“Predestinarian Calvinists we’re the fathers of civil liberty, and advocates of free will paved the way for various forms of statism.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 160
Parish the Thought
“Life in the church involves Word and sacraments, while life in the parish involves auto mechanics, farming, retail shops, and schools, along with all the other stuff men and women do.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 152
Which Is Harder Than It Sounds
“Joseph did not find himself ruling Egypt because he graduated from the right law school. Daniel did not find himself a great man in Babylon through some shrewd Mesopotamian logrolling. They got where they did because they had backbones that would not bend.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 148
Which It Does Not
Another “error is the idea that since the Gospel will have political effects, politics can have a Gospel effect.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 148
Aiming for Calm Results, No Matter What
“The first is the error of the man who insists we should ‘just preach the Gospel,’ but who also believes intensely that the Gospel can permeate an unbelieving society without throwing that society into cultural upheaval. In order to get the desired calm result, the Gospel that is preached has to be ethereal, otherworldly, and impotent.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 148
The Central Paradigm Shift
“The point of preaching is never to make Christ acceptable. But in a man-centered era, this is automatically thought to be the task of the preacher—somehow making God acceptable to man. The problem that confronts us in the Bible is actually quite different. The real problem is one of sin, and how to make sinful man acceptable to a holy God. The solution, which made holy angels stop their mouths, was the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection. That is how sinners are made acceptable to God.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 145
When the Bland Lead the Bland, They Both Fall for a Pitch
“George Whitefield once said that the churches of his time were dead because dead men preached to them. We may expand the observation. The churches are effeminate because effeminate men with wireless mics stroll around platforms chatting with the congregants. The churches are leaderless because we are nervous about prophetic preaching and settle instead for bland and balanced leadership teams. The churches have no sense of the numinous because men refuse to preach the greatness and glory of the living God.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 144
Chicken and Egg Culture
[Regarding Eph. 6:1-4] “So we have ourselves a chicken and egg problem. The fact that Paul commands fathers to begin a Christian process of enculturation means that he saw, with the eye of faith, the end result, which would have to be a Christian culture.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 141
Clear Preferences
“The message of ‘tax-supported anything but Christianity’ comes through loud and clear.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 140
Therapeutic Aerobics
“A conceited man thinks about himself all the time. A morbid, self-absorbed man does the same, and this means the two men have the same problem . . . ‘Learning how to love yourself’ is not the first step in obedience; it is clambering onto a veritable squirrel-cage run of disobedience.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 137