“I am not a pacifist because pacifism in this fallen world in which we live means that we desert the people who need our greatest help. Consider the following illustration: I am walking down the street. I see a great big, burly man who is beating a helpless little girl to death. I come up and I plead with him to stop. If he won’t stop, what does love mean? Love means I stop him in any way I can including, quite frankly, hitting him.
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. Now extend this illustration to violence at a national level. We have in World War II the clearest possible illustration with Hitler’s terrorism. There was no possible way to stop the awful terror that was occurring in Hitler’s Germany except by the use of force.
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.”
— Francis A. Schaeffer, Speech in Washington D.C. (1982)
August 19, 2009, 1:04pm Comments
