“I want the coercive power of the state to fall on thugs and rapists, and not on the wrong kind of light bulb user. I want force to be applied to the man who would rob a merchant of his earnings, and not applied to the merchant himself so that the government might rob him …
Coercion: A Big Deal
“We need to recognize that politics is necessarily coercive, and because coercion is a big deal, a Christian social order should want to strictly limit coercion to the bounds assigned by Scripture. Unless I have a word from God, I don’t want to make anybody do anything” (Empires of Dirt, p. 213.).
Naboth as Fat Cat
“Taxing the people in order to perform a function that God did not assign to the state is called theft . . . If Jezebel had taken Naboth’s vineyard in the name of ‘social justice,’ or ‘land reform,’ that would not have altered the prophet’s view of it. Neither would it have helped if Jim …
True Intersection
“The spirituality of the Church cannot be construed to mean that we are allowed to limit ourselves to visiting spiritual widows and ethereal orphans” (Empires of Dirt, p. 211).
Actually the Opposite Problem
“Abortion and sodomy were sins long before they were constitutional rights . . . We are told, ad nauseam, to keep our morality out of politics. It would be more to the point to tell the idolmongers to keep their politics out of morality” (Empires of Dirt, pp. 208-209).
The Problem Was Elsewhere
“Blaming public Christians for being ‘too political’ is like blaming Noah’s ark for being ‘too wet’” (Empires of Dirt, p. 208).
Know the Difference
“An ally fights the same enemy you are fighting, and for the same reasons. A cobelligerent fights them for different reasons” (Empires of Dirt, p. 205).
Who Wants to be Post Darwinian?
“Darwin gave modernity the mechanism it needed to throw off the authority of God’s Word and the sovereignty of the Lord Christ. Darwin is foundational to the secularist modernity project, but there is more. He is also foundational to the postmodern goo cauldron that is our culture today and every form of what I have …
Rascals and Raccoons
“Rascal hearts find the wrong thing to do at the wrong time just as sure as raccoons find the garbage cans” (Empires of Dirt, p. 202).
A Different Ground of Confidence
“I believe that things are getting better over the long haul because of the prophet Isaiah and the Psalms of David, and not because Christianity Today, InterVarsity Press, and the Presbyterian Church in America have inspired me by a rock-ribbed biblicism that grows stauncher by the year” (Empires of Dirt, pp. 201-202).