Search Results for: Chestertonian

“What is commonly caricatured as the ‘puritanical’ mentality is actually a mentality that can be found in the church of all ages. You can find this mindset in some of the early fathers, you can find it with Syrian ascetics, you can find it in medieval monasteries, and you can find it (after the first generation) among the Puritans. This religious type of person translates every serious call to holiness into terms it can understand, which is that of being introspective, stuffy, priggish, thin-lipped, censorious, prim, prudish, and more. Not only does it translate every serious call to holiness into this legalistic straitjacket, but it is attracted to every serious call to holiness—with the intention of burying it under a rock pile of rules.”

Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 121

“When Jesus turned the water into wine at Cana, the resultant wine was true wine. It was a supernatural act that brought it into being suddenly, but the wine itself was as natural as the wine that had already been drunk. And because it was better wine, we cannot say it was unnatural in any way.”

Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 97

“God made Adam out of dirt, and He made Eve out of Adam’s rib. And when God presented the woman to the man, and he asked where she came from, her reply was not ‘from my pre-Adamite hominoid ancestors.’”

Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 96

“The other view, the one that I am stoutly comfortable with, might be called the blammo view of creation. About ten thousand years ago, as the crow flies, there was nothing, and absolutely nothing underneath, above, or around that nothing. And then about four thousand years after that, also as the crow flies, God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and blammo, there it was.”

Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 96

“Adam disobeyed for us at a tree; the Lord Jesus obeyed for us on a tree.”

Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 90

“In short, Calvinists know that there is nothing to boast of in man, but some fall into the trap of boasting in that knowledge. They take pride in knowing that there is nothing to take pride in.”

Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 84

“Now if Rome were correct, and we could sin our way out of the grace of God, then the papists are in real trouble. They pray to pictures, man.”

Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 82

“In this view [Roman Catholicism], the grace of God is contained in a vast reservoir, and there are seven gold-plated spigots from which that grace is dispensed, and these spigots are manned by ordained priests. Not to be fair, this is structurally identical to how much of pop evangelicalism operates—only they dispense the grace through undecorated tin buckets and green garden hoses—meaning altar calls, signing cards, throwing pine cones in the fire at youth camp, re-dedications, and all the rest of it. The semi-Pelagianism of Rome is more than matched by the semi-Pelagianism of a Billy Graham crusade.”

Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 78

“What I am arguing for I will say yet again. You can’t have it both ways. You cannot establish a culture that has institutionalized the abandonment of the unique dignity of women, and then, when the culture starts acting on that perverse premise, suddenly find some dignity for them to stand on. You don’t have any of that dignity any more. You threw is away, remember? And you mercilessly mocked those who objected to throwing it away. You laughed at their predictions. They objected to discarding a unique feminine dignity, and you mocked them. When the consequences of having lost that dignity start to manifest themselves—as they will continue to do with increasing regularity—you hate and despise them. You hate them for being right in the prediction, and you hate them because their ‘misogynist’ subcultures are among the few remaining places where women are not treated like that.”

Chestertonian Calvinism, pp. 73-74