J.P. Moreland Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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").

The contemporary Christian mind is starved, and as a result we have small, impoverished souls.

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.

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.

Ought not a Minister to have, First, a good understanding, a clear apprehension, a sound judgment, and a capacity of reasoning with some closeness ... Is not some acquaintance with what has been termed the second part of logic, (metaphysics), if not so necessary as [logic itself], yet highly expedient? Should not a Minister be acquainted with at least the general grounds of natural philosophy? JOHN WESLEY, ADDRESS TO THE CLERGY

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.

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.

We need to admit the mind into Christian fellowship again. We need the mind disciplined in Christ, enlightened by faith, passionate for God and his creation, to be let loose in the world.

...this life is the incubation period!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Real life does not come naturally. It is counterintuitive. It is a skill we have to learn. That's because the way to real life is not something we get, but something we give.

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.

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.

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.

Religion is now viewed by many as a placebo or emotional crutch precisely because that is how we often pitch the gospel to unbelievers

Instead of responding to these attacks with a vigorous intellectual counterpunch, many believers grew suspicious of intellectual issues altogether. To be sure, 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

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 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.

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.

Love God with all your mind ...

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.

When God chooses to create somebody, he or she has an impact on other people's choices and it might be that they have an impact on their decisions to trust Christ or not.

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.

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

From space travel to organ transplants, one of the most important influences shaping the modern world is science. Amazingly, people who lived during the Civil War had more in common with Abraham than with us. If Christians are going to speak to that world and interact with it responsibly, they must interact with science.

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.

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.