Schaeffer: The God who is there

'Only Christianity of all the world's religions has produced a real interest in man. Buddhism, Islam or Hinduism could never have produced idealistic communism because they do not have a sufficient interest in the individual.

Christianity is not romantic it is realistic

We should be pleased that the romanticism of yesterday has been destroyed. In many ways this makes our task of presenting Christianity to modern man easier than it was for our forefathers.

To fail that we we take truth seriously at those points where there is a cost in our doing so, is to push the next generation into the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us. (push the next generation into quagmire of relativity?)

We should not only have a concern and genuine compassion for the lost people among whom we live but also a concern for our God. We are his people, and if we get caught up in the other methodology, we have really blasphemed, discredited and dishonoured him - for the greatest antithesis of all is that God exists as opposed to his not existing; he the God who is there.

To say that God communicates truly does not mean that God communicates exhaustively.

The Dilemma of man:

Modern man is desperately struggling with the concept of man in his dilemma. Most of the paintings of the crucifixion today, (1968) Salvador Dali's for example, are not of Christ dying on the cross in history. They are using the Christ-symbol to exhibit man in agony.
Of course, it is possible to try not to get involved in man's dilemma; but the only way not to get involved in the dilemma of man is by being young enough, having money enough, and being egotistic enough to care nothing about other human beings.

Albert Camus' book 'The Plague'. The story is about a plague brought by rats into the city of Oran at the beginning of the second world war. Camus confronts the reader with a serious choice: either he must join the doctor and fight the plague, in which case, says Camus, he will then also be fighting God; or he can join with the priest and not fight the plague, and thus be antihumanitarian.

Men turn away in order not to bow before the God who is there. This is the scandal of the cross.

Modern theology uses the term 'guilt' but because it is not orientated in a true moral framework, it turns out to be no more than guilt-feelings.

There is an opposite danger: that the orthodox Christian will fail to realize that at times guilt-feelings are present when no true guilt exists. Let us remember that the Fall resulted in division not only between God and man, and man and man but between man and himself.

Christianity says that man is now abnormal - he is seperated from his Creator, who is his only sufficient reference point - not by a metaphysical limitation, but by true moral guilt.

God's answer to man's dilemma:

The standards of morality are determined by what conforms to his character, while those things which do not conform are immoral.

Nobody has ever discovered a way of having real 'morals' without a moral absolute. If there is no moral absolute, we are left with hedonsim (doing what I like) or some form of the social contract theory (what is best for society as a whole is right). However, neither or these alternatives corresponds to the moral motions that men have. Talk to people long enough and deeply enough, and you will find that they consider some things are really right and some things are really wrong.

A Christian can fight what is wrong in the world with compassion and know that he hates these things, God hates them too. God hates them to the high price of the death of Christ.

If it is true that evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross, and that there is a moral law fixed in what God is in himself, then Christians should be the first in the field against what is wrong - including man's inhumanity to man.