"Christianity: the easiest religion, the hardest religion" (Francis Schaeffer)

Francis Schaeffer (1912 - 1984)

"If it is so true that there are good and sufficient reasons to know that Christianity is true, why doesn't everybody accept the sufficient answers?

"We must realise that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world, because it is the only religion in which God the Father and Christ and the Holy Spirit do everything.  God is the Creator;  we have nothing to do with our existence, or existence of other things.  We can shape other things, but we cannot change the fact of existence.  We can do nothing for our salvation because Christ did it all. We do not have to do anything.  In every other religion we have to do something - everything from burning a joss stick to sacrificing our firstborn child to dropping a coin in the collection plate - the whole spectrum.  But with Christianity, we do not have to do anything:  God has done it all.  He has created us and He has sent His Son;  His Son died and because the Son is infinite, therefore He bears our total guilt.  We do not need to bear our guilt, nor do we even have to merit the merit of Christ.  he does it all.  So in one way it is the easiest religion in the world.

"But now we can turn it over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason.  The heart of rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not our our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous.  We did not make ourselves, we are not the product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Saviour plus nothing - it is a complete denial of being autonomous.  Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in the most brilliant people it is occasionally conscious), when they suddenly see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they are suddenly up against their innermost humanness - not humanness as they were created to be human, but human in the bad sense since the Fall.  That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow...

"It is not that the answers are not good, adequate and sufficient. Unless one gives up one's autonomy, one cannot accept the answers."

Francis Schaeffer, The God who is There (Complete Works, I, 182-183)