Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Jones is doing something strategic here: he’s widening the doorway without changing the building. “Whatever our creed” functions as an ecumenical handshake, a phrase that flatters difference while quietly relocating the real point of unity away from doctrine and toward aesthetics and ethics. He’s not arguing Jesus’s divinity; he’s asking you to admire his “character,” a word that sidesteps theological landmines and lands in a more legible, modern register: moral stature, integrity, a life that can be read as exemplary even by skeptics.

The key lever is “sublime.” That’s not just praise; it’s elevation. Sublimity implies something that overwhelms ordinary categories and forces a kind of reverent pause. Jones is trying to convert admiration into openness: if you can be moved by Jesus as a moral and spiritual phenomenon, you’re already halfway toward the Christian claim, or at least toward taking it seriously. The sentence performs belief as an experience before it asks for assent.

Context matters. Jones was a Methodist missionary and a prominent voice in 20th-century Christian apologetics, working in an era when Christianity faced both global religious plurality and the pressure of modern skepticism. This line reads like interfaith diplomacy with a persuasive undertow: it grants room to Hindus, Muslims, humanists, even nominal Christians, while proposing a shared cultural baseline - Jesus as an unimpeachable figure. The subtext is confident: disagreement is permitted, but admiration is framed as inevitable, almost mandatory, which is precisely how the sentence exerts its soft power.