Theology That Bites Back
“I believe that God’s almighty and ancient good pleasure and will determined the position, velocity, and number of the first photons as they came into being when He first spoke the word of light and also determined the number of hairs on the back of the last stray dog on the last day of this preliminary and vanishing world.”
Concise and to the Point, p. 3
“A godly satirist should target lack of proportion, not exhibit lack of proportion.”
“No close member of his family should wince when [a godly satirist] walks into the room.”
“I don’t want classical Christian schools to graduate a generation of prigs and show poodles, even though some of them are trying to.”
“So when Calvin calls his opponents barking dogs, and we write journal articles refuting ‘an esteemed colleague,’ who is closer to the language of the New Testament (Phil. 3:2; Rev. 22:15)?”
“If I give a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name, it might be that I am showboating, or revealing my latent Pelagianism, or simply imitating Jesus. Before undertaking any obedience, I must prove to myself that what I am doing is true imitation of Christ and not false, but accusations from outside need to demonstrate the existence of the problem. It not enough to demonstrate that this is a situation that might involve this sin.”
“What this boils down to is that the camel is all gone, and we still can’t find the gnat.”
“I do write in a particular way. I think in metaphors, and whenever I open the spigot, what comes out is whatever was in the pipes. But bright yellow metaphors and incarnadine similes are not the same thing as snark. Writing in an interesting way is not the same thing as sarcasm.”
“The point that Kevin makes here is what I call the Cave of Adullam phenomenon. Back in the day, we ran a magazine for about twenty-five years (Credenda/Agenda). It was about forty pages of teaching on family, church life, the civil magistrate, eschatology, and so on. Near the back was one page we called the Cave of Adullam, which was dedicated to skewering what we called the ‘regnant follies.’ We would also occasionally horse around in the masthead, or in an editorial up front, but in the main the bulk of the magazine was clothed and in its right mind. But what would happen is that people would get the magazine, turn immediately to the Cave, read it with a guilty chuckle or two, spend the rest of the evening being harangued by their conscience, and then write us a concerned letter about our writing habits—when they really ought to have been more concerned about their reading habits. This is called reading all the snark and ignoring the rest. This is called picking all the bacon bits out of the salad, and then complaining about the paucity of greens” ().
“The temptation to ache for worldly respectability is, however, rampant throughout the evangelical world. Vast sections of our evangelical establishment have gone down before this alluring temptation, like dry meadow grass before a sharpened scythe.”
