Francis A. Schaeffer
#19. How can art be sufficiently meaningful? If it is offered up merely before men, then it does not have a sufficient integration point.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#20. Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains!" Rousseau saw the primitive as innocent and autonomous freedom as the final good. We
Francis A. Schaeffer
#21. We may not play with the new theology even if we may think we can turn it to our advantage.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#22. But when the world can turn around and see a group of God's people exhibiting substantial healing in the area of human relationships in their present life, then the world will take notice.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#24. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be *chosen* after a careful consideration of which worldview is true.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#25. Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person as a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#26. In God's world the individual counts. Therefore, Christian art should deal with the individual.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#27. A compassionate open home is part of Christian responsibility, and should be practiced up to the level of capacity.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#28. In a fallen world, we must be willing to face the fact that however lovingly we preach the gospel, if a man rejects it he will be miserable. It is dark out there.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#29. 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.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#30. For a long time this Bohemian life was taken to be the ideal for the artist, and it has come in the last few decades to be considered an ideal for more than the artist.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#31. How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#32. The Lord calls us to love all people, including those who are enemies of the gospel and those who blaspheme. This may not be comfortable, and it may not be easy, but this is the gospel of Christ, for He loved His enemies so much that He died to save us.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#33. We are to have a forgiving spirit even before the other person expresses regret for his wrong.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#34. The ironic fact is that humanism which began with man's being central eventually had no real meaning for people. On the other hand, if one begins with the Bible's position that man is created by God and in the image of God, there is a basis for that person's dignity.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#35. Actually we do everything we can, whether it is in a philosophic sense or a practical sense, to put ourselves at the center of the universe.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#36. The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#37. If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking,I am not confessing Christ. (Martin Luther)
Francis A. Schaeffer
#38. We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin-who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that He created man in His image. So man is something wonderful.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#39. 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.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#40. As my son Frankie put it, Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm: They began - I am my shepherd. Then - Sheep are my shepherd. Then - Everything is my shepherd. Finally - Nothing is my shepherd.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#41. The human hand has an amazing quality that nothing else has: tremendous efficiency of strength and yet total gentleness.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#42. We were free to create, as long as we never forgot that we are slaves to Jesus.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#43. Humanism means that the man is the measure of all things ... But it is not only that man must start from himself in the area of knowledge and learning, but any value system must come arbitrarily from man himself by arbitrary choice.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#45. To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#46. Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#47. I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#48. The principle of saying no to self lies at the heart of my attitude toward the world as it maintains its alien stand in rebellion against the Creator.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#49. As Christians, we must see that just because an artist -even a great artist- portrays a worldview in writing or on canvas, it does not mean that we should automatically accept that worldview. Good art heightens the impact of that worldview, but it does not make it true.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#51. Lex Rex has become Rex Lex. Arbitrary judgment concerning current sociological good is king
Francis A. Schaeffer
#52. Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen that beginning humanistically with mathematics one has only particulars and will never come to universals or meaning, but will end only with mechanics. It
Francis A. Schaeffer
#53. Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#54. One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#55. 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.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#56. Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#57. A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#58. I am not a Bible-believing Christian in the fullest sense simply by believing the right doctrines, but as I live in practice in this supernatural world.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#60. Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.
Francis A. Schaeffer
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