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Two Contents, Two Realities

Summary
There are four things which I think are absolutely necessary if we as Christians are going to meet the need of our age and the overwhelming pressure we are increasingly facing. They are two contents and two realities:

The First Content: Sound Doctrine
The Second Content: Honest Answers to Honest Questions
The First Reality: True Spirituality
The Second Reality: The Beauty of Human Relationships

(Francis A. Schaeffer, Two Contents, Two Realities)

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The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer (paper)
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Quotes From The Book
There is no use talking about meeting the threat of the coming time or fulfilling our calling in the midst of the last quarter of the twentieth century unless we consciously help each other to have a clear doctrinal position.

We must have the courage to make no compromise with liberal theology and especially neo-orthodox existential theology. Christianity is a specific body of truth; it is a system, and we must not be ashamed of the word system. There is truth, and we must hold that truth. There will be borderline things in which we have differences among ourselves, but on the central issues there must be no compromise.

There is no use talking about meeting the threat of the coming time or fulfilling our calling in the midst of the last quarter of the twentieth century unless we consciously help each other to have a clear doctrinal position. We must have the courage to make no compromise with liberal theology and especially neo-orthodox existential theology. Christianity is a specific body of truth; it is a system, and we must not be ashamed of the word system. There is truth, and we must hold that truth. There will be borderline things in which we have differences among ourselves, but on the central issues there must be no compromise.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, Two Contents, Two Realities, Ch. 1)


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.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, Two Contents, Two Realities, Ch. 1)


 It is one of my greatest sorrows that the evangelical church often will not accept the person with his lifestyle unless it fits into the middle-class norm in that particular geographical location. And unhappily we often do not realize what we have done when we do this. It is not only a lack of love. We have destroyed the absolutes of the Word of God by making something else equal to Godís absolutes.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, Two Contents, Two Realities, Ch. 1)


But to exalt a cultural norm to an absolute is even more destructive today because we are surrounded by a totally relativistic society. As we make other things equal to the absolutes of the Word of God, it may not be more sinful in the sight of God than it was in the past, but it is more destructive.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, Two Contents, Two Realities, Ch. 1)


And as we have a strong doctrinal content, we must practice the content, practice the truth we say we believe. We must exhibit to our own children and to the watching world that we take truth seriously. It will not do in a relativistic age to say that we believe in truth and fail to practice that truth in places where it may be observed and where it is costly. We, as Christians, say we believe that truth exists. We say we have truth from the Bible. And we say we can give that truth to other men in propositional, verbalized form and they may have that truth. This is exactly what the gospel claims and this is what we claim. But then we are surrounded by a relativistic age. Do you think for a moment we will have credibility if we say we believe the truth and yet do not practice the truth in religious matters? If we do not do this, we cannot expect for a moment that the tough-minded, twentieth-century young person (including our own young people) will take us seriously when we say, "here is truth" when they are surrounded by a totally monolithic consensus that truth does not exist.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, Two Contents, Two Realities, Ch. 1)


But nowhere is practicing the truth more important than in the area of religious cooperation. If I say that Christianity is really eternal truth, and the liberal theologian is wrong -- so wrong that he is teaching that which is contrary to the Word of God -- and then on any basis (including for the sake of evangelism) I am willing publicly to act as though that man's religious position is the same as my own, I have destroyed the practice of truth which my generation can expect from me and which it will demand of me if I am to have credibility. How will we have a credibility in a relativistic age if we practice religious cooperation with men who in their books and lectures make very plain that they believe nothing (or practically nothing) of the content set forth in Scripture?
(Francis A. Schaeffer, Two Contents, Two Realities, Ch. 1)


 It is the central things of the Word of God which make Christianity Christianity. These we must hold tenaciously, and, even when it is costly for us and even when we must cry, we must maintain that there is not only an antithesis of truth, but an antithesis that is observable in practice. Out of a loyalty to the infinite-personal God who is there and who has spoken in Scripture, and out of compassion for our own young people and others, we who are evangelicals dare not take a halfway position concerning truth or the practice of truth.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, Two Contents, Two Realities, Ch. 1)

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