Alister E. McGrath Quotes & Sayings

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

A god that can be reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshiped. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul. — Alister E. McGrath

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

The stories of Narnia seem childish nonsense to some. But to others, they are utterly transformative. For the latter group, these evocative stories affirm that it is possible for the weak and foolish to have a noble calling in a dark world; that our deepest intuitions point us to the true meaning of things; that there is indeed something beautiful and wonderful at the heart of the universe; and that this may be found, embraced, and adored. — Alister E. McGrath

The English experience suggested that nobody really doubted the existence of God until theologians tried to prove it. — Alister E. McGrath

Without the advent of printing, there would have been no Reformation, and there might well have been no Protestantism either. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

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

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

Lewis helps us to appreciate that apologetics need not take the form of deductive argument. Instead, apologetics can be an invitation to step into the Christian way of seeing things, and explore how things look when seen from its standpoint. Lewis's approach says, "Try seeing things this way!" If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into sharpest focus? — Alister E. McGrath

Hope is rooted in the trustworthiness of God. — Alister E. McGrath

Curiously, Dawkins and Dennett remain firmly committed to the outmoded notion that science and religion are permanently in conflict - an idea often referred to as the "warfare" thesis. This is now regarded as quite unacceptable by historians of science, chiefly because it is so difficult to reconcile with the facts of history.8 — Alister E. McGrath

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

Lewis wanted us to understand that the inner world is shaped by stories. — Alister E. McGrath

Take Lewis's "argument from desire." He basically argues that we experience desires that no experience in this world seems able to satisfy. And when we see these experiences through the lens of the Christian faith, we realise that this sort of experience is exactly what we would expect if Christianity is true. — Alister E. McGrath

I turned away from one belief system that tried to deny it was anything of the sort, and accepted another which was quite open and honest about its status. My conversion was an act of free-thinking. I believed that I had found the best way of making sense of things. And that remains my view today. Although I now appreciate that Christianity has emotional, imaginative, and ethical dimensions that I had yet to discover at that time, I continue to see the "sense-making" dimensions of faith to be profoundly important and significant. — Alister E. McGrath

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. — Alister E. McGrath

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

Good does not triumph unless good people rise to the challenges around them. — Alister E. McGrath

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

The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt. — Alister E. McGrath

It's the difference between utility and virtue. Many policy makers now think of education in functional terms. It's about learning skills that will help students find employment - such as using a word processor or spreadsheet. Yet what about helping people to figure out the meaning of life? Or become good people? Or make a difference to others? Is education for a stage in life, completed once we find jobs, or should it be a lifelong pursuit? — Alister E. McGrath

Lewis created a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

If there is no ultimate reality, it's pointless to think about how we might get there. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

Lewis at his best is about trying on ways of looking at the world. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

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

To speak of "the rise of Protestantism" is to offer a controlling narrative that links these potentially disparate events as part of a greater, more significant movement. So persuasive was this emerging narrative that many of the reforming groups scattered across Europe realigned their sense of identity and purpose to conform to it. As these movements began to locate themselves on a historical and conceptual map, each came increasingly to identify itself in terms of what was perceived as a greater overarching movement. A — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

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

Around this time, the term "Calvinism" was used by its opponents to refer to the Reformed type of Protestantism as a means of emphasizing that it originated from outside Germany. The term appears to have been introduced around 1552 by the Lutheran polemicist Joachim Westphal to refer to the theological, and particularly the sacramental, views of the Swiss reformers in general, and of John Calvin in particular.27 — Alister E. McGrath

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

Literature offers us a different way of seeing things. The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . . In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.[94] — Alister E. McGrath

Beneath all the rhetoric about relevance lies a profoundly disturbing possibility - that people may base their lives upon an illusion, upon a blatant lie. The attractiveness of a belief is all too often inversely proportional to its truth ... To allow "relevance" to be given greater weight than truth is a mark of intellectual shallowness and moral irresponsibility. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

TO BE asked to minister without an informing vision of God (which is what theology is really all about), however, is like being told to make bricks without straw. What keeps people going in ministry, and what, in my experience, congregations are longing for, is an exciting and empowering vision of God, articulated in a theology that is integrated with worship, prayer, and social action. — Alister E. McGrath

The printed word was integral to the spreading of the ideas of the Reformation across the religious and political boundaries of Europe. Martin Luther never visited England, yet his ideas were brought there through books that were smuggled in through eastern ports such as Ipswich and pored over in nearby Cambridge University. Calvin — Alister E. McGrath

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

Science proceeds by inference, rather than by the deduction of mathematical proof. A series of observations is accumulated, forcing the deeper question: What must be true if we are to explain what is observed? What "big picture" of reality offers the best fit to what is actually observed in our experience? American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce used the term "abduction" to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as "inference to the best explanation." It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy of investigation of the world characteristic of the natural sciences. — Alister E. McGrath

Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

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

For Tolkien, a myth awakens in its readers a longing for something that lies beyond their grasp. Myths — Alister E. McGrath

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

For Calvin, the creation reflects its Creator at every point. Image after images flashed in front of our eyes, as Calvin attempts to convey the multiplicity of ways in which the creation witnesses to its Creator: it is like a visible garment, which the invisible God dons in order to make himself known; it is like a book in which the name on the Creator is written as its author; it is like a theater, in which the glory of God is publicly displayed; it is like a mirror, in which the works and wisdom of God are reflected. — Alister E. McGrath

All the important things in life lie beyond reason ... and that's just the way things are. — Alister E. McGrath

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

It was not long before the possibly serious translation errors uncovered in the Vulgate threatened to force revision of existing church teachings. Erasmus pointed out some of these in 1516. An excellent example is found in the Vulgate translation of the opening words of Jesus's ministry in Galilee (Matthew 4:17) as: "do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." This translation creates a direct link between the coming of God's kingdom and the sacrament of penance. Erasmus pointed out that the original Greek text should be translated as: "repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand." Where the Vulgate seemed to refer to an outward practice (the sacrament of penance), Erasmus insisted that the reference was to an inward psychological attitude - that of "being repentant. — Alister E. McGrath

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

A Basic Definition of "Christian Spirituality" Christian spirituality concerns the quest for a fulfilled and authentic Christian existence, involving the bringing together of the fundamental ideas of Christianity and the whole experience of living on the basis of and within the scope of the Christian faith. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

Lewis had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will. — Alister E. McGrath

The burdens of taxation, the lack of due representation, and the desire for freedom were unquestionably integral ingredients in the accumulation of grievances that drove many colonials to take up arms against the king.22 Yet religious issues also played their part, not least in intensifying a sense of injustice over the privileged status of the Church of England in the British colonies.23 — Alister E. McGrath

Lewis is like a gateway, making the riches of Deep Church more accessible. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

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

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

At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble — Alister E. McGrath

village." The scholar, Lewis declares, has "lived in many times" and can thus challenge the automatic presumption of finality inherent in present judgements and trends: We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.58 — Alister E. McGrath

The solution was eventually found by Johannes Gutenberg, who made the breakthrough that finally established printing as the communication technology of the future. Similar ideas may have been under development around the same time in Prague and Haarlem. But in business, the key question is not about who else is in the race, it's about who gets there first. Johannes Gutenberg was the first to make the new technology work, ensuring his place in any history of the human race. — Alister E. McGrath

We live on earth; our homeland is in heaven. — Alister E. McGrath

We must not think that religious concerns swamped all other social activities. They simply provided a focal point for them. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

One of the best introductions to the history and ideas of Calvinism, packed with insight and wisdom. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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

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

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

How does humanity find God and enter into a relationship with him - a relationship that delivers humanity once and for all from fear of death, hell, or damnation? Luther is adamant: this relationship is made possible through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and is appropriated through faith. For — Alister E. McGrath

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

Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. — Alister E. McGrath

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

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