Theology That Bites Back
“You don’t identify the poseur by which pose he is copping, but rather by the participle, by the act of posing itself. A poseur can be smiling or glowering for any number of cameras. He might be a New Testament scholar, a gym rat, a hipster, a poet, or a smooth ladies’ man. He might be any number of things. We do not identify him by the costume he is wearing, but rather by the fact that he always has one eye on the lookout for a camera or a mirror.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, pp. 64-65
“You give the last piece of pie to God, who doesn’t eat pie, by giving it to your neighbor, who does.”
Chesterton Calvinism, pp. 60-61
“We affirm a fundamental creational loyalty to the world, and constantly thwart the world’s desire to be disloyal to itself. This is why it is good to be earthy, and bad to be worldly.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 58
“The pacifist who doesn’t want to fight the dragon for the sake of the lady is actually in the process of becoming a dragon himself.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 57
“There seems to be an inverse relationship between the number of footnotes that Chesterton uses and the number of footnotes he is in.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 55
“What we must do is receive all God’s covenantal blessings, as thick as we can conceive of them, and then imagine how much thicker Heaven will be. Let Jesus cut the bacon, in other words.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 49
“If I turn every gift that God gives over in my hands suspiciously, looking for the idol trap, then I am not rejoicing before Him the way I ought to be . . . This world competes with the eternal things, and so what we think we must do is get a five-gallon bucket of dour paint thinner and pour it over all our material possessions. We try to make Heaven thick by making earth thin.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, pp. 48-49
“In a perichoretic world, the gift need not displace the Giver, as though they were two billiard balls. In the material world, the space that one object occupies is space that another object cannot occupy. We carry our assumptions about this over into the spiritual world, and we consequently assume that if we are thinking about meat on the grill, bees in the honeysuckle, a sweet wife in bed, beer in a frosted glass, or a full tank of gas and lots of Wyoming ahead, then we cannot be thinking about God also, or be living in gratitude before Him. But I don’t believe this is the case at all.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, pp. 47-48
“There are two sacraments, true, there is is only one sacramental. The world is that sacramental, and everything in it. Grace is everywhere and gets into everything. Faith can dig it out of anything. The grandeur of God can flame out from anything, like the shining from shook foil.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 40.
“He rose from the dead in this world in order to redeem everything about it, beer and bacon included.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 39
