Matt Bennett » God

Matt — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:24:44 +0000

If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, Heis also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger – according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.

- C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity

Matt — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:56:20 +0000

I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a greeat moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic…or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

- C.S. Lewis

Matt — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:25:42 +0000

Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.

- Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician, (1623-1662)

Matt — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:18:42 +0000

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son – it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

- C. S. Lewis

Can't Trust Those Genes

Matt — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:45:09 +0000

Skeptics who argue that belief in God (indeed, God’s very existence) is nothing more than a genetic artifact of our evolutionary development, may be a little unsettled to hear what John Cleese has learned about such notions.