Theology That Bites Back
“But we want to see You glorified now.
And deliverance that comes like a bolt from the blue
Would also be glorious, and Your name would be praised in it,
But I pray we might see this grace as its building.
Father, I pray for a gathering crescendo
That then reaches in glory a climax of wonder.
I pray that Your glory comes in like a thunderclap,
So that we might try to match an amen.”
21 Prayers, p. 106
“Your Spirit can move as He always has.
Why don’t You come down—show up and show off?
Throw them all down and all their devices.
And with the left hand of Your cruciform power?”
21 Prayers, p. 105
“The choice between secular options on the right is like a competition between a gentlemanly Epicurean and a rowdy one. The former walks at dawn in a manicured flower garden, contemplating chess moves and Rawlsian political theory, while the latter is more interested in crack cocaine and hoochie mamas. Without an overarching standard governing the two of them, we are simply comparing a longer life of nobler, milder pleasures, and a shorter life consisting of a blowout filled with orgiastic ones. But when we have to choose on those grounds, it is simply a matter of personal preference.”
“The secular state dispenses freedoms (it would be better to call them privileges) like they were party favors. They function as bribes. They serve as . . . bread . . . or circuses. As Chesterton points out somewhere, sexual license is the first and most obvious bribe to be offered to a slave. For many in our era, that was the bribe that ushered them into their bondage to the state.”
Mere Christendom, p. 9
“Why would You spend so much of Your wisdom
Constructing the road that winds up to You
If You did not desire that we would then take it?
If Christ is the road, then can we not come?
Why call us if You did not want us to come?
Why would You choose to make the way straight
If You did not wish us to take the straight way?”
21 Prayers, p. 104
“We lift Christ up to You so that in our turn
We too might be lifted, raised up to You.
We approach You through Christ and in no other way.”
21 Prayers, p. 101
“If there is no God above the state, then the state has become god—the point past which there is no appeal.”
Mere Christendom, p. 5
“The liberties of the individual are too precious to be left in the hands of a civic agnosticism. To not know why you are extending liberties to the citizenry is to not know why you would be doing anything bad if you took them all away.”
Mere Christendom, p. 5
“I ask that Your Spirit would move in clear ways
That were obviously never ginned up by us.”
21 Prayers, p. 101
“I ask that Christ would now live in our mouths,
Inhabiting our hearts, and dwell in our lives.
I ask You to break up our little dried walnut hearts
And sweep up the pieces to throw them away.”
21 Prayers, p. 98
