I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.
John Gresham MachenRead
I see with greater and greater clearness that consistent Christianity is the easiest Christianity to defend
Interpretation
Consistent beliefs in Christianity are easier to support and defend than inconsistent ones.
John Gresham Machen emphasizes that a coherent and consistent understanding of Christianity makes it simpler to articulate and defend its teachings. This suggests that clarity in one's beliefs allows for stronger arguments and a more robust faith in discussions about religious principles.
In practice
During a debate on religion, you could use this quote to illustrate the importance of consistent beliefs.
I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.
Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.
What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?
The more we know of God, the more unreservedly we will trust him; the greater our progress in theology, the simpler and more child-like will be our faith
Vastly more important than all questions with regard to methods of preaching is the root question as to what it is that shall be preached.
Christ died"--that is history; "Christ died for our sins"--that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.
Each soul is a star and all stars are set in the infinite azure, the eternal sky-the Lord.
Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.
The most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendents not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships, or being patronised by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it.
Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.
No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do.
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