The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

faith-journeys are never simply intellectual exercises.

A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.

Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide grounds for your beliefs to sceptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive.

Many see both sides in the ‘culture war’ making individual freedom and personal happiness the ultimate value rather than God and the common good.

one of the main barriers to world peace is religion, and especially the major traditional religions with their exclusive claims to superiority.

How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?

The biblical doctrine of universal sinfulness also leads Christians to expect believers will be

worse in practice than their orthodox beliefs should make them. So there will be plenty of ground for respectful co-operation.

God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Saviour.

Therefore, though Christianity does not provide the reason for each experience of pain, it provides deep resources for actually facing suffering with hope and courage rather than bitterness and despair.

Experimentation, risk and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities.

To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must give up your personal autonomy.

Freedom, then, is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.

Once you realise how Jesus changed for you and gave himself for you, you aren’t afraid of giving up your freedom and therefore finding your freedom in

‘The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.’

What strikes us as overly fanatical is actually a failure to be fully committed to Christ and his gospel.

Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others.

he can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power.

Instead of trying to shape our desires to fit reality, we now seek to control and shape reality to fit our desires. The ancients looked at an anxious person and prescribed spiritual character change. Modernity talks instead about stress-management techniques.

In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity.