“Among the many words which our century has trashed (words like awesome and gay), this word federal most certainly heads the list. The word makes us think of big, centralized things, things that make a collectivist’s heart feel warm and cozy. We slap the word on institutions so little old ladies will deposit their money …
Unprovoked
“Anyone who undertakes to add to the number of modern books on marriage had better have some good reason. This is particularly true if the author in question is doing it for the second time and all apparently unprovoked. One would think our interest in marriage books would be waning by this time; like the …
Listen
“A few verses later, he says it again. ‘Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings: and the years of thy life shall be many’ (Prov. 4:10). And since his son was looking out the window, apparently with some kind of old covenant attention-deficit problem, just a few verses later, he says it once again. …
Tight Temple Quarters
“Another such god is the god of the republicans and democrats–the god of civic religion and prayer breakfasts. This god would have been happily served by a pragmatic pagan like Cicero. This is the god to whom some want to offer prayer in the government schools. Such prayers would not get past the little two-foot …
Gods of Soft Counsel
“Our culture swarms with little gods, like the frogs of Egypt. But the gods of Egypt do have the advantage of being relatively easy to identify. They are gods of antithesis. The gods of synthesis, the gods of gray and off-white, the gods which sidle up next to you in order to whisper devotional encouragements …
What It All Means
“Say we are dealing with a young man who has dyed his hair purple. I am giving him counsel and I tell him (as I would tell him) that this was sinful. He would want me to look up ‘purple hair’ in my concordance and show him where the Bible prohibits it. But this is …
Imitative Genius
“Debates with Christians who embrace pop culture are frequently hamstrung by the tenacity with which they insist on discussing the audible sound only, and never the actual meaning of the word. Modern evangelicals have a clear eye this way; they have a true imitative genius. They can copy anything the world produces, down to the …
All Or Nothing
“But because of an immature ‘all or nothing’ mentality in the evangelical world, as soon as anything is pronounced not inherently sinful, everybody rushes off to splash about in their Christian liberty, about which more later. And this is why the evangelical world today is crowded out to the borders with the culturally retarded. Cultural …
Lockstep Conformity
“For example, in the fifties, when something became hot, something on the order of hula hoops, everybody had to have one. And they had to have on because they had to be like ‘all the other kids.’ But snookered by our new consumerist culture, we now see that everybody has to have the latest hot …
No Handles
“‘This is a a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church’ (Eph. 5:31-32). Those who want the formation of this great mystery to be reeduced to a simple checkoff list want something that cannot be. For those who have no hands, wisdom has no handles” (Future Men, p. 147).