Theology That Bites Back
To all the good people of Moscow, greetings. I trust that you had a wonderful Christmas with your families, and as we are now on the threshold of a new year, I hope to do what I can to brighten the prospect of that year just a little bit. If I were in full possession …
“When it comes to the ‘ecumenical question,’ we appear to have divided between two positions. The first says we should accept all kinds of heretical ‘Christians’ with all friendliness. The other says we should reject their heresies, along with their title to the name Christian. We have two positions. The first is that husbands cannot commit adultery, and the second is that adulterers are not husbands, and hence not adulterers. What never occurs to anyone is the duty of fighting our fellow Christians to the last ditch, as Athanasius did with Arius.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 247
“The Bible is not a grab bag of infallible truths, thoughtfully provided by God so that we could have an axiomatic starting point for our subsequently autonomous reasoning. The Scriptures are authoritative. We are men, with our breath in our nostrils. We are creatures with little pointy heads.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 243-244
“Of course the Bible does not contain errors. But neither does my claim that triangles have three sides. What is the difference between the Bible’s inerrancy and my occasional bursts of it? The difference is the other essential component of sola Scriptura—ultimacy.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 242-243
One of the lesser known doctrinal themes in Scripture is the idea of ethical reversals. Sometimes the reversals are connected to classes of people, and other times to ethnic groups or nations. Whenever ...
“Similarly, the Bible meets no standard; the Bible is the standard. Defenders of the Word too often act as if the Bible is an exceptionally bright student, always acing every test we might devise for it.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 242
Letter to the Editor: I was wondering if you are familiar with cognitive dissonance theory. I had heard of it, and just recently heard an argument that the New Testament writers followed ...
“In the same way, those who abandon all hope of autonomous creativity amaze the world at their creativity. The one who is creative is the one who knows he cannot be.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 239
Introduction: One of the reasons that Christians get into a muddle about how their sanctification should look is that they don't know how to fit the blessings of the material world into it. Not only ...
