J.P. Moreland > Quotes

“God maintains a delicate balance between keeping his existence sufficiently evident so people will know he's there and yet hiding his presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore him can do it. This way, their choice of destiny is really free.”
― J.P. Moreland

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland

“...many atheists embrace Jesus as having been a great teacher, and yet he's the one who had the most to say about hell.”
― J.P. Moreland

“Anti-intellectualism has spawned an irrelevant gospel. Today, we share the gospel primarily as a means of addressing felt needs.”
― J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, Lost Virtue of Happiness: Discovering the Disciplines of the Good Life

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul

“The proper thing to do is to admit that hell is real and to allow our feelings of discomfort to motivate us to action.”
― J.P. Moreland

“No one will go to hell simply because all they needed was a little more time and they died prematurely.”
― J.P. Moreland

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland

“I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found. Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere? Why do I keep leaving home where I am called a child of God, the Beloved of the Father? ”9”
― J.P. Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul

“...this life is the incubation period!”
― J.P. Moreland

“...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.”
― J.P. Moreland

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview

“Kristin Neff wisely observes, “When we’re in touch with our common humanity, we remember that feelings of inadequacy and disappointment are shared by all. This is what distinguishes self-compassion from self-pity. Whereas self-pity says ‘poor me,’ self-compassion remembers that everyone suffers, and it offers comfort because everyone is human. The pain I feel in difficult times is the same pain that you feel in difficult times.”4”
― J.P. Moreland, Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Peace

“...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.”
― J.P. Moreland

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul

“The right approach to life is one that hungers to know as many truths as one can and to avoid as many falsehoods as possible.”
― J.P. Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland

“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.”
― J. P. Moreland

“Douglas Moo notes that therefore, while not denying that some in the church may have the gift of healing, James encourages all Christians, and especially those charged with pastoral oversight, to be active in prayer for healing. . . . Similarly, James’ promise that the Lord will raise up (egeiro) the sick person reflects the language of NT healing stories (Matt 9:6; Mark 1:31; Acts 3:7).”
― J.P. Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God

“Our current Western cultural plausibility structure elevates science and scorns and mocks religion, especially Christian teaching. As a result, believers in Western cultures do not as readily believe the supernatural worldview of the Bible in comparison with their Third World brothers and sisters.”
― J.P. Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God

“I fear that our inaccurate emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture has become an easy shortcut to the hard work of building a personal library of study tools and using them.”
― J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul

“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.”
― J.P. Moreland, Lost Virtue of Happiness: Discovering the Disciplines of the Good Life