"Pure feeling, if such a thing exists, is non-moral. That can be observed in the sphere of human relationships. What makes my affection for a human friend such an ennobling thing is the knowledge that I have of the character and the needs of my friend." (pg. 2)
"It is not a sin to worship the Jesus who is God and man. But it is a sin to manufacture a Jesus who was man only and not God, and then after you have manufactured that purely human Jesus to bow down and worship him." (pg. 25)
"The upshot of what I have been saying is this: when men today say that Christ is God they often do so not because they think high of Christ but because they think desperately low of God." (pg. 26)
"...the gospel of Jesus was also a gospel about Jesus; the gospel that he preached was also a gospel that offered him as Savior. He did not say merely: 'Have faith in God like the faith that I have in God,' but he said: 'Have faith in me.'" (pg. 40)
"If the Jesus of the Gospels were a purely natural and not a supernatural person, then we should have no difficulty in believing that such a person lived in the first century of our era. Even skeptics would have no difficulty in believing it. Defenders of the faith would have an easy victory indeed. Everybody would believe. But then there would be one drawback. It would be this: the thing that everybody would believe would not be worth believing. A purely natural, as distinguished from a supernatural, Christ would be just a teacher and example." (pg. 74ff)
"What those men had from the appearances of the risen Christ was not merely the conviction that Jesus was still alive. No, what they had was the conviction that he had risen. It was not merely the state of Jesus resultant upon the resurrection which was valuable for them, but the act of the resurrection. At the heart of their faith was the conviction that Jesus had done something for them by his death and resurrection. The Christian religion in other words is rooted in an event." (pg. 91)
"The evidence of the truth of Christianity must be taken as a whole. The direct evidence for the resurrection must be taken together with the total picture of Jesus in the Gospels, and then that must be taken in connection with the evidence for the existence of God and the tremendous need of man which is caused by sin. If you take the Bible as a whole you have a grand consistent account of God, of the world, and of human life. If you reject the Bible, and particularly if you reject the fact of the resurrection, you have a jumble of meaningless and detached bits of information that dance before your imagination in a wild and riotous rout." (pg. 100ff)
J. Gresham Machen, The Person of Jesus: Radio Addresses on the Deity of the Savior (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2017)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
