Theology That Bites Back
“He might end up pondering with his congregation that kindness and laughter in a home are generationally as contagious as abuse, and that they provide acoustics in which the gospel of grace will sound plausible and resonant, even to the children of preachers.”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 2
“It was the kind of family where the young men were expected to go off to school and then to make their own way in the world of great adventures—five years or so was respectable—before coming back and joining the firm in some useful and productive capacity. They were always expected to come back with a dragon head or two, and it was never looked down on if they came back with a beautiful and exotic woman from Ecuador or something. Trevor’s uncle had done that.”
“Poets are like preachers: they study how to say a lot in few words.”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. xii
“Trevor Smith was the scion of a family that had plenty of bucks but which had somehow managed to keep that fact from rotting out the floorboards of its collective soul. They had money—quite a bit of it, actually—but for them, money was just bullets . . . Some people cast their bread on the waters, and all they get is soggy bread, or happy ducks. Others were like the Smith dynasty, and nobody quite knew how it worked.”
“I know this is a bull ride at the rodeo. And not eight seconds either. I know I have to ride until the bull pukes.”
“The preacher who reads widely has a chance to become wise.”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. xi
“Like the faithful farmer Robert Frost describes, resourceful preachers are always out to ‘clean the pasture spring’.”
Cornelius Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. ix
“She was doing pretty well until about three minutes into his presentation. He gestured expansively, with the kind of gesture that he had found so effective in the impressing of freshman girls, and Maria almost lost it. His right hand moved languidly toward the ceiling, and Dr. Rollins was unable to keep himself from looking at it as it went. The board members, being all men, didn’t notice, but Maria did, and started biting her forefinger.”
“‘Some might have expected a flood of controversy like this to damage our . . . testimony.’ He remembered just in time that Dr. Tom hated the word brand, and so he veered at the last minute over to testimony. Tomayto, tomahto.”
Luther “said that the ultimate test of a good preacher is whether he is prepared to face ridicule and to lose his life, his wealth and his good name because of his preaching.”
Luther as quoted in Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 108
