12 Notable Quotes from Confronting Christianity
This article is part of the Notable Quotes series.
Hard Questions
The gospel challenges some of our culture’s deepest beliefs and can prompt a lot of questions. 1 Peter 3:15 exhorts believers to “be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” The following quotes, excerpted from Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion by Rebecca McLauglin, can help us think through how to do just that.
“No matter what we currently believe, we must all confront Christianity: the most widespread belief system in the world, with the most far-reaching intellectual footprint, and a wealth of counterintuitive wisdom concerning how humans should thrive.”
“If you care about diversity, don’t dismiss Christianity: it is the most diverse, multiethnic, and multicultural movement in all of history.”
“Jesus claims rule over all of heaven and earth. He presents himself not as one possible path to God, but as God himself. We may choose to disbelieve him. But he cannot be one truth among many. He has not left us that option.”
“The central truth claim on which Christianity stands or falls is that Jesus was physically raised from the dead.”
“In Jesus, Christians have the promise of a lover who will never leave them or forsake them, who sits with them in suffering to the bitter end—and beyond.”
“If there is a God who created the universe, we cannot exclude the possibility of miracles. The One who made the laws of nature in the first place can surely intervene when he chooses.”
“Faith in a loving, rational God, who created humans in his image and calls us to love both our neighbor and our enemy, is not only the historical source of our beliefs about human equality but also their best justification. And yet Christians can make no claim to innate moral superiority. To be a Christian is to acknowledge your utter moral failure and to throw yourself on the mercy of the only truly good man who ever lived.”
“Believing that Jesus is the resurrection and the life is not a one-time posture of the mind. Rather, it is a daily battle of the heart.”
“In Jesus’s world, we find connective tissue between the truths of science and morality. We find a basis for saying that all human beings are created equal, and a deep call to love across diversity. We find a name for evil, and a means of forgiveness. We find a vision of love that is so much deeper than our current hearts can hold, and a true intimacy better than our weak bodies could ever experience.”
“We are so used to science that we forget to marvel at the very fact that laws of the universe are comprehensible to us.”
“The ultimate man laid down his life for the billions of women who have trusted him with theirs. Does Christianity denigrate women? On the contrary. It lifts us into fellowship with God himself.”
“Heaven, in biblical terms, is not primarily a place. It is a shorthand for the full blessing of relationship with God. It is the prodigal son come home. It is the bride being embraced by her husband with tears of joy. It is the new heavens and the new earth, where God’s people with upgraded, resurrection bodies will enjoy eternity with him at a level of intimacy into which the best of human marriage gives us no more than a glimpse. Heaven is home: an embodied experience of deep relationship with God and his people on a recreated earth.”
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