Covenant Worldwide -- Francis A. Schaeffer: The Early Years

Site navigation: Covenant Worldwide > Francis A. Schaeffer: The Early Years > : Lesson 12

Francis A. Schaeffer: The Early Years

Instructor: Professor Jerram Barrs

Audio Transcription for Lesson 12: Review of a Review (continued)

Father, we thank You for Your truth. We thank You that You have revealed Yourself to us in Your Word and spoken to us. We thank You also for the way You reveal Yourself in creation. You have not left the human race without a witness, but everywhere there is testimony to Yourself. We pray, Father, that as we think about these things and how to speak to people, that You will teach us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

We have come, I think, to point number four in my summary of the points Schaeffer makes here in this little article, "A Review of a Review." I was discussing in the last lesson how the unbeliever is caught in tension (denying the existence of the God of the Bible and yet living in His world). That brings us to point number five.

As we think about the tension of the unbeliever, Schaeffer makes the point that God is constantly confronting the unbeliever with this tension, with this inconsistency. The unbeliever has developed his system, his worldview, his set of beliefs about himself, about the world, about his life. And all the time he is confronted by God with the actual world that God has made. Remember from last time that the person is living in between the world of his worldview and the actual world that God has made. The unbeliever is constantly confronted with God's testimony to Himself. You can think of Paul's statement in Romans 1:18-20 where Paul says, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." I have heard Schaeffer appeal to this passage over and over again, using the image that God is constantly confronting the unbeliever with evidence from the universe, from His own nature. And the unbeliever is constantly pushing it down, suppressing it, holding it down in his heart. He is constantly being driven by the evidence to become aware of the inconsistency, to become aware of the tension, but he pushes that down in unrighteousness. That is how Schaeffer understood those words of Paul there in Romans 1. You can also think of Paul's statement in Acts 17:27-28 in the sermon on Mars Hill, where Paul says to the people there on the Areopagus that God is not far from every one of us, "For in him we live and move and have our being." Thus every unbeliever is constantly surrounded by the testimony of God, all the time. And Paul again, in Acts 14:17, says the same thing. In this situation he is trying to stop the people from sacrificing to himself and Barnabas. There he says, "Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy."

This is Schaeffer's fifth point, then: God is constantly confronting the unbeliever with the tension, with what Schaeffer calls the illogicality in his own life. If you look at the third page of this article, you will see at the top of the page where Schaeffer says this. He says that many look at the beauty of the moon at night and do not want eradication. They see the splendor of creation, and they do not want what their own worldview leads them to -- which is that the world is ultimately meaningless and irrational. They fall in love, and they do not want it to end in blackness. They experience the reality of love in their own life, which is part of the world God has made, and they do not want it to end in just nothingness, which in their view of reality it will. They will die, and there will not be any more love. The human race will finish, and there will not be any more love for anyone. It will all be gone; it will be worthless in the end. Or they fear to die. They face death, and in their worldview that is what should naturally come to a human being who is just a developed animal. But they fear death, and feel they ought not to die. There is something in them that tells them man was not made to die. Thus Schaeffer uses these three illustrations of the way God is constantly confronting the unbeliever with the tension, with the illogicality between his own understanding and the way things are in the world God has made. The unbeliever is really caught between two worlds. We may say that he has turned his face into his own world that he has developed. But all the time he is actually living in the world God has made. He is really caught between those two worlds. And God Himself is constantly witnessing to him of that tension. Schaeffer says, "God can and does use these illogical things in unsaved men to bring some of them to salvation." Later on Schaeffer stopped using the word "illogical" there. He tended to use the word "inconsistent" more rather than "illogical." But at this early stage he is using the word "illogical" to speak about this tension. So that is the fifth point.

That brings us to point number six. If God uses these means to save His elect, so may we use them and pray that God will use these things and will use our appeals to them in our preaching and in our apologetics. In fact, Schaeffer says that we can use whatever is appropriate for the person. Now, this is important. He means that the person you are talking to is more important than the system of apologetics that you develop. Each person you meet is in a different situation. If you look at the last page of this article, he says:

The extent to which the person is illogical we have a point of contact. Therefore, to a certain type we preach of sin and point out to him that by his own sin he has been brought down to the gutter. To some we give Dr. Machen's book, The Virgin Birth. To some we appeal to fulfilled prophecy. To some we use the classical arguments. To some we use the philosophical approach, we show them the alternatives, whether it is the man in the gutter or the philosophically minded unbeliever. We use whatever point of contact we can get. If they flee from the nearer contacts into the distance, we pursue them there. In either case, it is Christ or death, Christ or Diana, Christ or modernism, Christ or rationalism, Christ or suicide…so it goes. The last step back to which we press them is into the blackness of irrationality. And if they are already there, we ask them why they have not committed suicide.

Now, what is he saying there? His point is this. If in fact the person in their inconsistency is living more in or closer to God's world -- even though in some ways their thinking may be shaped by the thinking of the age in which they live -- we may be able to simply use straightforward evidences to appeal to them. Here he gives the example of Machen's book, The Virgin Birth. We may be able to show how the New Testament clearly teaches the virgin birth and give the evidences for the truth of the virgin birth. Or we may appeal to fulfilled prophecy. Now, later on Schaeffer would come to point out that this was really what Paul was doing.

If you think of Paul in the book of Acts, when he talks to Jewish unbelievers, when he goes to the synagogues he does not talk about the nature of the universe. He assumes already that they are living partially in God's world because they believe in the God of the Old Testament. They believe the Old Testament is God's Word. They expect a messiah. So in fact, he appeals to fulfilled prophecy. He shows them that Jesus was the Messiah. He appeals to evidences. Now, he is not talking about evidences here in quite the same way that it is sometimes understood in terms of evidentialism as a way of approach. He is thinking of it within this context of the man who is caught between two worlds. Every unbeliever is really caught between two worlds. But the closer a person is to the world that God actually made, he will already have some ideas that make him more open to a very direct approach. Schaeffer uses the language, "If they flee from the nearer contacts, we pursue them to the farther." There he is talking about the "nearer" as the person to whom you can talk about the virgin birth or fulfilled prophecy. The person who has accepted a totally non-Christian worldview, such as a humanistic worldview, is not open at all to hearing about fulfilled prophecy or the fact that Jesus is the Messiah. When Paul is with the Gentiles he does not talk about Jesus being the Messiah. They would not have understood that idea even. He talks about something different. He talks about who God is, the nature of the world, and the nature of the human person. He starts with the issues that the person is dealing with. We pursue him to where he is. The unbeliever who is most consistent is the person who is living most in his worldview. Thus we will use whatever is appropriate in communicating to someone depending on where they are, how close to or how far from a biblical position they are. What we are to work to do is to find a point of contact. The point of contact will be the area where the person is inconsistent, or where there is a tension in his or her own heart. We can look at the examples Schaeffer gives in the quote above. If the person values human love even though there is no room for love in his worldview, that will be the point of contact. If he values rationality even though there is no room for rationality in his worldview, we will make that the point of contact.

Let me give you an illustration from one of our professors with the Hindu man who came to discuss his faith. Here was a man who clearly valued his own dignity as a human person, who clearly thought there was a fundamental difference between good and evil. Our professor appealed to both of those issues in his discussion with the Hindu man because those were the clear points of tension. This is because in Hinduism and absolute Monism there is no room for the value of the individual. And yet here is this person with tremendous dignity, with a great deal of intelligence and obviously a delightful personality, who values himself as a person. So you appeal to that. You show him that there is your point of contact. He values something that only has meaning within a biblical understanding. Thus you start from there and show him the conclusion of his own position.

Let us look for example at an unbeliever who is standing in the middle between his own worldview and the world God has created. He values his personality, let us say. But in his worldview that does not make sense (let us say he is a Hindu with an absolute Monist view like this man was, that is, everything is ultimately one). What you do is push him so that he sees where his worldview leads, that it leaves him with no value whatsoever for his personality. You show him the conclusion of his position; you push him to the logical conclusion. That is what Schaeffer called it later. He says here, "The last step back into which we press them is into the blackness of irrationality. And if they are already there, we ask them why they have not committed suicide."

Now, it may sound terrible to speak that way. He is not saying this harshly. He is not saying it harshly at all. He is just trying to help us see what we need to do. This is exactly what Isaiah does when he talks to the people who worship idols. He pushes them to see the folly of their own position, if they really think through what it means. This is also exactly what Paul does in Acts 17. He shows them how foolish it is to worship the things they do worship rather than the true God. Thus you are doing several things. You are pushing the person to the conclusion, you are showing him the conclusion of what his own worldview is. At the same time, you are showing him that the things he values, that point of tension or contact, can only make sense within a Christian understanding. You are taking the thing that is valuable to him and showing him that it only makes sense in God's world. This is like Isaiah in Isaiah 40-48. He tells them, "You are so much greater than an idol -- you made them yourselves! How can you bow down and worship them?" Man can only have real dignity because he is made by God, not by worshiping something that he has made himself. Thus you are showing him the conclusion of his own position, and you are at the same time showing him the glory of the Gospel. You will never meet anybody who is completely consistent within his own worldview. There is always a point of contact. As Schaeffer says, "If the unsaved man were completely illogical, and so had no point of common contact, we could not reach him, for he would have taken his life and so be out of our reach." Anyone who is still alive, you can still communicate with precisely because they are still holding on to life, and life is God's gift. And the extent to which they are holding on to life, to that extent you have a point of contact with every human being.

If we are thinking about the issue, the point Schaeffer makes is this. Taking Bertrand Russell as an example, he says that there is no God, as he does in his book, Why I am not a Christian. There he sets forth his arguments against Christianity. He acknowledges there himself that "If there is no God then my individual life will end in the grave. And the whole human race will disappear completely when the earth is destroyed, when the solar system ends. There is no future for the individual, no future for the human race." And he goes on to say that this means that there is no value, ultimately, to morality or to any kind of human achievement -- to intelligence, to creativity, to anything we can build. And then he actually says, "…only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." This means recognizing that your moral choices have no value at all. Now, he has acknowledged there that if he were consistent he should recognize that there is finally no difference between good and evil. It really does not make any difference in the end. Our professor made the same point when he was talking about Hinduism in the Bhagavad Gita. It is very, very clear in the discussion between Krishna and Arjuna that Krishna is acknowledging that in the end there is no difference between good actions and bad actions. It makes no difference in the end. That is what amorality is -- it is when you have no basis for morality.

However, as you look at the life of someone like Bertrand Russell, you see two things. You see first that he was a moral person in the sense that he was not amoral. He continued to make moral judgments, right up until he was past 90 years old and died. He was out there protesting against the atomic bomb and against American intervention in Vietnam and things like that. He was always making moral judgments. "This is wicked!" Well, he had no basis for that whatsoever, when he says that in the end it does not really matter. But we can be thankful that he was inconsistent in this way. If people were completely consistent, the universe would be an appalling place. But God has not left Himself without a witness, and human beings do have the Law of God engraved on their hearts. And thankfully they are not completely given over to evil, to thinking it really does not matter what we do. Thus he was not amoral, he was a moral person in the sense of making moral judgments.

Russell was very good at making pronouncements about morality in general and the immorality of nations. His cause was Man, with a capital "M." But what he lost sight of was the importance of individual morality. He would talk all the time about the human race and the importance of doing things that were righteous for the cause, furthering the cause of humanity. But in the process his own life was an absolute scandal in terms of the way he treated his wife, who was very faithful to him and loved him very dearly. Then when he was in the United States "furthering the cause of humanity," he stayed in the home of a professor of one of the universities in New England. There he seduced the man's youngest daughter. And for him it did not matter because "the cause" was what mattered. Thus there was certainly immorality in his life, but there was not amorality. There was not amorality in him or in most other people.

You occasionally find people who are almost totally amoral. The Marquis de Sade would be a good example, the father of what is called Sadism. He had the view that because men are stronger, they can do whatever they like to women, physically and sexually. And he lived this out quite consistently. It was interesting; a man who spoke here recently said it was the Marquis de Sade's mother-in-law who had him put in prison in the Bastille in 1789 because he treated his wife, her daughter, so appallingly badly. He really lived out what he believed, that you could treat women exactly how you wanted to. He said, "Simply because I am stronger, I can do what I like." He was really a naturalist in that sense, that man is just an animal who sprung up from nature and in nature there is the survival of the fittest, of the strongest. "I am stronger, so I can do to women whatever I want to do." He lived that out in practice. And the French Revolution was an expression of that, of the strong destroying the weak. That was an amoral revolution; it is a good example of amorality. It had no moral basis or foundation at all.

That brings me to the next point. Point number seven is this: we are not consistent, either. That is the last point Schaeffer makes in this little paper. At the end he says, "Incidentally, I think it is worthwhile to also call attention to the fact that after we are converted, we still do not hold a Christian worldview consistently, either. Many people are Christians with very little of what we would call a Christian worldview. And none of us will be completely consistent until we are fully glorified." This is really important. To have that humility about yourself changes the way in which you speak to people. And if you wanted to give a heading for this article, or for this whole section, or for Schaeffer's apologetics, we could call it "compassionate presuppositionalism." We must not imagine, this is really what he is saying, that the unbeliever is in total darkness and that the believer is in total light. It is not as simple as that. Of course, in one sense it is. When a person becomes a Christian, he or she is transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's beloved Son. We are now fully acceptable to God. We are covered by the blood of Christ so that we are perfectly received by Him. We have peace with God. Thus in one sense we are walking in the light fully. But in another sense we are not walking fully in the light, and we all know that very well. It is like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." That is the reality in which we all find ourselves. Actually, any particular Christian individual is on a road heading out of darkness into light. Any Christian is on a road, heading out of darkness into light. We have not arrived yet. We all make plenty of mistakes in our thinking, as the New Testament acknowledges. None of us is perfect, either in what we do, or in what we think. Now, that is tremendously important for the way we treat other Christians as well. We should not think, "I have the perfect doctrinal system at every point, and others are completely wrong." We acknowledge that we make mistakes in our thinking.

This is important in apologetics, because it enables me to speak with humility to the unbeliever. I am speaking as fellow sinner to fellow sinner, as fellow seeker to fellow seeker. This is because, while I have found God (in one sense, or while God has found me), I am still seeking Him. I am still seeking to know Him better. So I speak as fellow sinner to fellow sinner and as fellow seeker to fellow seeker. And I must speak with compassion to a person who is living in tension. I must speak in compassion, because he is lost and because he is caught in the tension. And I must compassionately point out to him the end of the road down which he is going. You must very carefully and very gently point out to someone where he is going, that if he were consistent he would have no other alternative but suicide. You are not interested in arguments. You are not interested in making points, in beating someone over the head to make them realize what a fool they are for holding this position. You are compassionately showing them where this would lead them if they took it consistently. At the same time, we are compassionately showing them the truth that gives light. Thus one must not imagine that what you are doing is pushing a person hard into his own worldview and saying, "This is what it means. Do you not realize where it is taking you? It is leading you to death, irrationality, meaninglessness, absurdity, amorality, and a hopeless universe." Then when you get him there and leave him feeling totally worthless, then you come along with a nice way to comfort and say, "Actually, there is an answer here…" That is not what Schaeffer is talking about. At the same that you are showing him where this leads consistently, you are also showing him there is an answer to it. You are showing him where the darkness is. You are pushing him back into his own worldview. But at the same time that you are doing that, you also show him where the light takes you, you are showing him what the light will give.

The book of Ecclesiastes is a wonderful example of this. The major theme of Ecclesiastes is the total vanity of human existence. But it is not unrelieved gloom. In every chapter or so in Ecclesiastes there is another theme that appears just briefly here and there, showing there is an answer to the problem. It is never spelled out in detail. It is not spelled out in its clearest form until the very last verse: after death there will be a judgment of God, when everything that is done and thought and said will be brought to the light, and that is the end of the matter. Now, he does not tell you until the very end of the book what the solution is to the problem he raises, and even then he does not spell it out in detail. But all throughout the book he gives hints that there is an answer to the problem of meaninglessness, with which he has begun.

That is an illustration of what I am talking about. You do not just push someone to absurdity because they might very well commit suicide. You must also tell them at the same time that there is an answer here. You do not want the person to end up in absurdity; you want them to end up in light. Therefore you show them the light at the same time. With compassion you point out the end of the road, and with compassion you show the truth that gives light. You have compassion because you have been found by compassion yourself. That is the heart of the Gospel. Christ is compassion. He is compassion incarnate. I have been found by compassion, by the compassion of God. And therefore I speak with compassion to others. I also speak with compassion because I have inconsistencies myself. I still have tensions and confusions. I do not live the Christian life perfectly, and I must not pretend that I do. I do not have everything clear, and I must not pretend that I have everything clear. I have some wonderful answers God has given me, which I can share. And hopefully there should be some consistency in my life so that the unbeliever can see that there is a difference in what I do and the way I live. But I am not in a position of having everything while this man has nothing. God has everything, and we are both looking toward God, who gives truth. He has given me some, and now I humbly and compassionately want to share it with someone else.

Let me give you an illustration of my own father. When I went back to live in England, my father was in his 70s. He was 74 and very ill. He had been a very radical socialist, a Marxist for most of his life, for the previous 40 or 50 years, ever since just after the first World War. Like many other young British young men, he was made totally cynical about the prevailing order by the first World War, which was such a totally useless, worthless, and unnecessary war. So many people's lives were just so appallingly destroyed by bad leadership, both from the government and from the generals. And my father saw most everyone he knew get killed. He was in the trenches in Belgium and France. He could never talk about it, even 50 years later, without crying. It was one of those things that was just completely overwhelming to him. And after the war, in reaction to everything he had been brought up in, he turned to Marxism as having the answer. He was, you could say, a humanist. He did not believe in God. He did not think God was necessary; it was just man here. But the particular direction he had gone in for answers was Marxism because of its economic solutions and societal solutions.

Now, my wife and I came back from the United States to live near my father and mother. After graduation from here, my wife and I went back to England, because of their need. None in my family were Christians at all, and I had spent very little time with them since being converted, just a week here and there, before coming over here. At that time what I tried to do was to find a point of contact, to use the language Schaeffer is using here. Now, in this situation, a point of contact was this: he and my mother were both very moral people. They assumed the second half of the Ten Commandments as self-evidently true, like many other people in our society (though increasingly less, if I may add). They assumed the second half of the Ten Commandments was true: you should not murder, you should not steal, you should not commit adultery, you should not bear false witness, you should not covet your neighbor's wife or his property. They thought these were self-evidently right, that all decent human beings regard these as necessarily true. That was the way they lived. They were extremely good people, as people go. They were a lot better in some ways, humanly speaking, than many Christians I know. They were very compassionate to people. I remember as a little boy taking, every Christmas, a basket of food to an old man who lived alone in the village. My parents were very poor, but every year we took a basket of food with chicken, a Christmas pudding made by my mother, minced pies, and all kinds of things so that he could have some kind of Christmas. And they were always doing things like that, really being kind to people.

So the point of tension was their morality, which was very precious to them and which they regarded as self-evidently right. They were both tremendously put out by the moral breakdown in our society. Even back then when I went back to England in 1971, all of Western society, as it is increasingly today, was evidently morally bankrupt. Moral standards of every kind, whether in the area of sexual morality, honesty in the workplace, or in other areas, were decaying. Sometimes people will try to deny that, saying, "People are always the same." Well, of course people are always sinful, but there really are differences in moments in history.

One illustration is this: when I was a little boy I used to wander all over the countryside in the area of England where I grew up, by myself on weekends, holidays, and vacations. I would wander like that without my parents having any fear at all about me wandering around. Now I have lived for the last 18 years in England just a few miles from where I grew up, working in L'Abri there. I was talking to my mother about this just recently. We have never let our children (I have three boys) wander around the countryside by themselves. And my mother agreed with me. She would not even consider doing that today. Things have really changed. Children are not safe in our society, wandering about alone. They were 35 years ago, but they simply are not now. That is one illustration of what is happening in our society.

For my parents this was a tremendous concern. And I used that as our point of contact. Now, I tried to show them very gently, and they were open to discussing this. It is because of the rejection of God that people have begun to live more and more consistently to the fact that they do not believe there is a god. Like Dostoevsky said, "If God is dead, everything is permitted." Everything is permitted. And that is what is happening in our society. Everything is indeed permitted. Jean-Paul Sartre said over and over again, "If God is dead, indeed everything is permitted, and man is completely alone to do whatever he wants to do and whatever he will do. And it really does not make any difference what you do. It does not matter in the end." I tried to show this to my parents very gently. Of course, with your own parents, with your own father, you do not say, "Dad, you are a fool. You have got it all wrong. All your life you have believed these lies. If you only had the intelligence to see it, this is just ridiculous." You do not speak like that to anyone, and especially not to your own parents. My father is a very proud man. So, very gently I started showing him, "This moral decay that you see in society is the logical conclusion beginning to work itself out of the worldview you have adopted." Now, that was a hard thing to say, but I said it very gently. And at the same time I was saying, "The kind of morals you so rightly treasure can only be held, can only have any real meaning, on a Christian foundation. There is a God who has a moral character, who is holy, righteous, and just. And His character provides the foundation for morality in the universe. This is a moral universe in which we live. Good is really good, and evil is really evil. And it will always be that way, no matter what people think. That is why you treasure morality -- because you have been made in God's image, and it really is right. You have His law written on your heart." Thus, at the same time you are saying, "This is where this leads, it leads to darkness and death, it leads to the decay of the individual and of the culture," and at the same time you are saying, "And this is the answer to the problem." That was really a means by which we could communicate, and he became a Christian. That was the point of real contact. He was able to say, "Yes, yes I see."

Now, you do not do this all at once. I had discussions with my dad over three or four months. Then he became a Christian eventually, about six weeks before he died. Actually, he became a Christian with Dr. Schaeffer personally when he was visiting us. My dad died of cancer and became a Christian just six weeks before the end. And it was this point of contact that really opened the door. Now, I have done the same sort of thing with many, many other people. It is a question of getting to know the people. That is why Schaeffer says, "If you have an hour with someone, you spend 50 minutes asking questions and 10 minutes giving the answer." What he meant by that is, in order to communicate, you really have to find out who they are. In this way you begin to find out where their point of tension is, where there is a hole in their armor, where there is a point where they are still living in the world God made and still valuing what is true, right, good, and just. It is from that point that you start communicating the Christian message. Do ordinary people -- the ordinary person in the street, the person out in the rural community -- have questions like this? Can one approach them in this kind of way? I would say absolutely yes. It is not a matter of using intellectual language or talking about philosophy or anything like that. My father left school at the age of 16 and went to join in the first world war. He had no formal education. He was quite a widely read person, but he certainly did not read philosophy or anything like that. He actually read mostly travel books, about other cultures and so on. He was not an intellectual at all.

Now, I think it has nothing to do with being intellectual, actually. That is where we have such confusion about apologetics. Apologetics has come to be thought of as something that is for intellectual people. I do not think it is at all. I think you can say these things to children, to small children. It is just a matter of using the right words. When the Schaeffers first went to Europe, they went to do a children's work. They were talking about the world God has made, the truth to little children. They produced that series of studies on Genesis and on Luke, Everybody Can Know. You can take the most profound aspects of biblical truth and communicate them very simply to people.

Let me use another illustration. I have a conversation that is ongoing with my barber, the lady out in the next town who cuts my hair. She raised this same issue one day when I was there having my hair cut. This was earlier this year at a time when a girl was brutally raped and murdered here in our community. She said, "Why are there so many things like that happening?" So I thought, there is a good opportunity to say something. So we started to have a discussion. She is not an intellectual at all. But she is concerned about what is happening in our society, about moral breakdown. Thus I began to explore very gently, in the limited amount of time you have in a barber's shop, what is happening. First of all, I got her to open up a little more, just to find out what she was thinking. She was talking about how her own husband watches pornographic films and about how distressing this is to her. This gave me the opportunity to talk about general moral breakdown, that it really has a practical effect in people's lives. You cannot just keep watching pornography and not have it affect you. These images, these ideas, really change the way people think, about women, about men; and ultimately they change their behavior. People really are profoundly affected by ideas and images. Their imaginations and their minds are really touched. And that began to be a point of contact to talk about what is happening in our society and why. Because people have turned away from God and His commandments and think they can make up their own ideas of the way people can live. That can be said very simply. It does not have to be said in an intellectual way. And there is no solution to this problem, except for people turning back to God and having a solid source of knowing what is right and what is wrong.

In fact, I would say most rural people are open to this particular argument. I say this because they are generally more conservative in their morals and are really appalled by what is happening in our cities and in our culture as a whole. I would suggest that not only in terms of talking to the individual, but you can preach on these things. We all ought to be preaching on them regularly. It is precisely at a point like this that God's Word really touches our world today. We are communicating the truth, but we are talking about a God who truly exists, who has a moral character, whose moral character provides the basis for distinguishing between good and evil and for moral behavior in the human world. And then what we see in our society is the ruin of a society that has turned away from God and insisted that man is the measure of all things for himself. You can say those things really simply. I have been challenging another class to try to think about how you would communicate that particular idea to children of eight or nine years old. I think you can communicate it very simply.

Site navigation: Covenant Worldwide > Francis A. Schaeffer: The Early Years > : Lesson 12