“In honesty, however, I must warn in advance any who may embark upon exploring it, that books about the media almost all have one, on the face of it, surprising feature in common—although their subject is communication, they display a singular incapacity to communicate themselves. Perhaps on consideration this is not so surprising as it …
God’s Camouflage
“The Bible can be interpreted as a string of God’s triumphs disguised as disasters” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 304).
While Calling It Capitalism, Just to Keep Things Jumbled
“Modern statism is a return to mercantilism, to forcible impoverishment of some in order to benefit others, to zero-sum thinking” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 279).
And That, To Use An Old-Fashioned Word, Is False
“The great fallacy of our time, Malcolm Muggeridge has written, is the one that says that we may pursue collective virtue apart from personal behavior” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 264).
Maybe This Applies to Us
“In a society in which idolatry runs rampant, a church that is not iconoclastic is a travesty. If it is not against the idols it is with them” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 254).
Religion, Civil or Biblical?
“A religious statement, on the other hand, which says, ‘do not be conformed to the values of society’ swings an axe at the trunk of civil religion. Civil religion eases tensions, where biblical religion creates them. Civil religion papers over the cracks of evil, and biblical religion strips away the covering, exposing the nasty places. …
Protesting Catholics
“Many modern readers of history fail to see the catholicity of the Reformation. In no way did the reformers desire to found ‘a denomination’ in the modern sense; rather, they desired the reformation of the one Church. They were one party within the Church; the other party was the papal faction” (For Kirk and Covenant, …
The Key to Eternal Relevance
“Examining the economic pronouncements of the church leaders, one is reminded of Chesterton’s remark that the morality of most moralists has been ‘one solid and polished cataract of platitudes flowing forever and ever.’ Having convinced themselves, rightly, that the biblical tradition has much to say about economics, the church intellectuals make theological statements serve as …
Why Dead Fish Always Swim Downstream
“The historicist mentality finds it difficult to consider the possibility that a dominant trend may be evil, and thus stands ready to embrace anything that will confer contemporaneity on itself” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 237).
Obedience a Two-Way Street
“It is easy to have strong views on the subject of authority, but these usually come up when we are considering how someone else ought to be obeying us. When we turn to consider those that we should be obeying, our ardor sometimes dims” (For Kirk and Covenant, p. 129).