“Preaching is a spiritual triangle whereby God draws the preacher and the hearers closer to himself and to each other”
Beeke, Reformed Preaching, p. 347
Just Wait a Little Longer
“If a man wants a garden full of weeds, he does not need to do a thing. And if a church wants its lampstand removed, in a fallen world, all that is necessary is a little more standing around”
The Cultural Mind, p. 116
All Connected
“Christians are people of the Word, and as a result they are people of words. We love the Truth, and this is why we must necessarily love truths. The flip side of this is that when a love for the Lord Jesus declines, one of the first places it manifests itself is in an obvious contempt for words. Words become little lumps of neutral clay on which a dishonest heart can exercise its creativity. But the real source of this rebellion in the little things, and the final direction of it, is hostility to the ultimate Word”
The Cultural Mind, p. 115
Judges Running Around Loose
“And so the Constitution must be kept around to provide the smell of a hoary antiquity, while a relativistic hermeneutic is slapped on to provide judges with the untrammeled liberty of doing whatever they want.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 113
The Eve of Battle
“Hermeneutics, the art and science of interpretation, sounds like a horribly dusty affair. And, of course, some have handled the subject along those lines. That is not how it should be; when the question of how a text is to be interpreted arises, we should feel a leaden weight in the gut and adrenaline in the veins, as men feel before a battle.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 111
Not Supposed to Work
“All secular idolatries must totter and fall. This is a wonderful part of the hope found in the biblical worldview—that in the long run, stupidity never works.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 108
Hidden Debts
“So this is how a layman in the church might come to object to the study of ‘all this humanistic philosophy,’ and yet have his own general worldview shaped by the objectionable philosophy in question. Because he does not know his own presuppositions, he does not know if he shares them with anyone else, including Messrs. Plotinus and Locke. Avoiding philosophy does not work. American fundamentalism is notorious for adopting in substance various philosophies that have somehow been purified through an ignorance of the adoption.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 105
The Genesis of Apostasy
“The tragedy of our time is that the Church currently wants to be cool, and for a host of reasons, as long as it remains recognizably Christian, it cannot be.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 101
Cooler Than Thou
“The category of cool represents a postmodern attempt to establish a relativistic antithesis. In this view, the human race is divided into two categories, square and hip, or, put another way cool and uncool. Unless the false conservative antitheses, the boundaries keep shifting. And unlike the liberal view, there really is an avowed antithesis between those who meet the standard and those who do not.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 100
Aesthetic Rot
“A man in error will pick up the wrong side of a debate. But a relativists says that all such debates are silly and unproductive. There is no debate, because there is no answer.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 98