Theology That Bites Back
“So a humble man and a proud man are not distinguished from one another because the latter does what he wants and the former does not. Rather, they are distinguished because they want different things. No creature ever desired anything from a base outside its own desires. So a humble man delights in God, and a proud man delights in that which is not God.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 136-137
“In order to argue anything, a man has to be able to say this, not that; here, not there; A, not A. In short he has to be able to make distinctions. So argumentation depends on this, and distinctions in their turn depend on having an ultimate ground for making distinctions. In the historic Protestant view, the ultimate and greatest distinction that must be maintained at all times is the distinction between the Creator and the creature.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 132
“We, in the grip of a very bad idea, have thought to repeal some fundamental laws of the natural order of things. Good luck to us all, says I. Let us repeal the law of gravity to cut down on that frictional wear and tear. Let us herd cats. Let us sweep water uphill. Let us feed cheesecake to our horses.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 130
[Concerning Deut. 22:5] “Transvestite men certainly are condemned here, but the language with regard to the women is quite different. The operative phrase in this passage is keli gabar, the gear of a warrior. A woman is not to wear the gear of a fighter. The prohibition is not one of slacks, but rather of helmets and heavy rifles.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 129
“The sillier a position gets, the more shouting is required to keep people from asking those pesky questions.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 127
“Social calamities, therefore, must not be understood as ‘random bad things’—our God is a God who keeps covenant, and this necessarily includes covenant blessings and curses. And this cannot be understood apart from a diligent study of Scripture and church history up to the present.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 125
“The teaching of the Bible here is that the chaos of panic is not a response to chastisement but is part of the chastisement itself.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 124
“Even though this is America, we have no constitutional right to easy answers.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 124
“We see the lying ways in which we handle our laws, wanting them to be as slippery as our hearts.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 121
“Because the possibility of any kind of creedal discipline is negligible in our day, those who have abandoned the Gospel are now openly seeking to make their distinctive into negotiable items and want to be held by all as being ‘within the pale.’ Thus, we do not have to agree with them, but we do have to agree to disagree, and to do so as fellow . . . evangelicals. They do not resist disagreement; in fact, they welcome it. But the disagreement must come in the form of continuing dialogue, and not in the form of showing them the door.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 117
