A Common Mistake
Under Authority
“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
Euclidian Inerrancy
“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
Pharaohs and Herods
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 ...
The Teacher, Not a Student
“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
Last Letters of a Bedraggled Year
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 ...
The Last Shall Be First
“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
Deuteronomy and Harvest Weight
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 ...
A Question, Certainly
Where the Gods Spring Forth
“The pagan hates the idea of creation because of the divine sovereignty that follows from it, but he loves the idea of morphing—rearranging stuff . . . In anti-Christian thought, matter is this eternally existent Play-Doh-type stuff that can be re-arranged creatively by other bits of stuff called artists or scientists. This is possible because the splendor is thought to be resident within the matter. The autonomous artist assumes he is the point on the surface of the chaos where the gods spring forth.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 238