Theology That Bites Back
“So cordially put the spiritual processes of which you preach within the judgment of all men who know a good life from a bad one. And in the second place strike at the symptom always for the sake of the disease.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 109
“What is this structure for? When the structure is a church, the answer should obviously be that it was built to glorify God. But even this has to be connected to subordinate functions. A church building glorifies God in the architecture itself, but also in how it houses the singing acoustically, and whether it is obvious that the preaching occupies a central place, and so forth”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. v.
“I believe no powerful pulpit ever held aloof from the moral life of the community it lived in, as the practice of many preachers, and the theory of some, would make our pulpit separate itself and confine its message to what are falsely discriminated as spiritual things.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 108
“Culture is the spiritual state of the people externalized.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 97
“Notice that Paul says that Cretans are a particular way, but notice also that he tells Titus to rebuke them sharply so that they can learn how to be different. In other words, he is not fatalistic about it. Cultures can grow in virtue, and cultures can also be corrupted in vice.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 83
“A society is an organic body, and like other bodies, it can have a disease that is well contained by the immune system, and it can also have a disease that has overwhelmed the immune system. In other words, societies can have AIDS.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 82
“Only I beg you to remember in what different ways sermons may all be messages of the Lord. Let it save you from the monotonous narrowness of one eternally repeated sermon. And, what is far more important, let it keep you from ever daring to say with cruel flippancy of some brother who brings his message to another door of humanity from you, that he ‘does not preach Christ.’”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 107
“We have to remember that we are a fallen race and that we sin downhill. We compromise downhill. We grow less disciplined downhill. It is not hard to go downhill.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 81
“There is no reason why, in the Bible as in Shakespeare, the minute study of parts should not be dangerous to the conception of the whole.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 105
“Medical science is supposed to be about the pursuit of truth, not the pursuit of tolerable truths”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 64
