“Calvin frequently said that it was useless for the preacher merely to declare the truths of the Bible and leave the congregation to accept them or not without more ado.”
Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 114
Like They Were Legos
“When enough of a staff assembled to constitute a quorum for getting yelled at, in the presence of his secretary Susan, Parker Parkson, and two interns, he dumped out two buckets of cuss words onto the carpet, and then spent a good ten minutes kicking them around the room with his cowboy boots.”
A Visual Echo
“Earlier we spoke of the expository preacher as a chameleon, taking his color from that of the passage on which he was alighted.”
Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 103
In Order to Say Hi
“The sun had barely gotten one elbow on the edge of the world that constituted the top of his garden wall.”
And So Should You
“Calvin believed in the universal relevance of Holy Scripture.”
Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 89
Which Can Be Pretty Aggrieved
“Prater, filled with the kind of aggrieved righteousness that you usually see in a cat that has been hosed down by a ten-year-old boy, had decided that it was time to act.”
Double Barreled
“Expository preaching consists in the explanation and application of a passage of Scripture. Without explanation it is not expository; without application it is not preaching.”
Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 79
Somebody Has to Do It
“A friend of Trevor’s from the gym downtown was a cop with the reserves, and, of course, if it comes to that, why shouldn’t he have been?”
Shared Responsibility
“It follow that the congregation no less than the preacher have a responsibility towards what is taught . . . They, no less than the preacher, have a duty to see to it, so far as they can, that the message of the Bible shall alone be heard in their pulpit (for the pulpit is the pulpit of the whole Church, not merely of one member, the preacher.”
Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 51
Trimmers
“These were people who just hated being led by trimmers and compromisers, and whose leaders always trimmed and compromised because that is what they thought the people were demanding. They had been let down time and over again by countless leaders who either drifted off into neo-evangelical liberalism like a child’s lost carnival balloon, or who blew up in the old-school conservative fashion via sexual scandals.”