Alister E. McGrath Quotes

Christianity israrely understood by those outside its bounds. In fact, this is probably one of the greatest tasks confronting the apologist–to rescue Christianity from misunderstandings.

Our desires cannot be, and were never meant to be, satisfied by earthly pleasures alone.

The state is concerned with the promotion of outward righteousness arising from the individual being constrained to keep the law. The Gospel alters human nature, whereas the state merely restrains human greed and evil, having no positive power to alter human motivation.

Puzzles lead to logical answers; mysteries often force us to stretch language to its limits in an attempt to describe a reality that is just too great to take in properly.

Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

Manz, formerly one of Zwingli’s closest allies, held that there was no biblical warrant for infant baptism. Refusing to recant his views, he was tied up and drowned in the River Limmat.

A failure to understand something does not mean it is irrational. It may simply mean that it lies on the far side of our limited abilities to take things in and make complete sense of them.

We live on earth; our homeland is in heaven.

If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason.

The idea of ‘calling’ was fundamentally redefined: no longer was it about being called to serve God by leaving the world; it was now about serving God in the world

When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring.

The idea that Christianity is basically a religion of moral improvement… has its roots in the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century… It is this stereotype which continues to have influence today… But then came the First World War… What had gone wrong was that the idea of sin had been abandoned by liberal Christianity as some kind of unnecessary hangover from an earlier and less enlightened period in Christian history.