Death in the City Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“that ideas have consequences.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City

“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

“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

“The basis of our salvation is not our faith. Faith is rather the instrument, the empty hands with which we accept the gift. We are not saved by faith in faith. The basis of our salvation is the finished work of Jesus Christ in space and time. Paul emphasizes this in the third chapter where he says we are saved upon the basis of the work of Jesus Christ. Faith is raising empty hands in accepting the gift.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City

“So when Paul is saying here that he is not ashamed of the gospel which is the power of God unto salvation, do not think it covers just a small area. It has something to say about every division that has come because of the Fall. From the Christian viewpoint, all the alienations that we find in man have come because of man’s historic, space-time fall. First of all, man is separated from God; second, he is separated from himself (thus the psychological problems of life); third, he is separated from other men (thus the sociological problems of life);fourth, he is separated from nature (thus the problems of living in the world—for example, the ecological problems). All these need healing. No”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City

“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

“What then are the results of his message? We have one indication in Anathoth, Jeremiah’s hometown. “Therefore, thus saith the Lord of the men of Anathoth, who seek thy life, saying, Prophesy not in the name of the Lord, that thou die not by our hand” (11:21). That is, the people of his own town said,“Jeremiah, if you don’t keep quiet, we’re going to kill you. We don’t want your prophecy of judgment.” The priests, the prophets, and the people violently opposed him. So in Jeremiah 26:8, “Now it came to pass, when Jeremiah had made an end of speaking all that the Lord had commanded him to speak unto all the people, that the priests and the prophets and all the people took him, saying, Thou shalt surely die.” And in 26:11, “Then spoke the priests and the prophets unto the princes and to all the people, saying, This man is worthy to die; for he hath prophesied against this city, as ye have heard with your ears.” Those of you who mean to be tellers of the Word of God in a generation like our own must understand that men are going to say, “You’re cutting out the optimism and, therefore, we’re going to bring every pressure against you that we can bring.” When a man stands up in the communist or other totalitarian countries today and really speaks of the judgment of God, he gets the same treatment as Jeremiah.Even in the West the results are similar. Men say, “You’re against our culture, you’re against the unity of our culture, you’re against the progress of our culture, you’re against the optimism of our culture and country, and we’re going to do what we can against you.” Our culture may do little if we preach only the positive message, but if we are faithful and also preach judgment in state or church, the result will be the same as with Jeremiah. Men haven’t changed, not one bit.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“God’s Word is still the message to Jeremiah: go on and teach and act, preach the truth of the revelation of God no matter what the cost; go on, go on, go on. If you are not willing to go on, you have to ask yourself the question, do I really believe Christianity is truth or is my Christianity only an upper-story religious concept? Do I really believe Christianity is truth, or does my Christianity rest only on an experience, an emotion—and when the experience, the emotion, cools, my Christianity collapses?”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City

“Christianity is not a modern success story. It is to be preached with love and tears into the teeth of men, preached without compromise, without regard to the world’s concept of success. If there seem to be no results, remember that Jeremiah did not see the results in his day. They came later. If there seem to be no results, it does not change God’s imperative. It is simply up to you and to me to go on, go on, go on, whether we see the results or whether we don’t. Go on.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City

“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

“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

“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