Daily Inspiration Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

Latourette is doing something quietly polemical under the guise of tidy historical summary: he’s stripping Christianity’s success story down to a single gravitational center and daring the reader to treat doctrine, ethics, and institutional machinery as secondary effects. The sentence is built like a historian’s corrective. “Primary source” sounds like an archive term, a nod to method and evidence, but he uses it rhetorically to rank causes. Not “the church,” not “Paul,” not Roman roads, not imperial patronage. Jesus.

The subtext pushes back against two temptations common in modern accounts of religion: reducing Christianity to a social program (a moral code, a community, a welfare network) or to a winning organizational technology (missionary strategy, episcopal structure, state sponsorship). Latourette isn’t denying those factors; he’s demoting them. “Appeal” is key: he’s interested not only in why Christianity spread, but why it felt compelling to actual people. The list that follows - incarnation, life, crucifixion, resurrection - is a narrative arc, almost a minimalist creed. It implies that the movement’s persuasive power lived in story and personhood: God rendered touchable, suffering rendered meaningful, death rendered defeatable.

Context matters. Writing in the mid-20th century, Latourette worked in an era when scholars were increasingly eager to explain religion through economics, psychology, or political power. His phrasing resists that flattening without turning into devotional prose. He’s asserting that you can’t finally explain Christianity’s historical magnetism while bracketing its central claim: that something happened in Jesus that reconfigured reality for his followers.