“All our scholars, statesmen, politicians, bureaucrats, philosophers, musicians, painters, and anchormen haven’t a clue. The bugle blows indistinctly, and we all think it is a new form of jazz” (Mother Kirk, p. 205).
The Low Bottom of the Heart
“Where Tyndale is most continuously and obviously superior to More is in style. He is, beyond comparison, lighter, swifter, more economical . . . What we miss in Tyndale is the many-sidedness, the elbow-room of More’s mind; what we miss in More is the joyous, lyric quality of Tyndale. The sentences that stick to the …
Distinguishable, Not Separable
“My contention is that there should be no such disjunction between the ‘appeal’ and the preaching, any more than there should be between the sacraments and preaching” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 274).
When Conscience Cannot be Denied
“It is a little like watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre over and over again and watching the hippies drawn inexorably to their doom in the uncanny house . . . that has become not a place of refuge, but of slaughter instead. That house is our culture. We are all being led into that house …
He Who Says A Must Say B
“It explains why ministers cannot teach on certain subjects from the pulpit. It explains why Christians cannot aerticulate why women in combat is an abomination. It explains why the masculine virtures of courage, initiative, responsibility, and strength are in such short supply. We cannot resist the deman to let pretty women lead us for the …
He Is No Patcher
“The law requires not only that we should do thus and thus but that we should do it with ‘a free, a willing, a lusty, and a louing hart’. Its beginning and end is that we should love God and our neighbours. It demands of us not only acts but new motives. This is what …
Because God is Not Mocked
“As anyone who has seen a number of films in the horror-slasher genre could attest, there is nothing surprising about this morality at all. The message of slasher films is very simple: you screw, you die . . . the plot of every horror story is essentially the same. If you violate sexual morals, you …
The Deeper Issue
“When the standards of Christian leadership are all feminine, the individuals most obviously qualified to be Christian leaders will be women. And so this poses a dilemma — why should we exclude women from leadership when they are so obviously qualified for what we call leadership? At that point we divide, with some calling for …
The Puritan Heart Set Free
“In theological language, no man can be saved by works. The whole purpose of the ‘gospel’, for Tyndale, is to deliver us from morality. Thus, paradoxically, the ‘puritan’ of modern imagination — the cold, gloomy heart, doing as duty what happier and richer souls do without thinking of it — is precisely the enemy which …
Get a Bit and Bridle on Your Gifts
“Watch your natural gifts and tendencies and idiosyncrasies. Watch them. What I mean is that they will tend to run away with you. It can all be summed up in a phrase — watch your strength. Not so much your weaknesses: it is your strength you have to watch, the things at which you excel, …