Christian Apologetics Quotes

“Why do you want a letter from me? Why don't you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don't you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular 'experts' who have picked it up as inaccurately as you? Why don't you learn the facts in this field as honestly as your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook on church history will tell you where they came from?
Why do you balk at the doctrine of the Trinity - God the three in One - yet meekly acquiesce when Einstein tells you E=mc2? What makes you suppose that the expression "God ordains" is narrow and bigoted, while your own expression, "Science demands" is taken as an objective statement of fact?
You would be ashamed to know as little about internal combustion as you know about Christian beliefs.
I admit, you can practice Christianity without knowing much theology, just as you can drive a car without knowing much about internal combustion. But when something breaks down in the car, you go humbly to the man who understands the works; whereas if something goes wrong with religion, you merely throw the works away and tell the theologian he is a liar.
Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I'm giving you personal opinions or Christian doctrines. Don't bother. Go away and do some work and let me get on with mine.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers

“There are no known non-biblical references to a historical Jesus by any historian or other writer of the time during and shortly after Jesus's purported advent. As Barbara G. Walker says, 'No literate person of his own time mentioned him in any known writing.' Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (20 BCE-50 CE)—alive at the purported time of Jesus, and one of the wealthiest and best connected citizens of the Empire—makes no mention of Christ, Christians or Christianity in his voluminous writings. Nor do any of the dozens of other historians and writers who flourished during the first one to two centuries of the common era.”
― D.M. Murdock, The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ

“For centuries after obtaining power during the reign of Constantine, Christians went on a censorship rampage that led to the virtual illiteracy of the ancient Western world and ensured that their secret would be hidden from the masses. The scholars of other schools/sects evidently did not easily give up their arguments against the historicizing of a very ancient mythological creature. We have lost the exact arguments of these learned dissenters because Christians destroyed any traces of their works. Nonetheless, the Christians preserved the contentions of their detractors through their own refutations.

For example, early Church Father Tertullian (c. 160-220 CE), an 'ex-Pagan' and a presbyter at Carthage, ironically admitted the true origins of the Christ story and other such myths by stating in refutation of his critics, 'You say we worship the sun; so do you. Interestingly, a previously strident believer and defender of the faith, Tertullian later renounced orthodox Christianity after becoming a Montanist.”
― D.M. Murdock, The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ

“For many people, apologetics is one of the biggest things that God has used to strengthen their faith and help them grow in their relationship with Him. Learning about the various ways that science, history, and philosophy cohere with God and how apparent conflicts can be resolved is exciting and edifying. Like Jacob struggling with God and refusing to let go until God blessed him, apologetics allows us to struggle with God over the deep philosophical and theological questions of our time. There’s a blessing for us in that struggle!”
― David Wilber

“The primary audience for Christian Apologetics should be other Christians. The bulk of Christians in the world have not deeply, critically considered their reasons for believing with the result that they tend to hold a number of ungrounded and often damaging beliefs, and they are not able to defend what beliefs they hold.”
― Joel Furches

“...it is incumbent upon the Christian to be willing to listen as well as to talk. If the Christian wants to share their worldview and reasoning with others, they should be willing to pay others the same courtesy.”
― Joel Furches

“Atheism will appeal to psychology and sociology to explain human behavior, which is legitimate, but what explains human psychology? Atheism can only find explanatory power in evolution such that the mind is - paradoxically - a mindless organ that is forced to act according to its chemistry and cannot act otherwise.
The fact that humans are capable of recognizing depravity in others, are offended by it, seek to reform it, feel guilt, and are capable of redemptive behavior all speak against this explanation.
The fact that humans are capable of meta-cognition - thinking about thinking - and are therefore able to postulate their own mindlessness is counter-intuitive to say the least.”
― Joel Furches, Christ-Centered Apologetics: Sharing the Gospel with Evidence

“Once again, it is difficult to start from the premise of mindless evolution and end with the idea that humans are anything more than organisms bent on preserving and passing on their DNA. The fact that humans not only pursue art, philosophy, and science, but also exult in those things more than reproduction cannot easily be explained through materialism.”
― Joel Furches, Christ-Centered Apologetics: Sharing the Gospel with Evidence

“There are at least three types of people who say the Christian Bible is inaccurate or corrupt:

1. Those who never read
2. Who never understood
3. Those who accept others' views of the scriptures as if it was their conclusions”
― Brother Pedro

“Among the favorite arguments of the irreligious, one that they almost invariably advance in their opening offensive in their attacks on faith is this: that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily ABOUT religion. By saying this the irreligious hope to establish that religion is of itself the cause of conflict. This is a crude factual misunderstanding. Some conflicts fought in the name of religion are specifically religious. Many others are not, or cannot be so simply classified. The only general lesson that can be drawn from these differing wars is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power or wealth or land.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“Science is entirely dependent on constants. Anything that is not constant (natural disasters, poor construction, or other human factors) is nearly impossible to include in equations such as those used in archaeology and for dating the Earth.”
― Stephen and Tiffany Domena

“When I look at the night sky, I'm overwhelmed by the enormity of the universe. But this doesn't make me question my significance in God's eyes, no. Instead, it makes me drop to my knees in awe of God. If God created all of this, how powerful must He be to be able to manage and sustain all of it? God has to have enormous power to manage the entire cosmos. How mighty must He be to hold this massive universe in the palm of His hand?”
― Evan Minton, Inference To The One True God: Why I Believe In Jesus Instead Of Other Gods

“You see, faith means the same thing as the word “trust”, or as I often like to say; “Faith is when someone is holding you over a ledge and you know in your heart that not only will they not let you fall, they’ll pull you up to safety”. You know that the person holding onto you exists. You have very powerful evidence that that person exists, but you still have faith in them. This is the real definition of the word “faith”.”
― Evan Minton, Inference To The One True God: Why I Believe In Jesus Instead Of Other Gods

“The significance of establishing those two facts (1) that Jesus claimed to be God and (2) that He rose from the dead is this; if Jesus said that he was God but he wasn’t, then he was either a lying heretic or else he was crazy. If that were the case, there’s no way God The Father would resurrect Jesus from the dead knowing that doing so would vindicate his blasphemous claims and lead many people astray. God would never raise a heretic and a blasphemer, but if God did raise Jesus from the dead, then God implicitly put his stamp of approval on everything Jesus said and did. If Jesus rose from the dead, then that means God The Father agreed with Jesus’ claims for which his enemies killed him as a blasphemer. If God The Father raised Jesus from the dead then that means He agrees with Jesus’ claims to be divine. If that’s the case, then whatever Jesus teaches carries a lot of weight.”
― Evan Minton, Inference To The One True God: Why I Believe In Jesus Instead Of Other Gods

“The Kalam Cosmological Argument, The Fine-Tuning Argument, and The Local Fine-Tuning Argument all do an end-run around the issue of special creation verses evolution. These evidences establish the existence of a Creator of the universe. Thanks to The Kalam Cosmological Argument and the two Fine-Tuning Arguments, the atheist’s goose is cooked before we even get to the issue of the origin of life much less the adequacy of random mutations and natural selection to produce new species of animals! .... I can give the atheist evolution for free. He still has to deal with all of the arguments in this book.”
― Evan Minton, Inference To The One True God: Why I Believe In Jesus Instead Of Other Gods

“God is not intimidated by such hard and testing questions, nor is he unable to answer them. But we must come with the right kind of skepticism—not the kind that refuses to believe anything at all, but the kind that is committed to believe only what is really true.”
― Philip Graham Ryken, King Solomon: The Temptations of Money, Sex, and Power

“You cannot say that the Bible is outdated because this book talks about things to come and eternity.”
― Brother Pedro

“Without a belief in God and the soul, where is the oath? Without the oath, where is the obligation or the pressure to fulfill it? Where is the law that even kings must obey? Where is the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, or The bill of Rights? (All of which arose out of attempts to rule by lawless tyranny.) Where is the lifelong fidelity of husband and wife? Where is the safety of the innocent child growing in the womb? Where, in the end, is the safety for any of us from those currently bigger and stronger than we are? And how striking it is that such oaths we use to make us better, not worse.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“Now if the teaching of Moses is inspired and Deuteronomy 13 and 18 tell you that future revelations must be judged according to previous revelation, and if the alleged future revelation of the Quran conflicts with the previous revelation of Moses, who has to go?
By their own logic who has to go? The Qur'an has to go. Those who advocate the worldview of the Qur'an are not able to live according to their own worldview, there's this inconsistency”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“the argument is, if God is all-good and God is all-powerful how could any of these things happen, there's an inconsistency in your Christian worldview. The intellectual answer is there is no logical inconsistency because not only do we believe God is all-good and all-powerful, we also believe there's a morally sufficient reason for everything God does.
That's one of our presuppositions, as Abraham said, shall not the Judge of all the earth do right [Genesis 18:25]. We believe that everything God does He does well for a good reason, that He is wiser than us, and even when things look tragic we know that God will bring good and His glory out of tragedy”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“The Lord said to Job: Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct Him? Let him who argues with God answer Him!… Would you condemn Me to justify yourself?" (Job 40:1-2, 8). God is not in the dock; we are. His word and character are not questionable; ours are.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“The task of the apologist is not simply to show that there is no hope of eternal salvation outside of Christ, but also that the unbeliever has no present intellectual hope outside of Christ. It is foolish for him to build his house on the ruinous sands of human opinion, instead of the verbal rock of Christ (Matt. 7:24-27). He needs to see that those who suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness inescapably "become vain in their reasoning… Professing themselves to be wise, they become fools" (Rom. 1:21-22). Their opposition to the faith amounts to no more than a "knowledge falsely so called" (1 Tim. 6:20-21), by which they actually "oppose themselves" in ignorance (2 Tim. 2:23, 25).”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“The unbeliever attempts to enlist logic, science, and morality in his debate against the truth of Christianity. Van Til's apologetic answers these attempts by arguing that only the truth of Christianity can rescue the meaningfulness and cogency of logic, science, and morality.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“Christian apologetics is a defense of religious faith, thus pertaining to the question of one's ultimate commitment in life. Apologetics entails intellectual reasoning in justification of one's beliefs, thus touching on the epistemological question of the final standard of knowledge.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“Therefore, the authority of Christ and His word, rather than intellectual autonomy, must govern the starting point and method of his apologetics, as well as its conclusion. He challenges the philosophical adequacy of the unbeliever's worldview, showing how it does not provide the preconditions for the intelligibility of knowledge and morality. His case for Christianity, then, argues from the impossibility of the contrary. From beginning to end, both in his own philosophical method and in what he aims to bring about in the unbeliever's thinking, the Christian apologist reasons in such a way "that in all things Christ might have the preeminence" (Col. 1:18).”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“In the nature of the case, God is the final authority. But if God's authority must be authorized or validated by the authority of human reasoning and assessment, then human thinking is more authoritative than God Himself — in which case God would not have final authority, and indeed would no longer be God. The autonomous man who insists that God can only be accepted if His word first gains the approval or agreement of man has determined in advance that God will never be acknowledged as God (the final authority).”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“The "greatest" commandment teaches us to love the Lord our God with all our minds, too (Matt. 22:37) – to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5).”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“The believer and the unbeliever recognize two different final standards for living including that aspect of living known as thinking, reasoning, and arguing. They are divided by their ultimate commitments, either to Christ or to some other authority (usually themselves).”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“A person cannot have it both ways regarding his final standard or ultimate reference point. He presupposes and reasons either according to the authority of God or according to some other authority. Attempting to be neutral about God's ultimate authority in determining what we know is a result of a bad attitude toward God's ultimate authority. It is a way of saying that one does not really need the work of Christ to save him in his reasoning.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“Apologetics involves a conflict over ultimate authorities — that is, a conflict over our presuppositions or final standard. What should be the source of a person's presuppositions? For the unbeliever, it will be some authority for reasoning other than the word of God, while for the believer it is God's revelation.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis