Thaddeus Williams > Quotes

“All injustice is a violation of the first commandment.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Idolatry happens when we make some good thing an ultimate thing, in which case it becomes a destructive thing. Given our tendency to make good things into ultimate things, it would be naive to think idolatry can’t creep into our justice pursuits.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Christians should be known less as culture warriors and more as Good Samaritans who stop for battered neighbors, whether they are black, white, brown, male, female, gay, straight, rich, poor, old, young, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, capitalist, socialist, Republican, Democrat, near, far, tall, short, or smaller than a peanut.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Social Justice B advocates find free markets repulsive because they lead to different outcomes for different people. Because different people with different priorities making different decisions experience different outcomes, any system that maximizes people’s freedoms to be their different selves will end up with different outcomes. If we believe that different outcomes are a priori evidence of injustice, then freedom itself is unjust.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Does our vision of social justice take any group-identity more seriously than our identities “in Adam” and “in Christ”? Does it buy into divisive propaganda? Does it replace love, peace, and patience with suspicion, division, and rage?”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Black lives matter. It’s true. From a Christian worldview perspective, we can plumb even deeper than a three-word catchphrase or hashtag. Black lives don’t merely matter; every black life was fearfully and wonderfully made by God himself. Every black life bears the divine image. Black lives are worth enough for the Creator to take on flesh and endure torture, execution, and infinite wrath.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“The Bible is clear that discrimination exists and that Christians must resist it. Sinful discrimination indeed causes some disparities. But the Bible never goes to the extreme that we find in the thinking of Ibram X. Kendi. In his award-winning bestseller Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi argues that “racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“How do you think preaching the gospel to ourselves every day— reminding ourselves of the amazing grace God extended to us when we were hostile to him—could impact our approach to social justice? How might excluding the good news of God’s forgiveness from our daily thought lives and emotions pollute our passion for social justice?”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Truly fulfilled and thriving people don’t look within for answers. They find their joy in God’s law and meditate on it often. The Hebrew for “meditates” here has nothing to do with sitting in lotus position, thumbs to index fingers, and chanting “omm.” This is not the mind-emptying meditation of the East, but the mind-filling exercise of the ancient Jews. The root word means to mutter to oneself, chew like a cow chews its cud, and ponder what God says is true until his thoughts become our thoughts.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Don't Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship

“We can no more separate truth from justice than we can subtract one side from a triangle and still consider it a triangle.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“[One bad idea] inspired the lynching trees of America, the smokestacks of Auschwitz, the gulags of Siberia, killing fields of Khmer Rouge, and the butchery of those in Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, and more. Given its bloody track record you would think that this idea would be universally rejected but it is staging a massive comeback in the 21st century, rebranding itself as “justice.” What is this bad idea?
Tribalism is the idea that we should divide people into group identities then assign undesirable or evil trait to that group and such a way that we don't see the unique image-bearers of God before us.”
― Thaddeus J. Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“When faced with doing some action, A—reading the next sentence—or not-A—refraining from reading on—you have the power to do either. Though you have apparently chosen A (for which I am grateful), you could have chosen not-A. Who or what determined your choice? Neither forces outside you (e.g., physical laws, other people, God) nor forces inside you (e.g., reasons, desires, character) are determinative. You, the choosing agent, and you alone determine which way to go (and if to go at all). It is the exercise of this self-moving, two-way power that makes good choices rewardable and bad choices punishable.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“For the head, how do we understand God’s supreme goodness and power in the many faces of evil? For the heart, how do we foster relational trust in God’s supreme goodness and power in the many faces of evil?”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“Evidencing the magnitude of the problem of evil is Barry Whitney’s published bibliography entitled Theodicy, which cites over 4,200 philosophical and theological works on the topic in the three-decade span between 1960 and 1990.3”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“Because reality is so massively important, Christianity has a long history of taking words and the definitions of words extremely seriously. We could fill libraries with Christian works arguing about the definitions of words like homoousia and homoiousia (same nature vs. similar nature), justification, free will, kingdom, and many other words. Is this because Christians throughout history have been word sticklers and dictionary snobs? No. It is because Christianity is a religion of truth. Since words have tremendous power to illuminate or obfuscate truth, definitions should be a big deal for Christians.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Libertarian free will, although it may be abused to actualize moral evil, is essential to the humanness of humanity, namely, our capacity for moral goodness.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“For a better approach to the Relational Free Will Defense, it is helpful to clarify its logical flow: RFD1: For any agent, A, to express authentic love for some other agent, B, it must be possible for A to refrain from loving B through an exercise of libertarian power. RFD2: God does not desire a relationally void world but a world in which agents can express authentic love for Himself and for each other. RFD3: Therefore, God created agents with libertarian power, making it possible for them to love both Himself and each other or to refrain from doing so. RFD4: Agents use their libertarian power to refrain from loving God and each other, thereby rendering themselves solely to blame for the actualization of moral evil.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, | am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.? - C.S. Lewis, Forgiveness, cp7 , Mere Christianity,”
― Thaddeus J. Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Martin Luther wrote in Bondage of the Will, the work he considered the most important of all his theological writings, “this false idea of ‘free will’ is a real threat to salvation, and a delusion fraught with the most perilous dangers.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“Like eyeballs in a healthy body, bodies in a beautiful marriage, members in a good family, or families in a thriving community, we become most truly ourselves only when we give ourselves to something other than ourselves”
― Thaddeus J. Williams, REFLECT: Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the Greatest Person in History

“In the words of Simone Weil, If God did not grant us the ability to sin and cause affliction to him and to one another, we would not have the kind of free and autonomous existence necessary to enter into a relation of love with God and with one another.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“Follow your heart” is actually a call to be slavishly devoted to the ideologies of others.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Libertarian free will allows blame to affix on those creatures who make evil actual, without ascending the ladder of causation up to the Creator, who merely makes evil possible.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“A survey conducted by the Barna Research Group revealed that the number one question posed about God by a cross section of American adults is, “Why is there so much pain and suffering in the world?”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“CLAIM 3—The Relational Dimension: Libertarian free will, although it opens the door of possibility to moral evil, is a necessary condition for the existence and expression of true love.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“According to Gordon Clark, From pagan antiquity, through the middle ages, on down into modern times, free will has doubtless been the most popular solution offered to the problem of evil.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“Each of us has a machine like that deep in our consciousness, an apparatus of fundamental convictions that signals what constitutes justice versus what we should get mad about. Philosophers call it our worldview. A worldview is not what we might say we believe in a street survey or online quiz. It’s what we truly believe and act from in our core about who we are, where we came from, and where humanity is headed.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Indeed, there is a deep resemblance between the notion of free will espoused by ancient Greek philosophers and the libertarian free will forwarded in today’s theological circles.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“The claim that love requires libertarian freedom has become a guiding axiom within open theism, process theology, Molinism, and many other contemporary theological paradigms.”
― Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

“But what happens if we leave God out of the picture? Does our need for the not guilty sentence magically disappear? No. The need to feel justified is irrepressibly human.17”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice