“When you don’t know where you are going, you can always make good time. When survival is the only prize at the end of the process, evolution could end with a world full of three-foot-long cockroaches, and we would be forced to call it good” (Empires of Dirt, p. 136).
The Last Things First
“One of the things we must come to grips with is the fact that eschatology precedes everything. The last things come first, just like Jesus said. So the first thing we need to get hold of is the idea that the whole discussion is a matter of interpretative ideas in conflict, not an interpretive idea …
We Either Gather or Scatter
“If the Church is not transforming the culture around her, then the culture around her is transforming the Church. There is no static equilibrium point” (Empires of Dirt, p. 133).
And Without Occupational Training
“After that unfortunate Cana incident, [Prohibition] was a law that would have gotten Jesus hauled before the authorities three years before He actually was. Not only did He manufacture about a hundred and sixty gallons of the stuff, He did so without a license” (Empires of Dirt, p. 132).
One and Many
“The hierarchies are ranked differently—they are not all the same. The Lord wants about half of his children to be husbands and the other half to be wives. He wants some to love classical music and others to love music from the Delta. He wants them all to hate abortion and child porn. He wants …
But It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
“We need to make sure we are doing what Jesus said and not what we thought Jesus must have said. The textbook case against Christian activism can be made in one word—Prohibition—the word that would have made the Lord Jesus at Cana into a moonshiner felon. We did a great job there of setting aside …
The Latest Scientific Consensus
“If a public policy screecher began demanding that we all start rationing salt water because the planet Earth (which is our only home) was about to run completely out, and that many leading theologians agreed with this (and they would too), and that they offered their agreement in the name of the Lord Jesus, and …
Until You Can See the Marble Pattern of the Counter Through It
“I would like to borrow a metaphor from Warfield and apply it to the phrase ‘the lordship of Christ.’ In the hands of liberals, the lordship of Christ is like pie dough—the farther you spread it, the thinner it gets” (Empires of Dirt, p. 124).
A Difficult Imagine
“Imagine trying to prove from the Bible that God wants rulers, especially Christian ones, to pretend that He doesn’t exist—to pretend in public that they don’t know Him” (Empires of Dirt, p. 123).
Sinning Right and Left
“Incidentally, I am making this argument so that Christians may call their leaders to righteousness, whether those leaders are Republicans or Democrats. I am not assuming that only Democrats are guilty of this kind of hypocrisy—far from it. When these words were first written, the present writer was being represented in the United States Senate …