Category: Engaging the Culture

“Modern Christians are constantly exhorted to care. This is legitimate, indeed, it is inescapable. But the problem is that we are told regularly to care about all the wrong things. ‘If we continue to maintain that God created the world in six days, we will not be granted academic respectability.’ To which we must reply, ‘Well, who cares?’ Why should we care that the guardians of the academy believe we are not academically respectable? They believe that the moose, the sperm whale, and the meadowlark are all blood relations. Why do we want their seal of approval?”

The Cultural Mind, p. 302

“When the church is unsubmissive to Christ, it becomes submissive to the world. ‘Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God’ (Jas. 4:4). Conversely to be submissive to Christ is the same thing as becoming uppity to the demands of the world.”

The Cultural Mind, pp. 299-300

“We start fussing, in a self-important kind of way, about the problems of extremes and excesses. Of course. There is a counterfeit boldness that might be called ‘worldview machismo.’ And there is a counterfeit humility that might be called ‘worldview effeminacy.’ But rebuking us all, there is a faith that wonders in a loud voice why the uncircumcised Philistines are being allowed to talk the way they do.”

The Cultural Mind, pp. 298-299

“As a result, we treat the Biblical world and life view as though it were pie dough—but the farther we spread it, the thinner it gets. This universal but think application of Christ’s claims has the advantage of not provoking a hostile reaction from the world, and it enables us to feel good about our Kuyperian selves.”

The Cultural Mind, p. 298

“The law must slay me before I can understand it. But the same thing is true of the Gospel.”

The Cultural Mind, p. 295