Rebecca McLaughlin > Quotes

“If Jesus is the Bread of Life, loss of Jesus means starving. If Jesus is the Light of the World, loss of Jesus means darkness. If Jesus is the Good Shepherd, loss of Jesus means wandering alone and lost. If Jesus is the resurrection and the life, loss of Jesus is eternal death. And if Jesus is the Lamb of God, sacrificed for our sins, loss of Jesus means paying that price for ourselves.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“Suffering is not an embarrassment to the Christian faith. It is the thread with which Christ's name is stitched into our lives.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“The further I go on in life, the more convinced I am that every Christian is a struggling Christian, dependent on help from brothers and sisters who know their needs and vulnerabilities. Lungs don’t work without hearts, or legs without feet. We’re simply not designed for solo flight.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“If I want to appreciate the texture of the Scriptures, I need to listen to brothers and sisters who grew up in cultures closer to those of the ancient Near East than my own. Every culture has its blind spots. Diversity helps us all to see.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“At the cross, the most powerful man who ever lived submitted to the most brutal death ever died, to save the powerless. Christianity does not glorify violence. It humiliates it.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“As Nazi-era German theologian and resistance leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. . . . The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother.”15 The”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“Independent of whether you believe in the existence of God . . . you have to be impressed with the man described as Jesus of Nazareth. At the time of Jesus’ life, around 4 B.C. to 30 A.D., child abuse, as noted by one historian, was “the crying vice of the Roman Empire.” Infanticide was common. Abandonment was common.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“...attempting to persuade others to change their beliefs is a sign of respect. You are treating them as thinking agents with the ability to decide what they believe, not just products of their cultural environment.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“The question we must always ask of suffering is this: What could possibly be worth it? Jesus’s flabbergasting claim is that he is.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“Such directness would not fly in most relationships. We are all more governed by our feelings than by our rationality, and emotions run high in debates about beliefs. But disagreement is not evidence of disrespect. Indeed, I debate hardest with the people I respect the most, because I take their ideas seriously. But our society seems to be losing the art of debate within friendships, and we instead surround ourselves with people who think like us.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“Christians invented the university and founded most of the world’s top schools to glorify God. And yet studying is seen as a threat to faith. Christians invented science, yet science is seen as antithetical to Christianity.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“To look at Jesus through the eyes of women may seem at first like an innately modern project. But when it comes to Jesus' death and resurrection, it's precisely what the Gospel authors invite us to do. What we see through their eyes is not an alternative Jesus, but rather the authentic Jesus, who welcomes both men and women as his disciples, and who is best seen from below.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Jesus through the Eyes of Women: How the First Female Disciples Help Us Know and Love the Lord

“Like paleontologists sifting through the dirt, we must excavate what the Bible actually says, while dusting off the cultural dross.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“Violence is the use of power by the strong to hurt the weak. At the cross, the most powerful man who ever lived submitted to the most brutal death ever died, to save the powerless.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“As long as our faith is defined by theory and not connected with practical realities, we shall not be able to fulfil the mission entrusted to us by Christ.” “If we are Christ’s,” Mukwege continues, “we have no choice but to be alongside the weak, the wounded, the refugees and women suffering discrimination.”11”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“Hippocrates, who lived about 400 years before Jesus, often wrote about how physicians should ethically interact with patients. But Hippocrates never mentioned children. That’s because children were property, no different than slaves. But Jesus stood up for children, cared about them, when those around him typically didn’t.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“Modern Western society teaches me to prioritize discovering my authentic self, peeling back the onion layers of my identity and living out of what I find there at all costs. But from a Christian perspective, who I am in relation to God is my authentic self. I find myself not in the depths of my psychology but in the depths of his heart. And when he calls you or me "child," "beloved," "friend," that's who we are, and any other identity--male, female, father, mother, child, friend-- flows out of that.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin

“Luke could've easily cut this scene between Mary and Elizabeth without disrupting the narrative. But he gives space for us to hear prophetic words from both these women--words that have echoed through the centuries--because Mary and Elizabeth are not only the biological mothers of Jesus and John. They also act as prophetesses in their own right. When it comes to women's unique ability to bear children, it's easy to make one of two mistakes: to overvalue childbearing, as if it's the primary reason why women exist, or to undervalue it, as if creating new life doesn't matter. The full-orbed picture Luke gives us of these two pregnant women helps us not to fall into either trap.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Jesus through the Eyes of Women: How the First Female Disciples Help Us Know and Love the Lord

“Science is not designed to give us morals. It can help us build chemical weapons and chemotherapy drugs, but it cannot tell us whether and when to use them. As we saw in the last chapter, science cannot ground the belief that human beings should be valued equally.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“If our commitment to diversity is more than skin deep, we must cultivate deep friendships with smart people with whom we fundamentally disagree.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“While the Bible clearly values the work of raising children that women often undertake, it also greatly values women’s gospel ministry outside the home, and gives us positive examples of women working for pay. The ideal wife described in Proverbs 31 makes money from her work outside the home, and some of the first female Christians held paid jobs.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims

“Like every other element of the Christian worldview, however, the recognition that unborn babies are fully human and therefore infinitely valuable belongs within a much larger story, a story in which the most vulnerable are the most important, a story in which no human being is unwanted, a story in which all of us are sexual sinners and only Jesus has the right to judge, a story in which sacrifice for others is the only path to joy, and a story that ends—for those willing to accept the offer—with a marriage of such beauty and intimacy that it makes the best human marriage seem like a heart emoji compared with a Shakespeare sonnet.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“As Bonhoeffer put it, “Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great sense of disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”47”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“We need to form deep friendships, so that we can fight the battles Jesus calls us to with comrades bu our sides. We need them there to brace us for the onslaught, stoke our joy and celebrate the victories along the way. But we also need our friends, so that when we slump down under the weight of all our frailty and failure, there will be someone there to ask us, "Are you crying?" and we'll have the courage to say, "Yes.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, No Greater Love: A Biblical Vision for Friendship

“Things happen to us... things we can't control and things we don't want. But we are more than what happens to us.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin

“For those who feel alienated from their sex, who feel like they
can’t get warm in their bodies, no matter how many layers they put
on, Jesus offers hope. Not the hope of a differently sexed body, but
the hope of a new reality that no longer feels like labor pains. The
transgender person I met after my talk in England thanked me for
treating these questions with tenderness. But Jesus’s tenderness utterly surpasses ours. It’s the tenderness of the God who likens his love to
that of a nursing mother (Isa. 49:15). We can trust our fragile bodies to
this God, however out of joint with them we feel, because he loves us
with an everlasting love. One day he will wipe away every tear from
our eyes and make our groaning bodies new.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin

“where there would be “nothing to kill or die for.” Staring into the dark night of segregation, Martin Luther King preached an antithetical message: that “there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for. And I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”15”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“American churches often fail to live up to the ideals of biblical diversity, both via lack of integration between black and white Americans and by portraying immigration as an erosion of America’s Christian identity. In fact, the opposite is true: most immigrants to the US are Christians, and the racial demographic that is eroding Christianity in America is white.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“The testimony of women is not just tacked on to the end of the Gospels. It's also woven in.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Jesus through the Eyes of Women: How the First Female Disciples Help Us Know and Love the Lord

“Translated literally, Jesus replies, "I am, the (one) speaking to you" [John 4:26]. This word-for-word translation comes out awkwardly in English, so it's often broken up in our Bibles. But as New Testament scholar Craig Evans observes, Jesus's statement is "emphatic and unusual" in the original Greek as well. Smoothing it out in translation masks the fact that this is the first of Jesus's "I am" statements. ...This is the first time in John that Jesus explicitly declares he's the Messiah. And as he does so, Jesus makes an even more extraordinary claim. Each of Jesus's "I am" statements gives us fresh insight into who he is. At first, his words to the Samaritan woman seem like an exception. But if we look more closely, Jesus is giving us more insight about his identity when he says to the Samaritan woman, "I am, the (one) speaking to you." Jesus claims he's the Messiah and the one true covenant God. But he is also the one who is speaking to this sexually suspect, foreign woman. He could have just said "I am he!" But as we look at Jesus through this woman's eyes, we see him as the long-promised King and everlasting God, who chooses to converse with her.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Jesus through the Eyes of Women: How the First Female Disciples Help Us Know and Love the Lord