Top 67 Alister E. Mcgrath Quotes
#1. To its critics, the study of theology distracts from real life. But, at its best, theology inspires and informs precisely the committed and caring ministry.
Alister E. McGrath
#2. Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, is thus the fulfilment of all previous mythological religions. Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself.
Alister E. McGrath
#3. We must not think that religious concerns swamped all other social activities. They simply provided a focal point for them.
Alister E. McGrath
#4. Later Protestant writers would refer to this as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae - the "article by which the church stands or falls.
Alister E. McGrath
#5. Our desires cannot be, and were never meant to be, satisfied by earthly pleasures alone.
Alister E. McGrath
#6. For Tolkien, a myth awakens in its readers a longing for something that lies beyond their grasp. Myths
Alister E. McGrath
#7. The English experience suggested that nobody really doubted the existence of God until theologians tried to prove it.
Alister E. McGrath
#8. New ideas can be supremely bad ideas, and by the time people realize how bad they are, it is sometimes difficult to get rid of them.
Alister E. McGrath
#9. Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief.
Alister E. McGrath
#10. Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.
Alister E. McGrath
#11. The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt.
Alister E. McGrath
#12. Hope is a settled state of mind, in which we see the world in its true light, and look forward to our final homecoming in heaven.
Alister E. McGrath
#13. Clergy had a vested interest in retaining the old, ways, which made few demands of them as teachers, as spiritual guides, or as moral examples or agents.
Alister E. McGrath
#14. Christianity brings to fulfilment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture. Tolkien gave Lewis a lens, a way of seeing things, which
Alister E. McGrath
#15. For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys "fundamental things" - in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. Myths
Alister E. McGrath
#16. Lewis is like a gateway, making the riches of Deep Church more accessible.
Alister E. McGrath
#17. Lewis is a rare example of someone who liked to think about life's great questions because they were forced on him by his own experience.
Alister E. McGrath
#18. 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.
Alister E. McGrath
#19. From this brief account of the origins of the English Reformation under Henry VIII, it will be clear that there are reasons for supposing that Henry's agenda was political, dominated by his desire to safeguard his succession and secure his own authority throughout his kingdom. Through
Alister E. McGrath
#20. Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more than this - not contradicting, but transcending reason.
Alister E. McGrath
#21. A god that can be reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshiped.
Alister E. McGrath
#22. Lewis wanted us to understand that the inner world is shaped by stories.
Alister E. McGrath
#23. Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we're meant to be doing.
Alister E. McGrath
#24. Our present world contains clues ... to another world-a world which we can begin to experience now, but will only know in all its fullness at the end of things.
Alister E. McGrath
#25. The success of the Inklings also helps us to see criticism in a positive light. There are, unfortunately, people who boost their own sense of importance by criticizing others as a matter of principle. Yet within this community, criticism was a mark of respect and commitment.
Alister E. McGrath
#26. At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble
Alister E. McGrath
#27. Tolkien helped Lewis to realise that the problem lay not in Lewis's rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance. The issue was not primarily about truth, but about meaning. When
Alister E. McGrath
#28. Reading works of literature is about "entering fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings, and total experience" of other people.[96] To read literature is thus to open us up to new ideas, or to force us to revisit those we once believed we were right to reject.
Alister E. McGrath
#29. 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.
Alister E. McGrath
#30. Lewis had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will.
Alister E. McGrath
#31. The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.
Alister E. McGrath
#33. The true believer is not someone who disengages from this world in order to focus on heaven, but rather the one who tries to make this world more like heaven.
Alister E. McGrath
#34. When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring,
Alister E. McGrath
#35. If there is no ultimate reality, it's pointless to think about how we might get there.
Alister E. McGrath
#36. For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism.
Alister E. McGrath
#37. Without the advent of printing, there would have been no Reformation, and there might well have been no Protestantism either.
Alister E. McGrath
#38. Good does not triumph unless good people rise to the challenges around them.
Alister E. McGrath
#39. God's existence may not be proved, in the hard rationalist sense of the word. Yet it can be affirmed with complete sincerity that belief in God is eminently reasonable and makes more sense of what we see in the world, discern in history, and experience in our lives than its alternatives.
Alister E. McGrath
#40. Within each of us exists the image of God, however disfigured and corrupted by sin it may presently be. God is able to recover this image through grace as we are conformed to Christ.
Alister E. McGrath
#41. They taught me longing - Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.
Alister E. McGrath
#42. 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.
Alister E. McGrath
#44. We live in a world of competing narratives. In the end, we have to decide for ourselves which is right. And having made that decision, we then need to inhabit the story we trust.
Alister E. McGrath
#45. Surely the better way is to pursue a generous orthodoxy, seeing disagreements in the context of the greater agreements which bind us together.
Alister E. McGrath
#46. The hallmark of intelligence is not whether one believes in God or not, but the quality of the processes that underlie one's beliefs.
Alister E. McGrath
#47. Apologetics is about persuading people that there is a door to another world - a door that perhaps they never realized existed. Evangelism is about helping people to open that door and enter into the new world that lies beyond.
Alister E. McGrath
#48. True love involves a willingness to change, to become more like the ones we love. Love is dynamic, not static. God may accept us just as we are - but he isn't going to leave us there. God wants to move us on, to help us become the people we are meant to be.
Alister E. McGrath
#49. Faith is not something that goes against the evidence, it goes beyond it. The evidence is saying to us, 'There is another country. There is something beyond mere reason'.
Alister E. McGrath
#51. Mere Christianity allows us to understand Christian ideas; the Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story and judge it by its ability to make sense of things and "chime in" with our deepest intuitions about truth, beauty, and goodness. If
Alister E. McGrath
#52. All the important things in life lie beyond reason ... and that's just the way things are.
Alister E. McGrath
#53. Suffering does not call into question the "big picture" of the Christian faith. It reminds us that we do not see the whole picture, and are thus unable to fit all of the pieces neatly into place.
Alister E. McGrath
#54. One of the best introductions to the history and ideas of Calvinism, packed with insight and wisdom.
Alister E. McGrath
#55. To reenchant nature is not merely to gain a new perspective for its integrity and well-being; it is to throw open the doors to a deeper level of existence.
Alister E. McGrath
#56. The Christian faith allows us to see further and deeper, to appreciate that nature is studded with signs, radiant with reminders, and emblazoned with symbols of God, our creator and redeemer.
Alister E. McGrath
#57. One of the great themes of the Christian Bible is that, whenever God asks us to do something for him, he gives us the gifts we need to do it. Knowing us for what we are, he equips us for what he wants us to do.
Alister E. McGrath
#58. 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.
Alister E. McGrath
#59. Lewis created a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination.
Alister E. McGrath
#60. Lewis at his best is about trying on ways of looking at the world.
Alister E. McGrath
#61. The human quest for beauty is thus really a quest for the source of that beauty, which is mediated through the things of this world, not contained within them.
Alister E. McGrath
#62. The God Delusion is a rather disorganized collage of arguments and pastiche of assertions which cannot be said to advance those ideas or enhance their critical edge, but rather harnesses them in the service of the advocacy of atheism.
Alister E. McGrath
#63. Lewis began to realize that atheism did not - and could not - satisfy the deepest longings of his heart or his intuition that there was more to life than what was seen on the surface.
Alister E. McGrath
#64. For Luther, it (faith) is an undeviating, trusting outlook appointment life, a constant stance of the trustworthiness of the promises of God.
Alister E. McGrath
#65. 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.
Alister E. McGrath
#66. For Lewis, the narration of his own story was about the identification of a pattern of meaning. This enabled him to grasp the "big picture" and discern the "grand story" of all things, so that the snapshots and stories of his own life could assume a deeper meaning.
Alister E. McGrath
#67. Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way.
Alister E. McGrath
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