“Apart from his detestation of Lester, there was also the pastoral folly of counseling drunks. He had learned that lesson years before—like sweeping water uphill.”
Impatience Notices
“Chad was being a little bit slower on the motor skills front, and so John waited patiently for him. And by ‘waited patiently,’ John had been a pastor long enough to know it meant he was actually waiting impatiently. Whenever he was waiting patiently, he didn’t notice that he was waiting patiently, and John was noticing.”
No, Not That Kind of War Song
“[Deidre] was a solo-obsessed soprano in their makeshift choir and was always calling with criticisms of the choir director disguised as prayer requests. Mitchell’s mother had always called church choirs the war department. Luther once said that when Satan fell, he fell into the choir loft.”
Not What’s Done
“As a conscientious pastor, John regretted having given a fellow clergyman a black eye. Not entirely intentional, more a confluence of events that was larger than everybody involved. But still, hardly what he had learned in seminary.”
Evangellyfish, opening lines, p. 9
A Reasonable Point, I Think
“This is as good a place as any to insist that all the characters in Evangellyfish are fictional, and I made them up out of my own head. Any resemblance to any real people, living or dead, is their own darn fault. If they quit acting like that, the resemblance would cease immediately and we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
Evangellyfish, front matter
As Strange as It May Seem
“In Genesis 6, we find an account give of the Deluge, and of the reasons for it. It was because the ‘sons of God,’ or bene elohim, saw that human women were fair, married them, and had children by them. Everywhere else this phrase appears in the Bible, it refers to celestial beings (Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7, and in the singular, Dan. 3:25). From the references in the first part of Job, we find that Satan is one of their number, or at least accompanies them . . . Jude verifies that these beings did not keep their proper station, and that the nature of their sin was sexual. He states clearly that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah sinned in the same way as these beings, by going after strange flesh (vv. 6-7).”
A Universal Domain
“So Jesus did not die in order to set an ethical dualism in stone, with God and Satan forever opposed. He spoke of the condemnation of the prince of this world (John 16:7-11); He appeared in order to destroy the devil’s work (1 Jn. 3:8); He died to destroy the devil himself (Heb. 2:14); and He stated that in His death the prince of the world would be driven out (John 12:29-32). As we examine the biblical cosmology, we should keep in mind that we are studying, because of the resurrection, the domain of Christ. Nothing is outside that domain.”
Forgotten Heavens, p. 3
Or Even Two Turtles
“We must rethink our assumptions about the universe around us. But if we submit to the biblical cosmology, it will not be found necessary to submit to a caricature of it—we are not living in a universe built like a 3-decker London bus, riding on the back of a turtle.”
Forgotten Heavens, p. 1
No Piglet Tails Here
[Speaking of behemoth] “The NIV provides us with an informative footnote which explains that this may possibly be the hippopotamus or elephant—with a tail like a cedar. Apparently the scholars who worked on the NIV were too busy with their studies as children, and never made it to the zoo, or the circus”
Forgotten Heavens, p. ix
Not Empty at All
“The Creator of all is not an impersonal force, and the creation reflects that. The biblical view of the cosmos is not the one of modernity—infinite depths of lifeless space punctuated by dead rock, or chaotic fire.”
Forgotten Heavens, p. viii