While I don't condone everything that Francis Schaeffer stood for, I want to share the following quote about how love sometimes requires the use of force:
“I would say that from my study of the Scripture, not to do what can be done for those in the power of those who automatically and logically oppress is nothing less than a lack of Christian love. This is why I am not a pacifist. I am not a pacifist, because pacifism in this poor world in which we live, this lost world, means that we desert the people who need our greatest help. As an illustration: I am walking down the street. I see a great big burly man beating a little tiny tot to death – beating this little girl, beating her, beating her. I come up and I plead with him to stop. If he won’t stop, what does love mean? Love means that I stop him in any way I can including, quite frankly, hitting him, and to me this is necessary Christian love in a fallen world. What about the little girl? If I desert the little girl to the bully, I have deserted the true meaning of Christian love, and responsibility to my neighbor. …As far as I’m concerned, this is the necessary outworking of Christian love. The world is an abnormal world, because of the Fall it is not the way God meant it to be. There are many things in this world which grieve us, and yet we must face them.” – Francis Schaeffer
“I would say that from my study of the Scripture, not to do what can be done for those in the power of those who automatically and logically oppress is nothing less than a lack of Christian love. This is why I am not a pacifist. I am not a pacifist, because pacifism in this poor world in which we live, this lost world, means that we desert the people who need our greatest help. As an illustration: I am walking down the street. I see a great big burly man beating a little tiny tot to death – beating this little girl, beating her, beating her. I come up and I plead with him to stop. If he won’t stop, what does love mean? Love means that I stop him in any way I can including, quite frankly, hitting him, and to me this is necessary Christian love in a fallen world. What about the little girl? If I desert the little girl to the bully, I have deserted the true meaning of Christian love, and responsibility to my neighbor. …As far as I’m concerned, this is the necessary outworking of Christian love. The world is an abnormal world, because of the Fall it is not the way God meant it to be. There are many things in this world which grieve us, and yet we must face them.” – Francis Schaeffer
No comments:
Post a Comment