Theology That Bites Back
“But, Cochlaeus asks, how can we be convinced that Scripture ‘flows from God’ unless we have recourse to the Church’s decree saying that this is so? Calvin brushes this aside as the typical academic question of a man without experience of faith. You might as well ask how one learns to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from sour.”
Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 3
“The apostle Paul lived one of the most thrilling lives ever lived, and yet the good professor seemed to have the ability to present the second missionary journey as something at the same level as watching paint dry.”
“In recommending a program of general reading for preachers, I will not be asking for a recrudescence of what Reinhold Niebuhr called ‘pretty sermons.’ Niebuhr appears to have had in mind not just poetry-laden sermons, or florid sermons, but any sermons of highly refined rhetoric. Niebuhr said he wanted to keep his sermons ‘rough,’ instead, ‘just to escape the temptation of degenerating into an elocutionist.’”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 5
“He had once heard his grandfather say, in reference to his grandmother, that she was the butterfly’s boots, and this was a sentiment that Trevor now thought he understood the deeper meaning of. He had fallen for her voice—that voice!—the day of the rally out in front of the college, and then, when he had actually met her, he had decided within minutes that it would be criminal negligence on his part not to be in hot pursuit. Of course, he must not look as though he was in hot pursuit. Some girls don’t go for that. He ought to look like he was sauntering. Sauntering purposively.”
“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
