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The new liberal theology, because it says that the Bible does not touch the cosmos or history, has no real basis for applying the Bible's values in a historic situation, in either morals or law. Everything religious is in the area of nonreason, and since reason has no place there, there is no room for discussion; there are only arbitrary pronouncements.
Francis Schaeffer
How Should We Then Live, 199Other Quotes from the Author & Topic
Here is a simple but profound rule: if there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute. Society is left with one man or an elite filling the vacuum left by the loss of the Christian consensus which originally gave us form and freedom in northern Europe and in the West.
A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross. The Kingdom of God in America (1937), New York: Harper and Row, 1959, p. 193
A liberal Protestant, a liberal Catholic, and a liberal Jew can agree on almost everything, because they believe almost nothing! Proclaiming A Cross-Centered Theology (24)
The distinction between the news columns and the editorial page has, in many of the most influential papers, become much less clear.
Almost every single collapse involving denominations and churches in regard to historic Christian beliefs can be traced back to a degradation in that group's view of the Bible as the inspired and inerrant revelation of God's truth.Scripture Alone: Exploring the Bible\'s Accuracy, Authority and Authenticity (p. 43). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
When I turned my eye back to the emerging church or back to my friend's classic liberalism, I saw that at the center of it all stood a denial of the authority of the Word of God. These people read the Bible and preached the Bible and wrote about the Bible and professed to honor the Bible, but all the while they denied the full authority of the Bible. They accepted God's Word on their own terms. But God gives us no such option. To take the Bible at any terms but its own is to reject the Bible altogether.http://www.challies.com/articles/why-i-am-not-liberal
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.How Should We Then Live
Liberal theology is a succession of rescue attempts for the reputation of Christianity.http://t4g.org/media/2012/04/inerrancy-panel-v/
As the memory of the Christian consensus which gave us freedom within the biblical form increasingly is forgotten, a manipulating authoritarianism will tend to fill the vacuum.
the fall of Constantinople in 1453 resulted in an exodus of Greek scholars who brought manuscripts with them to Florence and other northern Italian cities. It was the humanists of that time who, under the enthusiasm for the classics, spoke of what had immediately preceeded them as a "Dark Age" and talked of a "rebirth" in their own era.How Should We Then Live, 64
It is important to realize what a difference a people's worldview makes in their strength as they are exposed to the pressure of life. That it was the Christians who were able to resist religious mixtures, syncretism, and the effects of the weakness of Roman culture speaks to the strength of the Christian worldview.How Should We Then Live, 19
it may be said to be characteristic of the whole of modern liberal theology, with its emphasis on the goodness of man, that it has lost sight of the necessity of the saving grace of God.Systematic Theology, 431
It is a profound embarrassment to liberal leadership that during its hegemony, the seminaries, and the bureaucracies, the churches have lost ground in a massive membership haemorrhage. Liberals go into a cold sweat trying to explain how, while they owned the infrastructure, the money, the publications, and the leadership, they failed even to hold membership steady. They still nurture the fantasy that they have the high moral ground on sexuality issues, politically correct policing, and standard liberal theological issues such as universal salvation. The liberal leadership is now faced with the desperate dilemma of trying to secure trust and support from its ever-diminishing number of constituents.The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, 149
Liberal theology is a strategy that develops when you can't believe in Christian doctrine anymore, but you want to keep being a Christian, so you base your faith on Christian experience instead.Good News for Anxious Christians (179)
Each cycle of inflation, attempted control, the threat of economic recession, and finally, released control has increased inflation; yet politically, with most people dominated by the concept of an ever-expanding affluence, it is difficult or impossible to face the danger of economic recession.
To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.How Should We Then Live, 297
History indicates that at a certain point of economic breakdown people cease being concerned with individual liberties and are ready to accept regimentation.How Should We Then Live, 284
In order to justify the early taking of the needed kidneys and other organs, the criterion for death is now generally accepted as a flat brain wave over a twenty-four-hour period.
Politics has largely become not a matter of ideals - increasingly men and women are not stirred by the values of liberty and truth - but of supplying a constituency with a frosting of personal peace and affluence. They know that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least an illusion of them.How Should We Then Live, 260
I believe the majority of the silent majority, young and old, will sustain the loss of liberties without raising their voices as long as their own lifestyles are not threatened. And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things.How Should We Then Live, 260
Existentialism and linguistic analysis are both antiphilosophies in that neither gives the basis people need for the answers to the big and fundamental questions. Not only do they not give the answers people need, but each in its own way generates confusion about meaning and values.
I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.
in his theology Karl Barth made his own kind of dichotomy and brought the existential methodology into theology.How Should We Then Live, 196
We have also seen a tremendous rash of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope. Though demons do not fit into modern man's concepts on the basis of his reason, many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine. People put the occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having some kind of meaning, even if it is a horrendous one.How Should We Then Live, 193
it is not only that we need absolutes in morals and values; we need absolutes if our existence is to have meaning--my existence, your existence, Man's existence. Even more profoundly, we must have absolutes if we are to have a solid epistemology (a theory of knowing--how we know, or how we know we know).How Should We Then Live?, 160-161
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