Theology That Bites Back
“Application is not legalism. Obedience is not legalism. Legalism is inventing your own standard. But doing what God said to do the way that God said to do it is not legalism at all: ‘hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee.’”
Keep Your Kids, p. 112
“God does not just give a set of laws. He tells us to love Him. We aren’t told to grit out teeth and conform ourselves externally to a certain set of actions. The principal command is to love. The ultimate standard is to love.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 112
“Ruth was a virtuous woman, but she had some reputation issues: generally you don’t go out to the threshing floor and sleep at a man’s feet until he wakes up. That text is not usually used in courtship seminars.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 106
“If you find yourself in real solidarity with Palestinian Christians, and you want to know if it is love for Jesus, or just your nascent inner-anti-Semite rising, just ask yourself this question . . . Who do you have more in common with—a Palestinian non-Christian or a devout Christian woman with hoop earrings who just got back from the RNC, where she spent the entire convention wearing a big hat shaped like an elephant?”
“Christendom will be easier to see when it can be photographed, but we are called to see it whether it can be photographed or not.”
“The world is full of people who cross boundaries, and Christian women (wanting to be gracious) will often have difficulty telling a random stranger to pound sand. Now they don’t have to use that phrase, of course, but whatever they say, it should be clear and direct. Men who cross boundaries are frequently not masters of subtlety.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 103
“A Reformed understanding of the gospel, of worship, of education, of politics, and so on, is incoherent apart from a commitment to Christendom.”
“The goal is not double-negative modesty. You shouldn’t ask how short shorts can be before you’re definitely in sin and then wear shorts that are a millimeter longer than that. If you intend to go up to the sin line and then take a half step back, then your goal is to be almost in sin.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 102
“Because we have been barraged with feminist propaganda, we have come to treat anyone who believes in a woman’s moral agency as someone who automatically ‘blames the victim.’ But two things can be true at the same time. A thief ought not to have broken into your car and stolen your wallet; and simultaneously, you shouldn’t have left your wallet on the dashboard with twenty-dollar bills sticking out of it in a bad part of town. The thief should be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, of course, And all of your friends should still laugh and call you an idiot for leaving your wallet there. And if you try to defend yourself to your friends and say, ‘I frankly think that you’re blaming the victim here,’ they should laugh and say, ‘Yeah, well, we are, because in this case the victim is an idiot.”
Keep Your Kids, pp. 101-102
“The question is simply whether or not public morality needs to be grounded in the will of God or not.”
