How Do We Explain the Incarnation?

The Incarnation: The doctrine that the second person of the Trinity assumed human form in the person of Jesus Christ and is completely both God and man.
– https://www.dictionary.com/browse/incarnation

If the thing happened, it was the central event in the history of the Earth–the very thing that the whole story has been about.
– C. S. Lewis

The most astounding thing God has ever done to show His existence to us is when He passed through the veil between heaven and earth and came to live among us as a man.
– Sue Bohlin

The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the Incarnation.
– J. I. Packer‏

The incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

On earth a baby was born, a king got wind of it, a chase ensued. In heaven the Great Invasion had begun, a daring raid by the ruler of the forces of good into the universe’s seat of evil.
– Philip Yancey

No worldly mind would ever have suspected that . . . Omnipotence would be wrapped in swaddling clothes; that Salvation would lie in a manger… no one would ever have suspected that God coming to this earth would ever be so helpless. And that is precisely why so many miss Him. Divinity is always where one least expects to find it.
– Fulton J. Sheen

Don’t try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. It is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine
– Madeleine L’Engle

The staggering truth must be accepted afresh–that in this vast, mysterious Universe, of which we are an almost infinitesimal part, the great Mystery, Whom we call God, has visited our planet in Person.
– J. B. Phillips

The incarnation is proof that God is not against us.
– Martin Luther

If the incarnation tells us anything, it’s that God can’t be kept out. 
– Rachel Held Evans

This is cosmic news—the Good News, that will make every planet, every cell, every thing dance with joy at the wonder of it. Of all the things that have happened, or could happen this is the thing . . . the Central Cosmic Fact: God appeared on a little planet to take us by the hand and put us back on the Way. This is news—Good News—comparatively speaking, the only Good News that every reached our planet.
– E. Stanley Jones

When we did not want God, God wanted us. When we would not come to God, he came to us. When we resisted him, he plotted to win us. When we could not cross the chasm that separates creation from deity, God decided to cross it and become one of us. He would not give up his deity, rather, he would unite divinity and humanity in a single person so that God and humans would really meet and become one.
– Dennis F. Kinlaw

The incarnation is God’s own act of identification with the broken, the poor, with sinful humanity.
– Thomas C. Oden

The Maker of heaven and earth in His overflowing love will not be without us. He’s freely come to us in Jesus.
– T. F. Torrance

If, so to say, the Idea of the Good has actually entered the room and spoken, we have to stop our former discussion and listen.
– Lesslie Newbigin

How Do We Explain Equality?

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
– Aristotle

All this talk about equality.
The only thing people really have in common
is that they are all going to die.
― Bob Dylan

Inequality is built into life. This might be neither good nor fair, but one thing is certain: it cannot justly be blamed on capitalism, patriarchy or the west.
– Jordan B. Peterson

We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.
– James D. Watson

The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority.
– C. S. Lewis

Equality is a lie concocted by inferior people who arrange themselves in herds to overpower those who are naturally superior to them. The morality of “equal rights” is herd morality, and because it opposes the cultivation of superior individuals, it leads to the corruption of the human species.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies: “Nobody is going to occupy a higher place than I.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville

Liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty – for how else could it be attained?
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal, and if they are equal, they are not free.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Economic equality is essentially a marxist idea, and marxism seeks to achieve this goal through the elimination of private property.
– Otto Lobback

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
– Barry Goldwater

Human society, as established by God, is composed of unequal elements; to make them all equal is impossible, and would mean the destruction of human society itself.
– Pope Leo XIII

How Do We Explain Meaning?

Man is simply a being in search of meaning.
– Plato

Deeply ensconced in the marrow of our bones is the aspiration for significance.
– R. C. Sproul

We’re a species that needs and wants to understand who we are and what life means. Sheep lice don’t share this, which is why they write so little.
– Anne Lamott

Clinics are crowded with people suffering from a new kind of neurosis, a sense of total and ultimate meaninglessness of life.
– Viktor Frankl

Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.
– Bertrand Russell

No finite point has meaning without an infinite point of reference.
– Jean-Paul Satre

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
– C. S. Lewis

Even when we believe with all our minds that life is meaningless, we simply can’t live that way. We know better. We know God is there.
– Tim Keller

The issues of life are before me, I must vote for or against a view of life which has worth, purpose, goal. If I vote that the universe has no meaning, then I vote that my own life has none. But if my life has no meaning and hence no purpose, it will go to pieces, for psychology tells us that without a strong controlling purpose, which co-ordinates life, the personality disintegrates through its own inner clashes no purpose, no personality. But that purpose must be high enough to lift me out of myself. If my purposes end with myself, again I disintegrate. They must include God, who gives basis and lasting meaning to my purpose. If I lose God, I lose myself, my universe, everything. I see that Voltaire was right when he said, “If there is no God, we will have to invent one to keep sane.”
– E. Stanley Jones

How Do We Explain Beauty?

by Ken Samples

Beauty fits better in a world with God than in a world without God… The secular worldview of naturalism says that God does not exist and that life in this world is the product of mindless, unguided natural evolutionary processes. But according to naturalism, evolution runs exclusively on the track of survivability. So how does the mechanism of naturalistic evolution driven by survivability produce artistic beauty when aesthetics doesn’t seem to contribute to survivability? Put another way, why so much beauty and creatures that can appreciate beauty when beauty doesn’t contribute to human survival? This is known as the problem of nonutilitarian or nonuseful values: beauty does not seem to be survival-conducive.

In evaluating this argument, consider the words of Christian philosopher William C. Davis: “If everything (including humanity) is the result of random, impersonal forces which encouraged only survival, then it seems highly unlikely that the process would yield organisms (humans) which recognized values like these [artistic beauty] which aren’t survival-conducive… But values like these [artistic beauty] are what we would expect if humans (and the human environment) were created by a personal, loving, and beauty-valuing God. God’s existence is a much better explanation for the existence of nonutilitarian value than any explanation without God.” [Reason for the Hope Within]

To read the rest of this article go to:
https://reflectionsbyken.wordpress.com/2019/11/19/god-as-the-best-explanation-of-beauty/

Einstein And The Cardinal

The German mathematician Professor Hans Rohrbach tells of the following conversation between Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, and Professor Albert Einstein.

“I respect religion, but believe in mathematics;” said Einstein, “doubtless for your Eminence the reverse is true.”

“You are mistaken;” replied Faulhaber, “religion and mathematics are for me only different ways of expressing the same Divine exactness.”

Einstein was astonished. “But what if one day mathematical research should show that certain verdicts of science contradict those of religion?”

“I have such a high regard for mathematics,” replied Faulhaber, “that in such a case you, Professor, would be under the obligation to never stop looking for the error in calculation.”

…Experience shows that faith in God’s Word has nothing at all to fear from serious thought. It would be useless to reject faith for the sake of natural science, or to abandon thought for the sake of faith. Faith does not need to prune the assertions of science nor does science need to blend the confessions of faith into shape. A sacrifice of one’s reason is not demanded. On the contrary, it is just the Bible which sees both together: creation and Creator, nature and revelation, the visible and the invisible…

It is necessary to look at both together and to see the harmony of both Divine revelations, the book of nature and the book of the written word.

– Eric Sauer,
The King of the Earth

Everything Is A Nail

Just as to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail,
so in the age of science and technology, everything is
a scientific and technical matter to be solved by
scientific and technical means.

― Os Guinness,
Fool’s Talk

Reason, Reality & Faith

Reason itself is a matter of faith.
It is an act of faith to assert that
our thoughts have any relation
to reality at all.

– G. K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy

It’s All in the Genes

Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they’re not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we’re simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it’s rather awful to be the answer to someone else’s question, especially when that thing is not a person at all. Nevertheless, people swallow that.

― Roger Scruton,
The Soul of the World

The Most Fascinating Feature

That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of life, character, and teaching of Christ remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.

–Will Durant,
The Story of Civilization

The Miracle of Restraint

The more I get to know Jesus, the more impressed am by what Ivan Karamazov called “the miracle of restraint.” The miracles . . . the signs and wonders the Pharisees demanded, the final proofs I yearn for—these would offer no serious obstacle to an omnipotent God. More amazing is his refusal to perform and to overwhelm. God’s terrible insistence on human freedom is so absolute that he granted us the power to live as though he did not exist, to spit in his face, to crucify him . . .

I believe God insists on such restraint because no pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence will achieve the response he desires. Although power can force obedience, only love can summon a response of love, which is the one thing God wants from us and the reason he created us. “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself,” Jesus said. In case we miss the point John adds, “He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.” God’s nature is self-giving; he bases his appeal on his sacrificial love . . .

Why does God content himself with the slow, unencouraging way of making righteousness grow rather than avenging it? That’s how love is. Love has its own power, the only power ultimately capable of conquering the human heart.

–Philip Yancey,
The Jesus I Never Knew