Death in the City QUOTES

1 " Having turned from the One who can fulfill, the One who can give comfort, having turned away from His love, His propositional revelation, there will be death in your city, in your culture!” Modern man stands in that place. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

2 " There is no real preaching of the Christian gospel except in light of the fact that man is under the wrath of God—the moral wrath of God. So Paul has a reply to the man who shrugs his shoulders and says, “Why do I need salvation?” His response is this: “You need salvation because you are under the wrath of God. You have broken God’s law. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

3 " A Christian must reject the philosophy of existentialism, but he must emphasize what is truly existential, for the Bible does not teach a static situation in which one becomes a Christian and that’s it. Rather, it teaches that time is moving, and a relationship to God is important at every given existential moment. Consequently, you do not begin the Christian life by faith and then remain static. You continue to live it by faith. Much of Paul’s teaching from Romans 5 on deals with this. The Christian, then, should be the true existentialist, moving upon the knife-edge of time, in every given moment being in relationship with God. Moment-by-moment living by faith "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

4 " There is death in the city when the understanding of the human being about himself is no longer related to an actually existing God. For then human beings inhabit an impersonal world of their own shifting values and their own power plays. Without a knowable God in heaven, man is left without real meaning and morals on earth. He will think and act just like pagans, whose integration is with land, earth, and nature (Latin: pagus). "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

5 " Being a Bible-believing Christian, then, not only means believing with our heads, but in this present moment acting through faith on that belief. True spirituality is acting at the given moment upon the doctrines which one as a Christian says he believes. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

6 " Often Christians, young and old alike, have not faced the facts about their own countries—that they are under the judgment of God. Perhaps that explains why they are often without enthusiasm in their proclamation of the gospel, why they just give the crumbling wall a coat of paint. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

7 " To think that one can give the Christian message and not have the world with its monolithic, post-Christian culture bear down on us is not to understand the fierceness of the battle in such a day as Jeremiah’s or such a day as our own. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

8 " Our calling is to enjoy God as well as glorify Him. Real fulfillment relates to the purpose for which we were made—to be in reference to God, to be in personal relationship with Him, to be fulfilled by Him, and thus to have an affirmation of life. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

9 " Let us be careful—we who stand for the orthodox, historic Christian faith in this century—that we have a thankful heart. Otherwise it will not be many years until the orthodoxy is gone and we are faced with heterodoxy. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

10 " Paul then turns to the second area in which men suppress the truth. In Romans 1:20 he says, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” So the second testimony man suppresses is the truth of the external world. JeanPaul Sartre has said that the basic philosophic question of all questions is this: why is it that something is there rather than nothing? He is correct. The great mystery to the materialist "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

11 " Without the context of the biblical teaching about Man, meaning, and morals, such rightful insights and tools as democracy, economic interests, global relations, and techniques take on a life of their own. Fanatical religion will replace truth and commitment. They turn the human being into a little god with monstrous, because untrained, irrational and unrestrained intentions who has tools at his disposal to justify the most murderous competition, selfishness, and greed. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

12 " There is death in the city of our society, our relationships, our views on life, our human interests, when we have become the little dictators that determine how everything has to be crushed that does not revolve around our private, personal self-interest, economic advantage, or optimistic expectations. A private morality is related to a personal god, any god who meets my selfish expectations. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

13 " That is, Jeremiah says, “I’m talking against you, O kings. I’m talking against you, O priests. I’m talking against you, O prophets.” Jeremiah preached against the dignitaries who might have been great in the hierarchy of that society and state, but who were leading the people astray. Today such dignitaries include not only church and governmental and judicial leaders, but those of education, the media and culture. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

14 " Further, we find in Jeremiah 5:13, “And the prophets shall become wind, and the word is not in them; thus shall it be done unto them.” What’s the matter with the prophets? The trouble is they are not speaking for God. They are merely taking the social consensus of their day and speaking as though that was the Word of God. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

15 " Removing the absolutes, liberalism has led into a wilderness. It has eliminated the categories that make the difference between love and non love It led us all the way to Antonioni’s movie Blow-up, advertised as “Murder without guilt, love without meaning.” The sheep are scattered. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

16 " Men of our time knew the truth and yet turned away-turned away not only from the biblical truth, the religious truth of the Reformation, but turned away from the total culture built upon that truth, which included the balance of freedom and form which the Reformation brought forth in northern Europe in the state and in society, a balnce which has never been known anywhere in the world before. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

17 " Certainly the greatest guilt rests upon the church which knew the truth, deliberately turned away from it, and now only presents men with relativism, an echo of modern secular thought. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

18 " They have come and spoken in the name of God, and they have said, “God says,” but they have not had the Word of God. It has merely been their own words welling up inside themselves and echoing the society which surrounds them. These men come and say, “Here is the message of God,” but it’s not. It’s the message of man. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

19 " And finally, we read in 23:30, which is especially strong, “Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal my words every one from his neighbor.” What do the prophets say? This prophet hears that prophet, and then he repeats the message. And all you hear are echoes. It is like being in a hollow, boarded-up building; all you hear is echo, echo, echo, echo. Study the theology of our own day and all you hear is the echo, echo, echo, ECHO! Echoing what? Echoing what this man says, what that man says, what materialistic sociology teaches, what materialistic psychology teaches, what materialistic economics teaches, what materialistic philosophy teaches. Echoing, echoing, echoing as though the words were sprinkled with holy water because they now repeat these same things in theological terms. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City

20 " The non-Christian, in this century especially, has no legal and moral base. Everything floats in space: a 51 percent vote of some type of right-wing or left-wing authoritarianism must decide what is acceptable, or some form of hedonism must be adopted, because, as Plato understood so well, an absolute is necessary for real morality. Plato never found such an absolute, but he understood the problem, and so did the Neoplatonic men of the Renaissance. "

― Francis A. Schaeffer , Death in the City