Quotes About Schaeffer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Chapter Three it was noted that some of Schaeffer's L'Abri colleagues thought he was adopting the perspectability approach. By this they meant that at certain points, certain perspectives need to be emphasized, albeit they are not given a higher importance.

I agree with Schaeffer that many people do not so much reject Christianity as fail to even consider it because of their presuppositions (however hidden they may be), and therefore they need to be challenged. Apart from those who have gained their presuppositions unconsciously from the society around them, Schaeffer also recognized that some individuals try to bury themselves in themselves, for "down inside of himself, man finds it easy to lie to himself.

Schaeffer was not an academic in the traditional sense, but he was a thinker, and indeed, I would suggest, a thinker with prophetic insight.

One has to ask why a Christian scholar like Pierard was concerned about Schaeffer (or himself) being placed outside the mainstream of twentieth-century historical scholarship.