Nominally Christian Community Like Adding Up Zeros

by Staff March 30, 2015

What is the sum when you add up zeros?

"There will be little meaning concerning Christian community until we understand what Christian means, and who can make up a Christian community.

"The liberal theologians in their stress on community speak and act as though we become Christians when we enter the horizontal relationship of community, but this is a totally wrong starting point. If this were so, Christianity would have no more final value than the humanistic community, and that is just the trouble with modern man. He can find no sufficient value for humanistic community for he can find no sufficient value for the men who make it up. If the individual man is a zero, then community is only adding zeros."

—Francis Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the 20th Century (Downer's Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity, 1970), 45.