How Should We Then Live? (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Rousseau: Add a description of this character.
• Luther
• Leonardo Da Vinci
• Giotto
• Thomas Aquinas
• David
• Calvin
• Mustafa Arshad
• Brunelleschi
• Picasso
• Solzhenitsyn
• Aristotle
• Mary
• Handel
• Francis Crick
• Michelangelo
• Van Eyck
• Hitler
• Huss
• Camus
• Skinner
• Lenin
• Karl Barth
• Paul Robert
• Whitehead
• Heidegger
• Beethoven
• Wilberforce

Quotes edit see section history

• “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.”

  Francis Schaeffer

• “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 . . . ; 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.”

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• Rome did not fall because of external forces such as the invasion by the barbarians. Rome had no sufficient inward base; the barbarians only completed the breakdown-and Rome gradually became a ruin.

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• Culture and the freedoms of people are fragile. Without a sufficient base, when such pressures come only time is needed-and often not a great deal of time-before there is a collapse.

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• Aquinas held that man had revolted against God and thus was fallen, but Aquinas had an incomplete view of the Fall. He thought that the Fall did not affect man as a whole but only in part. In his view the will was fallen or corrupted but the intellect was not affected. Thus people could rely on their own human wisdom, and this meant that people were free to mix the teachings of the Bible with the teachings of the non-Christian philosophers.

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• At its core, therefore, the Reformation was the removing of the humanistic distortions which had entered the church.

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• Nevertheless, the pristine Christianity set forth in the New Testament gradually became distorted. A humanistic element was added: Increasingly, the authority of the church took precedence over the teaching of the Bible. And there was an ever-growing emphasis on salvation as resting on man's meriting the merit of Christ, instead of on Christ's work alone.

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• Thus the Christians not only had knowledge about the universe and mankind that people cannot find out by themselves, but they had absolute, universal values by which to live and by which to judge the society and the political state in which they lived. And they had grounds for the basic dignity and value of the individual as unique in being made in the image of God.

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• Beginning from man alone, Renaissance humanism-and humanism ever since-has found no way to arrive at universals or absolutes which give meaning to existence and morals.

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• We can also express in a second way why the Christians were killed: No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God's revelation. Because the Christians had an absolute, universal standard by which to judge not only personal morals but the state, they were counted as enemies of totalitarian Rome and were thrown to the beasts.

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• It is important to realize what a difference a people's world view 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 weaknesses of Roman culture speaks of the strength of the Christian world view.

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• To understand where we are in today's world-in our intellectual ideas and in our cultural and political lives-we must trace three lines in history, namely, the philosophic, the scientific, and the religious.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• United States
• Rome
• England
• Europe
• Florence
• France
• Masaccio
• Russia
• Switzerland
• Italy
• Paris
• Germany
• Stalin
• Goethe
• London
• High Renaissance
• Czechoslovakia
• Buxtehude
• Milan
• Geneva
• Pompeii
• America
• Gospel
• Middle Ages
• Lausanne

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Francis A. Schaeffer (Author)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 909.09821

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Authors, A-Z › ( S ) › Schaeffer, Francis
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Christianity › Christian Living › Discipleship
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Religious Studies › Ethics
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Religious Studies › Sociology
• Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy › Religious