“Conscience, then, is more like the moaning of a prisoner in his cell than the discourse of a professor at his lectern. It is an alarm signal whose noise can be turned down but not off. It is our interior reality, which is inexplicable in the absence of God and inconsolable apart from his grace.” …
How False Teachers See Themselves
[Speaking of 2 Pet. 3:15-16] “The word translated as wrest here is streblao, which refers to putting something on the rack and twisting it out of all recognition. Of course, those who are occupied in this activity do not themselves describe it this way. They do not advertise their seminars as being taught by ignorant …
Glossy Magazines Help You Reinvent Yourself
“With an extraordinary profusion of stylized goods to choose from – designer ties, designer scents, designer automobiles, and designer jeans – we now have a rich palette from which to paint our own meaning, to state our own identity.” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 144]
My Doxy Is Orthodoxy
“And thus, orthodoxy means straight belief or correct opinion. Who could be against this, one wonders. As it turns out, no one is against it — every man affirms that what he maintains is the truth. Every person in the world, all day long, every day, thinks he’s right. Even those hapless relativists and nihilists …
The Mirror Surface
“Style, therefore, may be an act of cannibalization as we take from others to create our own surface, even though it may be entirely unrelated to who we actually are. It is, however, who we want to be.” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 143]
Jerusalem and Athens
“Disobedience to God’s law blurs the antithsis between white and off-white. We must not resist anything because of what we see following it — the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. At the same time, the Bible tells us the world is filled with consequences for evil actions and bad ideas. What is our protection? …
Voyeurism Broadcasting Network (VBN)
“We are, of course, only doing what television and the movies have made legitimate. They have tilted the scales away from privacy toward exposure, away from bodily modesty toward public nakedness, away from the thought that grief and pain should be private and toward ‘the canonization of the intruding investigative reporter.’” [David Wells, Losing Our …
The Empty Space Above It All
“However, we have imposed a severe penalty on ourselves in the process: a terrifying sense that while all we have left is the self, the self unfortunately does not amount to too much. The passion of believing and the passion of being have now been replaced by the empty stare, the ironic posture.” [David Wells, …
Folks Who Don”t Get Out Much
“The spirit of pragmatic modernity, which likes to flaunt a sophisticated and cosmopolitan air, is really carrying on like a provincialist chronological hayseed. We are entirely taken with ourselves, and outside the village we all grew up in, everything is unknown; we are entirely lost — chronological rubes trying to pretend that the end of …
Redemption In A Bottle
“It is hard to miss the redemptive themes in the many dreamy scenes of sensuality that we have so often seen in perfume advertisements, scenes that waft across the viewing public with the promise of bodily regeneration, even renewed sexual attraction, if one simply purchases the product.” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: …