The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe.
Interpretation
Faith and reason can coexist; belief should be based on evidence rather than blind acceptance.
In this quote, William Lane Craig emphasizes that the Christian faith is not intended to disregard rational thinking or historical context. Instead, he suggests that a well-informed and rational individual can engage with their faith confidently, drawing on evidence and logical reasoning rather than making unfounded assumptions or blind leaps into uncertainty.
In practice
During a lecture on the intersection of faith and science, this quote can illustrate the compatibility of rational thought and belief.
Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.
Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith.
No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.
It's no longer enough to teach our children Bible stories; they need doctrine and apologetics.
Scepticism, ironically, draws its life's blood from claims to have a good deal of knowledge. For example, your friends claim to know, 'Since every possible option has not been explored, nothing can be said for certain.' That statement is itself a claim to knowledge!
People who give will never be poor.
It's the end game that people dread and that's what I'm scared of
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
This demand follows from an insight that I was the first to articulate: that there are no moral facts.
My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.
Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs.
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