Theology That Bites Back
“When the Spirit moves among God’s people, they start to build. This is because they are imitating Him, and He is building us. We are living stones. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to be doing the work we are doing.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, pp. 61-62
“These three rules seem to have in them the practical sum of the whole matter. I beg you to remember them and apply them with all the wisdom that God gives you. First. Have as few congregations as you can. Second. Know your congregation as thoroughly as you can. Third. Know your congregation so largely and deeply that in knowing it you shall know humanity.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 143
“We are accustomed to think about the world in quasi-Deistic terms. Sure, God made everything some time long ago, but things happen now because of impersonal natural laws, right? Gravity pulls things to the floor, centrifugal force pulls them out to the edges, and the law of supply and demand determines the cost of zippers. But the biblical doctrine is actually one of creation and ongoing providence. All of it is personal.”
Ploductivity, p. 49
“In Deuteronomy, the people of God were told to exterminate the Canaanites. This was a God-ordained ethnic cleansing. Particularly they were to go after the idolatrous worship, and note this—and ‘destroy the names of them out of that place’ (Dt. 12:3). But nature abhors a vacuum even here, and this was done so that the name of God might be established in the land (Dt. 12:5). God was going to select a place to put His name.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 59
“Grinding poverty can certainly come about through natural disasters—famines and so on—but the thing we really need to be on guard against is organized and coercive poverty, by which I mean socialism.”
Ploductivity, p. 48
“So we worship in a fortress. But the metaphor should never run away with us. This does not mean we should walk around in here like we were an armed garrison—open carry in worship would make a liturgical statement, one that we don’t want to make. That statement would be that we consider all the others here to be potential enemies, not brothers and sisters. We are in the sanctuary, not in an Old West saloon. Concealed carry is different, and no more a problem that having a church building with a sprinkler system installed in case of fire. We would not be dubious about open carry at church because we were afraid of guns—far from it. The problem is liturgical, not practical. This is a secure fortress, and so we never want to install our anxieties into the liturgy. Here we are foreshadowing the time when we hang the trumpet in the hall, and study war no more (Is. 2:2-6).”
Let the Stones Cry Out, pp. 57-58
“It is a strange thing to say, but when the number of any public body exceeds that of forty or fifty, the whole assembly has an element of joyous childhood in it, and each member revives at times the glad, mischievous nature of his schoolboy days.”
Arthur Helps, as quoted in Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 139
“We pray through Christ, we have fellowship in Christ, and we proclaim Christ. What do we use as we do all these things? We use, among other things, ink, newsprint, microphones, email, toner, power point, algorithms, video clips, all of which are made out of molecules. They are things. This means that, because of the way we are created, we cannot love others without media because love, like sound, doesn’t travel in a vacuum.”
Ploductivity, p. 44
“When we build this sanctuary, we are not trying to create a little meditative chamber, like the kind of prayer room you might find in an airport. This is a building that should speak defiance. There is a certain peacefulness to it, certainly, but in a world full of turmoil, to speak peace is to speak defiance. This is because we are speaking peace on God’s terms, which means that rebels in arms must lay down their weapons.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 54
“I have known many ministers who were frank and simple and unreserved with other people for whom they did not feel a responsibility, but who threw around themselves a cloak of fictions and reserves the moment that they met a parishioner.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 138
