Grace & Ontology

Now when a Christian bows before God, he can move out of this with rationality in place. The other man, man without God, if he is going to be absolutely consistent in his position, may know that he exists, but nothing else. He cannot know that anything else exists. His problem is that he cannot live so; and no man does. Man logically and rationally cannot live in this cocoon of silence. So he is immediately damned in his intellect, not just by God saying, “You are a sinner,” but by the being that he himself is. God has made him rational. He cannot move from this cocoon and yet he must–and so he is crushed by what he is. It is not just a legal act of God that says “You are guilty”–though that is there. What man is has separated him from himself. The tension is within man. On the other hand, when a Christian bows before the personal Creator for whom man’s very existence shouts aloud, then there stretches from his feet to the end of infinity a bridge of answers and reality. That is the difference.

The Christian position states two things: that God is there, this infinite-personal God; and that you have been made in his image, so you are there. There is from your feet all the way to the infinite an answer that enables you to make the first move out of your intellectual cocoon. God has spoken, and what he so teaches is a unity with what he has made. Beginning with these two things, there is a bridge stretched before you, as the moon stretches a silver bridge across the ocean, from the curve of the horizon to yourself.

Now then, the wonder is that these answers do not end simply with an abstract, bare, scholastic understanding of Being, though that would be wonderful in itself. They end in communion with the infinite-personal reference point who is there, God himself. And that is tremendous. Then you can worship. There is where true worship is found: not in stained-glass windows, candles, or altar pieces, not in contentless experiences, but in communion with the God who is there–communion for eternity, and communion now, with the infinite-personal God as Abba, Father.

—Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality