Quotes from Bryan A. Follis

For Schaeffer rationality concerned the validity of thought, while rationalism concerned someone beginning with himself and his reason plus what he observes, without information from any other source, and coming to final answers in regard to truth, ethics, and reality.

Far from regarding mankind as autonomous, Schaeffer believed that his books stressed "that people have no final answers in regard to truth, morals or epistemology without God's revelation in the Bible.

Conscious that each generation had its own particular questions and aware, from his own experience, that not every intellectual question is a moral dodge to avoid responsibility for sin, Schaeffer argued that there was a real need for somebody to provide an answer.

Christians had the responsibility to "have enough compassion to pray and do the hard work which is necessary to answer the honest questions.

We want to share the truth with sensitivity and love and in the context of a meaningful relationship, but with the fundamental purpose of leading someone into a relationship with Jesus Christ.

This has led George Marsden to observe that while "Calvinists had maintained that the human mind was blinded in mankind's Fall from innocence, in the Common Sense version, the intellect seemed to suffer from a slight astigmatism only."42

Cornelius Van Til, under whom Schaeffer studied at Westminster for two years, used Kuyper's notion of the antithesis (i.e., that an absolute antithesis exists in all of life between the believer and unbeliever) to develop his presuppositional apologetics.

John Frame has noted that for Van Til, presuppositionalism did not denote apriorism, but the "pre- in presupposition refers to the 'pre-eminence' of the presupposition with respect to our other beliefs."45

By "rationalism" Schaeffer meant man beginning absolutely and totally from himself, gathering information concerning the particulars, and formulating the universal.

For Schaeffer "rationality" means mankind thinking in a way that is not contrary to reason, or as he put it, "man's aspiration of reason is valid.

Schaeffer argues that this move—whereby mankind retained his rationalism but at the expense of rationality—was made out of desperation, but that this is characteristic of sinful man.

Hence while Warfield held that it was the task of apologetics to lay the foundations for theology, Kuyper took the opposite view and regarded theology as the starting point for apologetics.

Placing himself, rather than God, at the center of the universe and making himself autonomous, man will give up his rationality so he can preserve his rationalism, his autonomy, and his rebellion against God.36

It is a sad reflection upon a society obsessed with sex that people are now desperate for intimacy and love. But then as John Stott has said, the capacity for relationships is part of the divine likeness in man, whereby we are "made to love. To love other people, and above all, to love God.

As William Edgar has pointed out, Schaeffer's favorite method in apologetics (pushing an unbeliever to the extreme of his or her own presuppositions to show how dark the world is without Christ) was "very similar, if not identical" to Van Til's idea of placing yourself on your opponent's ground for the sake of argument.

Schaeffer declared that a central reason Christians do not understand their children is because their children no longer think in the same framework in which their parents think. It is not merely that they come out with different answers. The methodology has changed—that is, the very method by which they arrive at, or try to arrive at, truth has changed.

His principal interest was evangelism, and apologetics was but a means to that end, for Francis Schaeffer was convinced that if the Christian faith is to be effectively communicated, "we must know and understand the thought-forms of our own generation."81

For Schaeffer the local church should have "two orthodoxies: first, an orthodoxy of doctrine and second, an orthodoxy of community.

We—and here I include myself—need to be careful lest, in working hard and standing firm against wickedness, we (like the church in Ephesus) forsake our first love and fall from a great height.

While only a small number of people wrestled with the philosophical problems that Schaeffer faced, by the 1960s the majority of young people wrestled with the question of authority.

Thus all persons are capable of rational discourse, and as John Stott has pointed out, "one of the noblest features of the divine likeness in man is his capacity to think.

It allows us as Christians to come alongside individuals, to listen to their questions (or even prod them into asking questions), to answer the questions within the framework of their own (defective) worldview, and then to explain a Christian worldview, the need for Christ's saving work, and the reasons why we have accepted the gospel

Carnell saw the purpose of Christian apologetics as removing from critics any excuse for not repenting before God. He was convinced that "men who refuse Christ because of presumed 'logical errors' in Christianity are men with a self-righteousness in the area of knowledge.

He believed that the non-Christian enjoys a false optimism by living partly on the basis of Christian presuppositions. Schaeffer aimed to destroy that by pushing the person toward the despair and darkness to which his or her non-Christian presuppositions logically led.