Love Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Jones aims straight at the emotional engine of Christianity: not guilt, not law, but the aching need for communion. By naming “the deepest portion of our nature” as “the urge to love and be loved,” he’s doing more than offering comfort; he’s reframing redemption as something that has to meet humans where they are most vulnerable and most motivated. Sin, in this view, isn’t just rule-breaking. It’s a fracture in relationship. So the remedy can’t be merely a decree from above. It has to be love made legible.

The line “in an incredible and impossible way” is calculated provocation. “Incredible” signals scandal, “impossible” signals paradox: if God is to be persuasive at the level of desire and fear, He must show up in a form that seems least God-like. Jones’s subtext is anti-triumphalist. Power doesn’t redeem power; love redeems love. The cross, then, isn’t an accessory to the message but the message’s grammar: self-giving, public, humiliating, bodily. It’s God speaking in the only dialect that can reach the human heart without coercion.

Context matters: Jones wrote as a 20th-century evangelist-theologian shaped by global missions, modern skepticism, and the search for a credible faith after industrial war. The cross becomes his answer to a modern objection: if God is real, where is He in suffering? Jones doesn’t solve suffering; he relocates God inside it, betting that the only believable divinity is one willing to be broken open for love.