updated 9d ago
Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World
Religion also makes sense to many people because of a direct experience of the transcendent that goes beyond the fainter intuitions of the aesthetic experience.
from Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World by Timothy Keller
Blas Moros added 16d ago
If Jesus Christ was really raised from the dead—if he is really the Son of God and you believe in him—all these things that you long for most desperately will come true at last. We will escape time and death. We will know love without parting, we will even communicate with nonhuman beings (think angels), and we will see evil defeated forever. In fa
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Blas Moros added 16d ago
How, then, can we tell if a human being is good or bad? Only if we know our purpose, what human life is for. If you don’t know the answer to that, then you can never determine “good” and “bad” human behavior. If, as in the secular view, we have not been made for a purpose, then it is futile to even try to talk about moral good and evil.
from Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World by Timothy Keller
Blas Moros added 16d ago
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
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Blas Moros added 16d ago
So we need universal values, but we also need something that undermines the natural, powerful human inclination to dominate others. Bauckham believes what we need lies within the pages of the Bible.
from Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World by Timothy Keller
Blas Moros added 16d ago
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.
from Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World by Timothy Keller
Blas Moros added 16d ago
Why should your brain stand in judgment on other brains, cultures, and experiences? To simply choose and elevate one part of real life and call it “good” over another that we call “bad” is an arbitrary act.
from Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World by Timothy Keller
Blas Moros added 16d ago
When economic experts were consulted about this unparalleled situation, the answer was that people no longer have the same confidence that the future will see the same kind of progress we have been used to in the past.14 Our modern belief that the new is usually better is vanishing.
from Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World by Timothy Keller
Blas Moros added 16d ago
The alternative to secular optimism in progress is hope. Real hope, as Lasch defines it, “does not demand a belief in progress” at all. “The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder . . . three names for the same state of heart and mind—asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity.”19 Wh
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Blas Moros added 16d ago