Jp Moreland Quotes

God maintains a delicate balance between keeping his existence sufficiently evident so people will know he's there and yet hiding his presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore him can do it. This way, their choice of destiny is really free.

...many atheists embrace Jesus as having been a great teacher, and yet he's the one who had the most to say about hell.

Anti-intellectualism has spawned an irrelevant gospel. Today, we share the gospel primarily as a means of addressing felt needs.

If you were to force people to do something against their free choice, you would be dehumanizing them. The option of forcing everyone to go to heaven is immoral, because it's dehumanizing; it strips them of the dignity of making their own decision; it denies them their freedom of choice; and it treats them as a means to an end. When God allows people to say 'no' to him, he actually respects and dignifies them.

No one will go to hell simply because all they needed was a little more time and they died prematurely.

When God is making these judgements, his purpose is not to keep as many people out of hell as possible. His goal is to get as many people into heaven as possible.

The proper thing to do is to admit that hell is real and to allow our feelings of discomfort to motivate us to action.

...this life is the incubation period!

God loved me enough to make me aware, at a deep experiential level, of my own pride and sinfulness, and my desperate need for his mercy and continuing work in my life as a believer.

...people in heaven will not be denied the privilege of enjoying their life just because they're consciously aware of hell. If they couldn't, then hell would have veto power over heaven.

I am responsible for what I believe and, I might add, for what I refuse to believe, because the content of what I do or do not believe makes a tremendous difference to what I become and how I act.

In Scripture, faith involves placing trust in what you have reason to believe is true. Faith is not a blind, irrational leap into the dark. So faith and reason cooperate on a biblical view of faith. They are not intrinsically hostile.

I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found. Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere? Why do I keep leaving home where I am called a child of God, the Beloved of the Father? ”9

...the degree of someone's just punishment is not a function of how long it took to commit the deed; rather, it's a function of how severe the deed itself was.

The right approach to life is one that hungers to know as many truths as one can and to avoid as many falsehoods as possible.

But their overall effect was to overemphasize immediate personal conversion to Christ instead of a studied period of reflection and conviction; emotional, simple, popular preaching instead of intellectually careful and doctrinally precise sermons; and personal feelings and relationship to Christ instead of a deep grasp of the nature of Christian teaching and ideas.

I would rather commit a sin of commission than a sin of omission, and the evangelical community is exactly the opposite. The evangelical community would rather not do something wrong and the price they're willing to pay for not doing something wrong is they're willing to fail to do something right; they're so afraid of making a mistake. Now the reason they're afraid of making a mistake is they're cowards and our community produces cowards.

The current understanding of happiness identifies it as a pleasurable feeling. Pleasant feelings are surely better than unpleasant ones, but the problem today is that people are obsessively concerned with feeling happiness; people are slaves to their feelings. Feelings are wonderful servants but terrible masters. When people make happiness their goal, they do not find it and, as a result, start living their lives vicariously through identification with celebrities.

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.

A Christian goes to college to discover his vocation - and to develop skills necessary to occupy a section of cultural, intellectual domain in a manner worthy of the kingdom of God. A believer also goes to college to gain general information and habits of thought necessary for developing a well-structured soul suitable for a well-informed, good citizen of both earthly and heavenly kingdoms.

Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others.

You must understand that in the afterlife, our personalities reflect an adult situation anyway, so we can say for sure that there will be no children in hell.

...people will be sentenced in accordance with their deeds...God's justice is proportional. There is not exactly the same justice for everyone who refuses the mercy of God.

As Puritan Cotton Mather proclaimed, “Ignorance is the Mother not of Devotion but of HERESY.”4

Propositional knowledge is justified true belief; it is believing something that is true on the basis of adequate grounds.

immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.

What hell does is recognize that people have intrinsic value. If God loves intrinsic value, then he has go to be a sustainer of persons, because that means he is a sustainer of intrinsic value.

I fear that our inaccurate emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture has become an easy shortcut to the hard work of building a personal library of study tools and using them.

Kristin Neff wisely observes, “When we’re in touch with our common humanity, we remember that feelings of inadequacy and disappointment are shared by all. This is what distinguishes self-compassion from self-pity. Whereas self-pity says ‘poor me,’ self-compassion remembers that everyone suffers, and it offers comfort because everyone is human. The pain I feel in difficult times is the same pain that you feel in difficult times.”4

We start by trusting our reason. But, later, we encounter skeptical arguments against that trust and so we stop trusting reason. But once we do this, we no longer have any reason to accept the skeptical arguments themselves and continue our mistrust of reason. At this point, I begin to trust reason again, but then, the skeptical arguments reassert themselves and so forth. We have entered a vicious dialectical loop that, eventually, will reach a sort of intellectual paralysis.

While forgiveness is an important part of the gospel, the good news goes beyond that. It amounts to the claim that the kingdom of God—the direct availability of God himself and His rule—is now available to anyone who will enter it through trust in Jesus.

Our current Western cultural plausibility structure elevates science and scorns and mocks religion, especially Christian teaching. As a result, believers in Western cultures do not as readily believe the supernatural worldview of the Bible in comparison with their Third World brothers and sisters.

Today, people are inclined to think that the sincerity and fervency of one's beliefs are more important than the content. As long as we believe something honestly and strongly, we are told, then that is all that really matters. Reality is basically indifferent to how sincerely we believe something.

When stress becomes a habit mentally, emotionally, and physically, a default setting on our inner dial, then it becomes “normal” and we no longer notice its presence. But the stress is still there, and it affects how we perceive, feel, and react to events in our lives. And stress is the major cause of anxiety.

The gospel of the kingdom is an invitation to a different reality, a different way of living. The kingdom is a new way of relating as people. Where ordinary human life is based on competitiveness and defensiveness, domination and subjugation, treachery and violence, the kingdom is based on the self-giving love of God.

Douglas Moo notes that therefore, while not denying that some in the church may have the gift of healing, James encourages all Christians, and especially those charged with pastoral oversight, to be active in prayer for healing. . . . Similarly, James’ promise that the Lord will raise up (egeiro) the sick person reflects the language of NT healing stories (Matt 9:6; Mark 1:31; Acts 3:7).

Merely exhorting people to be more committed to God—“just have more faith”—seldom produces greater confidence and dedicated trust in God. Rather, what is needed is a realistic picture of a flourishing life lived deeply in tune with God ’s kingdom—a life that is so utterly compelling that failure to exercise greater commitment to life in that kingdom will feel like a foolish, tragic missed opportunity for entering into something truly dramatic and desirable.

If you spend all your time trying to be happy, you end up focusing all your attention on yourself and how “happy” you are and, as a result, you become a shriveled self who can’t live for some larger cause. Your life will center on yourself and your moment-by-moment focus will be on how you feel inside. Your sole criterion of evaluation for seeking a job, making friends, finding a spouse (or staying with a spouse!), and selecting a church will reduce to one overarching concern: How does this particular thing make me feel? The best way to be happy in the contemporary sense is to forget about it, to try to live a good life for a bigger purpose, especially for the cause of Christ.

Great advances in religious epistemology have been made in the last generation. Positivistic challenges to the cognitive significance of religious belief are now passé, having been shown to be based on a criterion of meaning that was overly restrictive and self-refuting. Similarly, claims that atheists and theists have differential burdens of proof, so that in the absence of preponderant evidence for theism, the presumption is that atheism is true, are obsolete. The absence of evidence counts against an existence claim only if it were to be expected that the entity, were it to exist, would leave evidence of its existence in excess of that which we have. This debate has moved on to the question of the hiddenness of God. The difficulty of the atheist is to show why the Christian God should not, as the Bible declares, hide himself from certain unbelievers.

When your view is criticized or even ridiculed on television, on radio talk show, or in a newspaper editorial, don't just react angrily. Take a moment to jot down on paper the person's main thesis and how that thesis was supported. Then do two things. First, assume the person is expressing at least some good points and try to identify them. This assumption may be false, but the search for common ground with intellectual opponents is a good habit. In the process of identifying these good points, try to argue against your own view. Second, try to state on paper exactly how you would argue against the view being expressed in an intellectually precise yet emotionally calm way.

Second, when one tries to formulate a definition of knowledge or, more generally, when one investigates matters in epistemology, one does not start with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as knowledge. Instead, one starts with paradigm cases of knowledge: central, clear cases of where knowledge does or does not obtain.

The way we reach decisions today, the manner in which we dialogue about issues, and the political correctness we see all around us are dehumanizing expressions of the anti-intellectualism in modern society when it comes to broad worldview issues. Rhetoric without reason, persuasion without argument are manipulation

If reason plays no practical role in such religious decisions as choosing a denomination or becoming a Christian in the first place, why should we expect it to inform subsequent decisions within the religious life?

The word comes from two Greek words, phileō, “to love,” and sophia, “wisdom.” Thus a philosopher is a lover of wisdom.

On Sunday, I look at my calendar to be sure my week is planned appropriately, and then I take one day at a time.

We need not get distracted by the seeming defeat or troubles of our daily lives (“what is seen”), because this affliction is actually being used by God to transform our character (2 Corinthians 3:18) so we can become the kind of citizens who will flourish in his future kingdom (“what is not seen”).

When a Christian, Sharon, for instance, tries to present objectively good reasons for a position and is greeted with a claim of disqualification on the grounds of bias, the proper response is this: Tell the other person that she has changed the subject from the issue to the messenger, that while the Christian appreciates the attention and focus on her inner drives and motives, she thinks that the dialogue should get refocused on the strength of the case just presented. Perhaps at another time they could talk about each other’s personal motivations and drives, but for now, a case, a set of arguments has been presented and a response to those arguments is required.

Satan uses any means, ethical or unethical, to distract us from trusting in God, drawing us away to trust in ourselves by moving us into fear, into anger, into pride.

Furthermore, our initial perception of God is largely formed by our interaction with our parents and other early caregivers. As children, to be safe, we developed ways of coping with our imperfect parents. And due to these varied challenging experiences in our childhood, perhaps some of us may wonder how safe God really is.

By the very act of arguing, you awaken the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real.

This can only be done by making these cultural assumptions explicit, by exposing them for the intellectual frauds they actually are, and by being vigilant in keeping them before one’s mind and spotting their presence in the ordinary reception of input each day from newspapers, magazines, office conversation, television, movies and so on.

I am a soul, and I have a body. We don't learn about people by studying their bodies. We learn about people by finding out how they feel, what they think, what they're passionate about, what their worldview is, and so forth. ...So my conclusion is that there's more to me than my conscious life and my body. In fact, I am a 'self,' or an 'I,' that cannot be seen or touched unless I manifest myself through my behavior or my talk. I have free will because I am a 'self,' or a soul, and I'm not just a brain. ~J.P. Moreland, PHD~

If normative relativism is true, then it is logically impossible for a society to have a virtuous, moral reformer like Jesus Christ, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr. Why? Moral reformers are members of a society who stand outside that society's code and pronounce a need for reform and change in that code. However, if an act is right if and only if it is in keeping with a given society's code, then the moral reformer is by definition an immoral person, for his views are at odds with those of his society. Moral reformers must always be wrong because they go against the code of their society. But any view that implies moral reformers are impossible is defective.

Might — it is wrongly believed — makes right.

But why would he do this? One possibility is to allow us to bring things to his awareness through prayer that he already knows but wasn’t focusing on. In such cases, God could bring these things to his awareness at will without relying on us. After all, he knows everything. But he does not have to be aware of all he knows, and this withholding of awareness allows us to genuinely inform God of things, not in the sense that he didn’t already know them, but in the sense that he has condescended in such a way as to allow us to recall these things to his awareness. And such an act of recalling would bring with it a genuine, and not feigned, sense of fresh excitement and concern for the prayer being made.

As G. K. Chesterton bemoaned, once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything. This

The spirit is that faculty of the soul through which the person relates to God (Psalm 51:10; Romans 8:16; Ephesians 4:23) and is able to be directly aware of God, demons, or angels.5 Before the new birth, the spirit is real and has certain abilities to be aware of God. But most of the capacities of the unregenerate spirit are dead and inoperative. At the new birth, God implants or activates capacities in the spirit. These fresh capacities need to be nourished and developed so they can grow.

Knowledge by acquaintance gives us direct access to reality as it is in itself, and we actually know this to be the case in our daily lives.

Sunday school classes, discipleship materials, and sermons too often address the heart and not the head, or focus on personal growth and piety and not on cultivating an intellectual love for God in my vocation.

Knowledge by acquaintance is sometimes called “simple seeing,” being directly aware of something.

The role of intellectual development is primary in evangelical Christianity, but you might not know that from a cursory look at the church today.

As our Savior has said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). To do this, we cannot neglect the soulful development of a Christian mind.

What was a problem, however, was the intellectually shallow, theologically illiterate form of Christianity that came to be part of the populist Christian religion that emerged.

Christians must rely on the Holy Spirit in their intellectual pursuits, but this does not mean they should expend no mental sweat of their own in defending the faith.

If this is correct, then sermons should target people’s thinking as much as their wills and feelings.

First, it does not reach people who may be out of touch with their feelings.

Second, it invites the response, “Sorry, but I don’t have a need.

What is important for our children is that they stay pure in college and, perhaps, witness, have a quiet time, and pray regularly. Obviously, these are important. But for a disciple, the purpose of college is not just to get a job. Rather, it is to discover a vocation, to identify a field of study in and through which I can serve Christ as my Lord.

As former president of the United Nations General Assembly Charles Malik has said, “I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough.

Have you ever wondered why no one responded to the apostle Paul in this manner? If you look at his evangelistic approach in Acts 17:20, the answer becomes obvious. He based his preaching on the fact that the gospel is true and reasonable to believe. He reasoned with and tried to persuade people intelligently to accept Christ.

Our Lord is a God of reason as well as of revelation.

The God of the Bible requires teachers who diligently study His Word and handle it accurately (compare 2 Timothy 2:15 and 1 Timothy 4:15-16).

In my view, the Spirit does not help the believer understand the meaning of Scripture. Rather, He speaks to the believer’s soul, convicting, comforting, opening up applications of His truth through His promptings.

We need local churches dedicated to the task of training believers to think theologically and biblically.

For our purposes, two things are important about the narrative. First, Jesus revealed His intellectual skills in debate by: (1) showing His familiarity with His opponents’ point of view; (2) appealing to common ground (a text all the disputants accepted) instead of expressing a biblical text He accepted but they rejected (Daniel 12:2); and (3) deftly using the laws of logic to dissect His opponents’ argument and refute it powerfully. Second, because it forms the immediately preceding context for Matthew 22:37-39, this incident may inform at least part of what it means to love God intellectually: to be prepared to stand up for God’s truth and honor when they are challenged and to do so with carefully thought-out answers.

Here’s a simple definition of knowledge: It is to represent reality in thought or experience the way it really is on the basis of adequate grounds.

3. Know-how.

Experience is more basic than ultimate worldview presuppositions and, in fact, the evidence of experience provides data for evaluating rival worldviews or interpretations of some event.

The Lord’s Word is not only practically useful, it is also theoretically true (John 17:17).

Influence is one thing; determination is another.

It’s actually all right with God if you are nice to yourself! Rather than experiencing your anxiety or depression as an occasion for self-loathing and condemning yourself for being such a failure, you can experience it as an opportunity to soften your heart towards yourself. Seek to have an open heart toward yourself with gentleness. After all, we are all flawed and fragile! Your anxiety or depression is simply a part of common humanity.

If our lives and ministries are expressions of what we actually believe, and if what we believe is off center and yet so pervasive that it is seldom even brought to conscious discussion, much less debated, then this explains why our impact on the world is so paltry compared to our numbers. I cannot overemphasize the fact that this modern understanding of Christianity is neither biblical nor consistent with the bulk of church history.

while few would actually put it in these terms, faith is now understood as a blind act of will, a decision to believe something that is either independent of reason or that is a simple choice to believe while ignoring the paltry lack of evidence for what is believed. By contrast with this modern misunderstanding, biblically, faith is a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true.

we have allowed secular thinkers to frame the debate, and the Christian voice has been muffled at best.

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics today because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.

Once objective duty, goodness, and virtue were abandoned under the guise of scientism and secularism, the only moral map that could replace objective morality is what Daniel Callahan has called minimalistic ethics —anything is morally permissible provided only that you do not harm someone else.

Until Christians can do a better job of seeing these issues and articulating them in terms of objective duty and virtue, the Jack Kevorkians will continue to win the “debate” (if that is what we should call the media rhetoric that surrounds the framing of moral dilemmas), precisely because the Kevorkians are on the side of individual rights.

Scientific Naturalism Just what is scientific naturalism (hereafter, naturalism)? Succinctly put, it is the view that the spatio-temporal universe of physical objects, properties, events, and processes that are well established by scientific forms of investigation is all there is, was, or ever will be.

There is no nonempirical knowledge, especially no theological or ethical knowledge. Science and science alone carries authority in culture because the alleged possession of knowledge gives people authority, and science and science alone is perceived to have knowledge. Outside science — especially in theological, ethical, or political discussions — the makeup man is more important than the speech-writer (feeling and image are more important than reason, knowledge, and truth).

If we are going to be wise, spiritual people prepared to meet the crises of our age, we must be a studying, learning community that values the life of the mind.

English professor Carolyn Kane wrote an article in Newsweek about the loss of thinking in American culture generally. After putting her finger squarely on the problem, Kane identified her solution in front of both God and the Newsweek readership: “But how can we revive interest in the art of thinking? The best place to start would be in homes and churches of our land.

Perhaps Kane has a better grasp of the importance of the intellectual life in the Christian faith than many of us do. Perhaps she has read enough Scripture to know that the church was meant to be and has often been the instrument of reason in society.

we cannot “prove,” that is, “make known to ourselves and to others,” what God’s will is without the renewing or transformation of our minds.

1. Knowledge by acquaintance.

2. Propositional knowledge.

Our society has replaced heroes with celebrities, the quest for a well-informed character with the search for flat abs, substance and depth with image and personality.

Understood in this way, we see that faith is built on reason.

As theologian Carl Henry put it, “Training the mind is an essential responsibility of the home, the church, and the school. Unless evangelicals prod young people to disciplined thinking, they waste — even undermine — one of Christianity’s most precious resources.

when people learn what they believe and why, they become bold in their witness and attractive in the way they engage others in debate or dialogue.

For many secularists, knowledge is obtained solely by means of the senses and science. Something is true and reasonable to believe to the degree that it can be tested by the five senses — it can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or felt. Seeing is believing. Likewise, knowledge is identical to scientific knowledge. If you can prove something scientifically, then it is culturally permissible or even obligatory to believe it.