Bryan A. Follis > Quotes

“For Schaeffer rationality concerned the validity of thought, while rationalism concerned someone beginning with himself and his reason plus what he observes, without information from any other source, and coming to final answers in regard to truth, ethics, and reality.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“This has led George Marsden to observe that while “Calvinists had maintained that the human mind was blinded in mankind’s Fall from innocence, in the Common Sense version, the intellect seemed to suffer from a slight astigmatism only.”42”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“I agree with Schaeffer that many people do not so much reject Christianity as fail to even consider it because of their presuppositions (however hidden they may be), and therefore they need to be challenged. Apart from those who have gained their presuppositions unconsciously from the society around them, Schaeffer also recognized that some individuals try to bury themselves in themselves, for “down inside of himself, man finds it easy to lie to himself.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Nevertheless, Reformed epistemology does not regard belief in God as groundless or arbitrary. Plantinga distinguishes between evidence and grounds, the former being what apologists look for in theistic proofs, while the latter is more straightforward. Direct experience provides grounds to justify belief even without argumentation. One’s experience of God appropriately grounds belief in His existence.33 Reformed epistemologists stress the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit as confirming, for example, that the Bible is the reliable revelation from God. Stephen Evans believes that those who dismiss this Reformed approach as fideism (i.e., irrational faith based solely upon personal experience) try to understand it in evidentialist terms.34 He says that it should be understood in externalist terms, which means that the factors that determine whether or not I am justified or warranted in holding my belief do not have to be internal to my consciousness. At bottom the externalist says that what properly “grounds” a belief is the relationship of the believer to reality.35 For Reformed epistemologists such as Evans, the biblical story is self-authenticating in the sense that “through the work of the Spirit the story itself produces a conviction of its truth in persons, and it is in that sense epistemologically basic.”36”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Schaeffer called upon all Christians studying sociology, psychology, or ethics to resist the modern concept that all sin can be explained merely on the basis of conditioning.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Schaeffer, as we shall examine in Chapter Four, drew upon the Old Princetonian approach and the presuppositionalism of Van Til to develop a new style of apologetics.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Schaeffer argues that this move—whereby mankind retained his rationalism but at the expense of rationality—was made out of desperation, but that this is characteristic of sinful man.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“We want to share the truth with sensitivity and love and in the context of a meaningful relationship, but with the fundamental purpose of leading someone into a relationship with Jesus Christ.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Evidentialism is rooted in classical foundationalism, which constructs knowledge “by first laying a very secure, undoubtable foundation and then building other truths on that base.”26 Beliefs that are part of a foundation—basic beliefs—must be self-evident or indisputable, and thus only a few very secure propositions are permitted in the foundation.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“It is a sad reflection upon a society obsessed with sex that people are now desperate for intimacy and love. But then as John Stott has said, the capacity for relationships is part of the divine likeness in man, whereby we are “made to love. To love other people, and above all, to love God.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“His principal interest was evangelism, and apologetics was but a means to that end, for Francis Schaeffer was convinced that if the Christian faith is to be effectively communicated, “we must know and understand the thought-forms of our own generation.”81”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Furthermore, by arguing not only that all knowing and all speaking is done from a particular perspective, but that each perspective is equally true and valuable, postmodernism promotes not merely an alternative truth but a plurality of truths.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“It allows us as Christians to come alongside individuals, to listen to their questions (or even prod them into asking questions), to answer the questions within the framework of their own (defective) worldview, and then to explain a Christian worldview, the need for Christ’s saving work, and the reasons why we have accepted the gospel”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“One has to ask why a Christian scholar like Pierard was concerned about Schaeffer (or himself) being placed outside the mainstream of twentieth-century historical scholarship.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Schaeffer declared that a central reason Christians do not understand their children is because their children no longer think in the same framework in which their parents think. It is not merely that they come out with different answers. The methodology has changed—that is, the very method by which they arrive at, or try to arrive at, truth has changed.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Over the past twenty-five years this has led to a growth of a culture that worships the individual, is obsessed with self-fulfillment, and seeks to find meaning in the self as a substitute for God. As Professor David Wells has noted, life in society is now “characterized by self-righteousness, self-centeredness, self-satisfaction, self-aggrandizement, and self-promotion.”49 Living and seeking to minister in the first decade of the twenty-first century, hedonism rather than existentialism seems to be the main challenge to the Christian gospel. Certainly, serving as I do near a major university and dealing with students and young professionals, I have to say that not many are knocking on my door to ask about the purpose of their life. Instead I come across many who live without moral restraint or thought for other people or any consideration of the broader picture. They encapsulate the person from Ecclesiastes who declared that he denied himself nothing his eyes desired nor refused his heart any pleasure. To talk of apologetics in this situation seems utterly foolish.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“In Chapter Three it was noted that some of Schaeffer’s L’Abri colleagues thought he was adopting the perspectability approach. By this they meant that at certain points, certain perspectives need to be emphasized, albeit they are not given a higher importance.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Thus all persons are capable of rational discourse, and as John Stott has pointed out, “one of the noblest features of the divine likeness in man is his capacity to think.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Placing himself, rather than God, at the center of the universe and making himself autonomous, man will give up his rationality so he can preserve his rationalism, his autonomy, and his rebellion against God.36”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“He defined a presupposition as a belief that “consciously or unconsciously affects the way a person subsequently reasons.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Kuyper called upon Christians to wage a struggle against all compromises with truth in every area of life and learning.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Cornelius Van Til, under whom Schaeffer studied at Westminster for two years, used Kuyper’s notion of the antithesis (i.e., that an absolute antithesis exists in all of life between the believer and unbeliever) to develop his presuppositional apologetics.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Veritas Forum”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Schaeffer was not an academic in the traditional sense, but he was a thinker, and indeed, I would suggest, a thinker with prophetic insight.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“For Schaeffer the local church should have “two orthodoxies: first, an orthodoxy of doctrine and second, an orthodoxy of community.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Postmodernism is largely non-theistic and united with modernism in its philosophical naturalism. The leading postmodernist thinkers “deny the objective existence of God and the supernatural, and take the material universe to be all there is.”13”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Far from regarding mankind as autonomous, Schaeffer believed that his books stressed “that people have no final answers in regard to truth, morals or epistemology without God’s revelation in the Bible.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“For Schaeffer “rationality” means mankind thinking in a way that is not contrary to reason, or as he put it, “man’s aspiration of reason is valid.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“Hence while Warfield held that it was the task of apologetics to lay the foundations for theology, Kuyper took the opposite view and regarded theology as the starting point for apologetics.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer

“As William Edgar has pointed out, Schaeffer’s favorite method in apologetics (pushing an unbeliever to the extreme of his or her own presuppositions to show how dark the world is without Christ) was “very similar, if not identical” to Van Til’s idea of placing yourself on your opponent’s ground for the sake of argument.”
― Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer