Francis Schaeffer: Two Contents, Two Realities

"Evangelicals can fall into something that really is not very far from existential theology without knowing it. One form of such 'evangelical existentialism" is the attitude, if not the words, "Don't ask questions, just believe." This sort of attitude was always wrong, but it is doubly wrong today when we are surrounded with a monolithic consensus that divides reason from nonreason and always puts religious things in the area of nonreason. We must call each other away from this idea. It is not more spiritual to believe without asking questions. It is not more biblical. It is less biblical, and eventually it will be less spiritual, because the whole man will not be involved. We must be absolutely determined not to fall into the trap of saying or implying, 'Don't ask questions, just believe.' It must be the whole man who comes to understand that the gospel is truth and believes because he is convinced on the basis of good and sufficient reason that it is truth.

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What we need to do is understand our age to be an age of very subtle religious and political manipulation, manipulation by cool communication, communication without content. And as we see all these things, we must lean against them. WE have a message of content; there is a system to Christianity. It is not only a system, true enough; it is not a dead scholasticism, true enough; but it is a system in that the person who accepts Christ as his Savior must do so in the midst of the understanding that prior to the creation of the world a personal God on the high level of Trinity existed. And if they 'accept Christ as their Savior' and do not understand that God exists as an infinite-personal God, and do not understand t hat man has been made in the image of God and has value, and do not understand that man's dilemma is not metaphysical because he is small but moral because man revolted against God in a space-time Fall, in all probability they are not saved. If we 'evangelize' by asking for such 'acceptance of Christ as Savior,' all we have done is to guarantee they will soon drift away and become hard to reach than ever. Not everybody must know everything--nobody knows everything; if we waited to be saved until we knew everything, nobody would ever be saved--but that is a very different thing from deliberately or thoughtlessly diminishing the content."