Home > Work > Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical QUOTES

Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical QUOTES

1 " Ordinary moralistic religion operates on this principle: “I live a good and moral life; therefore God accepts me.” Gospel Christianity operates in the opposite way: “God accepts me unconditionally in Jesus Christ; therefore I live a good and moral life. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

2 " Many voices argue that it is exclusionary to claim that you have the truth, but as we have seen, that view itself sets up a dichotomy with you as the heroically tolerant and others as villainously or pathetically bigoted. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

3 " Our culture tells us that you must look inside to discover your deepest desires and dreams and to express them. You must do this yourself, and must not rely on anyone outside to affirm and tell you who you are. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

4 " But this is an impossibility.23 You cannot get an identity through self-recognition; it must come in a great measure from others. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

5 " God repeatedly refuses to allow his gracious activity to run along the expected lines of worldly influence and privilege. He puts in the center the person whom the world would put on the periphery. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

6 " The Israelites must have wondered about this patriarch who was always in trouble. . . . This God does not align himself only with the obviously valued ones, the first-born. This oracle speaks about an inversion. It affirms that we are not fated to the way the world is presently organized. That is the premise of the ministry of Jesus: the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry . . . are the heirs to the kingdom (Matt. 5:3–7). "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

7 " Jesus Christ’s salvation comes to us through his poverty, rejection, and weakness. And Christians are not saved by summoning up their strength and accomplishing great deeds but by admitting their weakness and need for a savior. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

8 " Yes, of course, believing in universal moral truths can be used to oppress others. But what if that absolute truth is a man who died for his enemies, who did not respond in violence with violence but forgave them? How could that story, if it is the center of your life, lead you to take up power and dominate others? "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

9 " we can conclude that a professed Christian who is not committed to a life of generosity and justice toward the poor and marginalized is, at the very least, a living contradiction of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God, whose Father “executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

10 " In a penetrating insight, Bauckham writes that belief in the story of salvation “also breaks the cycle by which the oppressed become oppressors in their turn.”47 In the Old Testament the Israelites are constantly warned not to oppress immigrants and racial outsiders “because you were foreigners in Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33–34). The memory of their salvation from slavery not by their own power but by God’s grace was to radically undermine their natural human inclination to domination. But, Bauckham writes, “the cross is the event in which the cycle [of the oppressed becoming oppressor] is definitively broken. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

11 " The reason for this persistent story line in the Bible is not simply because the writers like underdogs. It is because the ultimate example of God’s working in the world was Jesus Christ, the only founder of a major religion who died in disgrace, not surrounded by all of his loving disciples but abandoned by everybody whom he cared about, including his Father. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

12 " A salvation earned by good works and moral effort would favor the more able, competent, accomplished, and privileged. But salvation by sheer grace favors the failed, the outsiders, the weak, because it goes only to those who know salvation must be by sheer grace. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

13 " Without socially shared discovered meaning we have no basis for saying to somebody else: “You need to stop doing that!” Created meanings cannot be the basis for a program of social justice. Martin "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

14 " Created meaning is a less rational way to live life than doing so with discovered meaning. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

15 " Through faith in the cross we get a new foundation for an identity that both humbles us out of our egoism yet is so infallibly secure in love that we are enabled to embrace rather than exclude those who are different. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

16 " Western secularity is not the absence of faith but a new set of beliefs about the universe.72 "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

17 " Religion is not the place where the problem of man’s egotism is automatically solved. Rather, it is there that the ultimate battle between human pride and God’s grace takes place. Insofar as human pride may win the battle, religion can and does become one of the instruments of human sin. But insofar as there the self does meet God and so can surrender to something beyond its own self-interest, religion may provide the one possibility for a much needed and very rare release from our common self-concern.23 "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

18 " For the first phase of American history, “hope was chiefly expressed through a Christian story that gave meaning to suffering and pleasure alike and promised deliverance from death.” But then, under the influence of Enlightenment rationality, belief in God and the supernatural began to weaken among cultural elites. Instead of finding ultimate hope in the kingdom of God, Americans began to believe in the sacred calling of being the “greatest nation on earth,” one that would show the rest of the world the way to a better future for the human race. It essentially substituted a “deified nation” for God. There was no more vivid example of nationhood and citizenship than “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As [Jesus] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

19 " We see, then, that freedom is not what the culture tells us. Real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others. It is not the absence of constraints but it is choosing the right constraints and the right freedoms to lose. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

20 " Our modern culture’s idea of freedom is wholly negative. We are free as long as no one is constraining our choices. However, this concept is too thin to be adequate. "

― Timothy J. Keller , Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical