Aging & Wisdom Quote by Francis Schaeffer

A culture that prides itself on open-mindedness, Schaeffer suggests, can end up smuggling in a dogma of its own: you may believe anything except that anything is finally true. The line is built like a logical trap. By calling the age’s signature “curious,” he frames relativism not as sophisticated tolerance but as a self-contradiction with good PR. The rhetorical snap comes from the mirror structure: “the only absolute” is an absolute, and the repetition forces the reader to feel the circularity rather than merely understand it.

Schaeffer’s intent isn’t just to score a clever point against fashionable skepticism. It’s to expose what he sees as a new orthodoxy operating under the banner of neutrality. The subtext is cultural: institutions (universities, media, law) increasingly treat moral and metaphysical claims as private preferences, while enforcing that stance publicly. That enforcement is the tell. Relativism, in his telling, doesn’t float above the fray; it disciplines the fray, defining which kinds of conviction are admissible.

Context matters. Writing and speaking in the postwar West, Schaeffer watched modernism’s confidence erode into the late-20th-century suspicion of “metanarratives,” with “personal truth” replacing shared frameworks. As an evangelical theologian and apologist, he’s arguing that Christianity isn’t simply one lifestyle option among many; it makes truth-claims that collide with the era’s etiquette. The quote works because it recasts relativism not as humility but as power: a rule that denies it is a rule.