Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Martin

Credibility, Martin argues, is not a prize you win by spotless living; its a tool the church loses when it confuses moral failure with intellectual bankruptcy. The line is built like a rebuke: "And yet" signals he is pushing back against a common reflex, likely from critics eager to dismiss Christian thinkers by pointing to their sins, scandals, or blind spots. His target is less the fact of wrongdoing than the tidy logic that turns a human flaw into a total veto on a persons ideas.

The intent is defensive but not evasive. Martin is not excusing sin; he is insisting on a more adult accounting of history, where influence and error can coexist in the same biography. That matters in a tradition that canonizes some figures and condemns others, because it exposes how selectively we apply standards. If you can read Augustine without pretending he was pure, or cite Luther while acknowledging his uglier views, then the purity test is revealed as a strategy, not a principle.

Subtextually, Martin is also protecting the churchs continuity. To "throw out" great minds is to sever yourself from the inheritance that shaped doctrine, worship, and moral imagination. The quote defends a kind of institutional memory: the church survives not by finding perfect people, but by learning how to sift truth from the compromised hands that carried it.

In context, coming from a late-20th-century clergyman known for polemical apologetics, it reads like a push against gotcha theology and anti-intellectual anti-clericalism alike. He is asking for discernment over demolition: judge the sin, learn from the mistake, but dont pretend history becomes unusable the moment it gets human.