Top 100 Francis Schaeffer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Art is a reflection of God’s creativity, an evidence that we are made in the image of God.”

— Francis Schaeffer

Featured in: Aesthetic Quotes, Art Quotes

2. “Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose – to be in relationship to God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.”

— Francis Schaeffer

3. “Jesus taught that the mark of the Christian is the observable love shown among all true believers.”

— Francis Schaeffer

4. “Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful – Christian community is the final apologetic.”

— Francis Schaeffer

5. “If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.”

— Francis Schaeffer

6. “True spirituality consists in living moment to moment by the grace of Jesus Christ.”

— Francis Schaeffer

7. “Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.”

— Francis Schaeffer

8. “People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.”

— Francis Schaeffer

9. “Apostasy must be called what it is, spiritual adultery.”

— Francis Schaeffer

10. “Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.”

— Francis Schaeffer

11. “The beginning of men’s rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.”

— Francis Schaeffer

12. “If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong.”

— Francis Schaeffer

13. “Thank God for the reality for which we were created, a moment-by-moment communication with God himself.”

— Francis Schaeffer

14. “Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air.”

— Francis Schaeffer

15. “If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.”

— Francis Schaeffer

16. “We must remember throughout our lives that in God’s sight there are no little people and no little places. Only one thing is important: to be consecrated persons in God’s place for us, at each moment.”

— Francis Schaeffer

17. “Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society.”

— Francis Schaeffer

18. “Tell me what the world is saying today, and I’ll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.”

— Francis Schaeffer

19. “We as Bible-believing evangelical Christians are locked in a battle. This is not a friendly gentleman’s discussion. It is a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ.”

— Francis Schaeffer

20. “There is a sad myth going around today – the myth of neutrality. According to this myth, the secular world gives every point of view an equal chance to be heard. And it works fairly well – unless you are a Christian.”

— Francis Schaeffer

21. “Eternity will be wonderful, but there is one thing heaven will not contain, and that is the call, the possibility, and the privilege of living a supernatural life here and now by faith, before we meet Jesus face to face.”

— Francis Schaeffer

22. “This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith.”

— Francis Schaeffer

23. “The purpose of apologetics is not just to win an argument or a discussion, but that people with whom we are in contact may become Christians and then live under the Lordship of Christ in the whole spectrum of life.”

— Francis Schaeffer

24. “I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution.”

— Francis Schaeffer

25. “This is not an age in which to be a soft Christian.”

— Francis Schaeffer

26. “In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.”

— Francis Schaeffer

27. “If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals.”

— Francis Schaeffer

28. “All men bear the image of God. They have value not because they are redeemed, but because they are God’s creation in God’s image.”

— Francis Schaeffer

29. “Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.”

— Francis Schaeffer

30. “One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.”

— Francis Schaeffer

31. “Truth always carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation nevertheless. If our reflex action is always accommodation regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong.”

— Francis Schaeffer

32. “A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.”

— Francis Schaeffer

33. “In fact, philosophy is universal in scope. No man can live without a world view; therefore, there is no man who is not a philosopher.”

— Francis Schaeffer

34. “In my reading of philosophy, I saw that there were innumerable problems that nobody was giving answers for. the Bible, it struck me, dealt with man’s problems in a sweeping, all-encompassing thrust.”

— Francis Schaeffer

35. “Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person as a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism.”

— Francis Schaeffer

36. “And the purpose of our creation, in which all our subsidiary purposes fit, is to be in a personal relationship to God, in communion with him, in love, by choice, the creature before the Creator.”

— Francis Schaeffer

37. “If the church is what it should be, young people will be there. But they will not just ‘be there’ – they will be there with the blowing of horns and the clashing of high-sounding cymbals, and they will come dancing with flowers in their hair.”

— Francis Schaeffer

38. “I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.”

— Francis Schaeffer

39. “If I’m going to be in the right relationship with God, I should treat the things he has made in the same way he treats them.”

— Francis Schaeffer

40. “We should not view men with a cynical eye, seeing them only as meaningless products of chance, but, on the other hand, we should not go to the opposite extreme of seeing them romantically. To do either is to fail to understand who men really are – creatures made in the image of God but fallen.”

— Francis Schaeffer

41. “If Christians win a battle by using worldly means, they have really lost.”

— Francis Schaeffer

42. “We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin-who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that He created man in His image. So man is something wonderful.”

— Francis Schaeffer

43. “If we do not show love to one another, the world has a right to question whether Christianity is true.”

— Francis Schaeffer

44. “He who loses the arts loses the culture.”

— Francis Schaeffer

45. “If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just ‘dogmatically’ true or ‘doctrinally’ true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.”

— Francis Schaeffer

46. “If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.”

— Francis Schaeffer

47. “Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.”

— Francis Schaeffer

48. “God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the nature of God and the nature of man.”

— Francis Schaeffer

49. “Modern man has not only thrown away Christian theology, he has thrown away the possibility of what our forefathers had as a basis for morality and law.”

— Francis Schaeffer

50. “Truth carries with it confrontation.”

— Francis Schaeffer