Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Moral Effort or Grace?

Tim Keller:
Christianity teaches that our main problem is sin. What then is the solution? Even if you accept the Christian diagnosis of the problem, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason why one must look only to Christianity for the solution. You may say, "Fine, I understand that if you build your identity on anything but God, it leads to breakdown. Why must the solution be Jesus and Christianity? Why can't some other religion do as well, or just my own personal faith in God?"

The answer to that is that there is a profound and fundamental difference between the way that other religions tell us to seek salvation and the way described in the gospel of Jesus. All other major faiths have founders who are teachers that show the way to salvation. Only Jesus claimed to actually BE the way of salvation himself. This difference is so great that, even though Christianity can certainly be called a religion in the broader sense, for the purposes of discussion we will use the term "religion" in this chapter to refer to "salvation through moral effort" and "gospel" to refer to "salvation through grace."

From The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism
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