“All things work together for good to him that is in tune with the times. Trying to ‘turn back the clock’ becomes more serious than impropriety or stupidity; it is an act of impiety” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 17).
One or the Other
“All idols belong either to nature or to history. The whole creation falls into those two categories, and there is no other place to which man can turn to find a substitute for God. Any idol that is not an artifact of the natural world is an artifact of the social world” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols …
Why Discussions Get Hot Sometimes
“And that explains the vehemence with which attacks on someone’s assumptions are met; they are often attacks on that person’s unacknowledged religion” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 8).
Intangible Idols
“Idolatry in its larger meaning is properly understood as any substitution of what is created for the creator. People may worship nature, money, mankind, power, history, or social and political systems instead of the God who created them all. The New Testament writers, in particular, recognized that the relationship need not be explicitly one of …
Puritan Types
“Following this lead, Calvinists customarily distinguished typological meaning from allegory and all other figurative modes in scripture, identifying it as part of the full or entire or perfect literal sense — the symbolic dimension of the literal sense which, in the course of time, is uncovered and fulfilled” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 120).
Cool is Distant and Love Closes Distance
“Real compassion is not sexy. It is not cool. It is inefficient and painful. And it is also faith, and hope, and love. This is real church” (Paul Grant, Blessed Are the Uncool, p. 107).
Just Me and My Bible
“The danger in the American church is less that we believe the wrong beliefs than that we believe them all by ourselves” (Paul Grant, Blessed Are the Uncool, p. 91).
Protestant Poetic Sophistication
“The reformers loudly denounced the profusion of allegories and the doctrine of the four senses . . . But the Reformers accepted, and indeed exalted, typological symbolism, endeavoring by more and more rigorous means to distinguish this divinely sanctioned symbolic method from arbitrary allegorizing . . . the new Protestant emphasis is clear: it makes …
But This Is Actually a Good Thing
“If we dump cool, cool will never take us back” (Paul Grant, Blessed Are the Uncool, p. 53).
Seduced by Cool
“Christians are willing to part with large amounts of case for access to Christian cool . . . There’s nothing wrong with Christian music being integrated into the global market. God is glorified by excellence in our craftsmanship. Lots of top-quality Christian music is produced by multinational corporations will be present in heaven. Still, the …