Theology That Bites Back
“But above all else, they remembered John’s testimony about the hard run he took one morning to an empty tomb. The grave clothes had been there, but nothing else. John then walked outside with Peter and into a world made new. It took some time for that world to realize it, but nothing was ever the same.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 286
“The God who spoke light out of darkness, with the darkness helpless to do anything about it, also spoke light into the darkness of our hearts.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 284
“For some reason, no one wants to admit that the grace of the new birth is irresistible. But our first births are just as irresistible, and virtually no one complains about that. I was born in 1953, and I do not recall ever being consulted in 1952 about whether I wanted to be born or not. Life was simply thrust upon me, somewhat violently they tell me, and first thing I knew, I was playing with toy trucks on the floor of this family’s living room. The name was Wilson, they said, and the prison door clanged shut. That whole business was irresistible—it makes your skin crawl to think of it. I was now somebody’s brother, not someone’s sister, and I hadn’t been asked about my preferences there, either. I was an American, not an Englishman. I was a Wilson, not a Williams or Smith. In short, there was a good bit of tyranny all around.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 282
“Imagine going into a hospital for the soul and inviting them to run every test imaginable—spiritual blood work, MRIs, X-rays, the works. Imagine further that omni-competent angelic technicians are running the show, recalling that the law was delivered to us through angels. This is what the law of God does. It detects everything—the slightest stirring of lust, the first few cancer cells of envy, the leprosy of vainglory, the pustules of pride, which we think are beauty marks. And the report always comes back to us in the words of God to Abimelech: ‘Behold, you are a dead man’ (Gen. 20:3, NASB).”
The Cultural Mind, p. 278
“Faith without works is dead. Religious experience, understanding, or giftedness don’t mean a thing if they ain’t got that swing.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 275
“The devil is a spirit and is unspiritual, and my neighbor, made out of meat and bones, is a very spiritual man.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 274
“Be not high-minded, Paul said, but fear. Again, he told the church at Rome not to be high-minded but rather to fear. What were they to fear? The answer is plain—the Roman church was commanded to fear the prospect of removal from the olive tree of the covenant. In the face of this, over the centuries, it has become a dogma in the church at Rome that while other churches can fall away, it cannot. Even if everyone else denies You, Peter says, I will not. In other words, a church that is expressly warned that it can be cut off maintains that it cannot be.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 271
“Instead of seeking to persuade others that we should confess these sins lest God respond in judgment, we in the church should begin to confess the sins for which these things are the judgment. This is hard for us because, when we think back to the time before this cultural meltdown began, we do not see a self-satisfied complacency that angered God. Rather, we see a paradise of traditional values. Conservatives like to look back at that golden age, before the Beatles came to America, when June Cleaver vacuumed while wearing pearls. We want to think that we had it good back then, but we threw it all away. Actually, we were in high rebellion against God back then. This means that in the judgments that have befallen us, God is stripping away our illusions. And about the only people today who are seeking to retain the old illusions are the Christians. More than a few Christians are urging us to get away from the judgments—and back to the sin.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 267-268
“Many conservative Christians who are concerned about the state of our nation are fearful of judgment in the simpler sense. They believe that if we do not turn from the course we are on, at some future date we will fall under the judgment of God. Almost no one sees that we already have fallen under His judgment.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 266
“If a certain modern doctrinal assumption is to be believed, God had an olive tree in the Old Testament, but He chopped it down in the first century and now watches over a second tree He planted, which is a peach tree.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 262
