Top 60 Alister E. McGrath Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Within each of us exists the image of God, however disfigured and corrupted by sin it may presently be. God is able to recover this image through grace as we are conformed to Christ.”

— Alister E. McGrath

2. “Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.”

— Alister E. McGrath

3. “The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt.”

— Alister E. McGrath

4. “We live in a world of competing narratives. In the end, we have to decide for ourselves which is right. And having made that decision, we then need to inhabit the story we trust.”

— Alister E. McGrath

5. “The Christian faith allows us to see further and deeper, to appreciate that nature is studded with signs, radiant with reminders, and emblazoned with symbols of God, our creator and redeemer.”

— Alister E. McGrath

6. “If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason.”

— Alister E. McGrath

7. “A failure to understand something does not mean it is irrational. It may simply mean that it lies on the far side of our limited abilities to take things in and make complete sense of them.”

— Alister E. McGrath

8. “Our desires cannot be, and were never meant to be, satisfied by earthly pleasures alone.”

— Alister E. McGrath

9. “The most radical question which anyone can be asked is not how much their possessions cost, but whether they have found something of value – that is, something that makes living worthwhile.”

— Alister E. McGrath

10. “To reenchant nature is not merely to gain a new perspective for its integrity and well-being; it is to throw open the doors to a deeper level of existence.”

— Alister E. McGrath

11. “Hope is a settled state of mind, in which we see the world in its true light, and look forward to our final homecoming in heaven.”

— Alister E. McGrath

12. “Surely the better way is to pursue a generous orthodoxy, seeing disagreements in the context of the greater agreements which bind us together.”

— Alister E. McGrath

13. “If there is no ultimate reality, it’s pointless to think about how we might get there.”

— Alister E. McGrath

14. “Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, is thus the fulfilment of all previous mythological religions. Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself.”

— Alister E. McGrath

15. “We live on earth; our homeland is in heaven.”

— Alister E. McGrath

16. “Suffering does not call into question the “big picture” of the Christian faith. It reminds us that we do not see the whole picture, and are thus unable to fit all of the pieces neatly into place.”

— Alister E. McGrath

17. “New ideas can be supremely bad ideas, and by the time people realize how bad they are, it is sometimes difficult to get rid of them.”

— Alister E. McGrath

18. “Hope is rooted in the trustworthiness of God.”

— Alister E. McGrath

19. “Take Lewis’s “argument from desire.” He basically argues that we experience desires that no experience in this world seems able to satisfy. And when we see these experiences through the lens of the Christian faith, we realise that this sort of experience is exactly what we would expect if Christianity is true.”

— Alister E. McGrath

20. “One of the great themes of the Christian Bible is that, whenever God asks us to do something for him, he gives us the gifts we need to do it. Knowing us for what we are, he equips us for what he wants us to do.”

— Alister E. McGrath

21. “Erasmus produced a new Latin translation of the New Testament in 1516, based on the original Greek texts.”

— Alister E. McGrath

22. “Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.”

— Alister E. McGrath

23. “The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.”

— Alister E. McGrath

24. “Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.”

— Alister E. McGrath

25. “Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief.”

— Alister E. McGrath

26. “For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys “fundamental things” – in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. Myths.”

— Alister E. McGrath

27. “The idea of ‘calling’ was fundamentally redefined: no longer was it about being called to serve God by leaving the world; it was now about serving God in the world.”

— Alister E. McGrath

28. “The hallmark of intelligence is not whether one believes in God or not, but the quality of the processes that underlie one’s beliefs.”

— Alister E. McGrath

29. “Good does not triumph unless good people rise to the challenges around them.”

— Alister E. McGrath

30. “Tyndale was strangled in October 1536, and his dead body then burned at the stake. Tyndale’s fate is an important reminder that biblical translation was more than just a scholarly challenge in the early sixteenth century – it was, in Tyndale’s case, illegal, dangerous, and ultimately fatal.”

— Alister E. McGrath

31. “Hebrew idiom that the translators interpreted literally and so failed to appreciate the general drift of the text. The idiom “to rise up early to do something” actually means “to do something continually.” Hence the second of the quotations just noted has the following meaning: “They did not listen to my words which I sent unto them by my servants the prophets; even though I sent them continually they still would not listen to them.”

— Alister E. McGrath

32. “The state is concerned with the promotion of outward righteousness arising from the individual being constrained to keep the law. The Gospel alters human nature, whereas the state merely restrains human greed and evil, having no positive power to alter human motivation.”

— Alister E. McGrath

33. “Christianity israrely understood by those outside its bounds. In fact, this is probably one of the greatest tasks confronting the apologist–to rescue Christianity from misunderstandings.”

— Alister E. McGrath

34. “The true believer is not someone who disengages from this world in order to focus on heaven, but rather the one who tries to make this world more like heaven.”

— Alister E. McGrath

35. “No Marginal Notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek Words, which cannot without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the Text.”

— Alister E. McGrath

36. “Acts 24:24 in 1611 referred to Drusilla, the wife of the Roman governor Felix, as a Jew; in 1629, this was altered to “Jewess.” The original translation of Mark 10:18 read thus: “there is no man good, but one, that is, God.” This could be misunderstood as implying that God was a human being. A small alteration was introduced in 1638, avoiding this implication: the text now read “there is none good but one, that is, God.”

— Alister E. McGrath

37. “Manz, formerly one of Zwingli’s closest allies, held that there was no biblical warrant for infant baptism. Refusing to recant his views, he was tied up and drowned in the River Limmat.”

— Alister E. McGrath

38. “Erasmus had to work on the basis of the criterion of accessibility. As far as we can ascertain, none of the half dozen manuscripts were earlier than the tenth century.”

— Alister E. McGrath

39. “The English experience suggested that nobody really doubted the existence of God until theologians tried to prove it.”

— Alister E. McGrath

40. “One of the best introductions to the history and ideas of Calvinism, packed with insight and wisdom.”

— Alister E. McGrath

41. “Clergy had a vested interest in retaining the old, ways, which made few demands of them as teachers, as spiritual guides, or as moral examples or agents.”

— Alister E. McGrath

42. “Puzzles lead to logical answers; mysteries often force us to stretch language to its limits in an attempt to describe a reality that is just too great to take in properly.”

— Alister E. McGrath

43. “Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we’re meant to be doing.”

— Alister E. McGrath

44. “Lewis created a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination.”

— Alister E. McGrath

45. “Curiously, Dawkins and Dennett remain firmly committed to the outmoded notion that science and religion are permanently in conflict – an idea often referred to as the “warfare” thesis. This is now regarded as quite unacceptable by historians of science, chiefly because it is so difficult to reconcile with the facts of history.8.”

— Alister E. McGrath

46. “Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more than this – not contradicting, but transcending reason.”

— Alister E. McGrath

47. “Lewis had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will.”

— Alister E. McGrath

48. “Lewis helps us to appreciate that apologetics need not take the form of deductive argument. Instead, apologetics can be an invitation to step into the Christian way of seeing things, and explore how things look when seen from its standpoint. Lewis’s approach says, “Try seeing things this way!” If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into sharpest focus?”

— Alister E. McGrath

49. “Christianity brings to fulfilment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture. Tolkien gave Lewis a lens, a way of seeing things, which.”

— Alister E. McGrath

50. “The real problem lay with the extensive marginal notes, which offered guidance to the reader as to how the text was to be interpreted and applied. Although the Geneva Bible dated from two generations earlier, its critique of the abuse of monarchical powers might have been written with Charles I’s reign in mind.”

— Alister E. McGrath