“We need our preachers to stop telling the skeletons to develop a positive mental attitude” (Rules, p. 266).
Context Matters
“For us, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’ is a Christian school slogan for our track teams’ T-shirts. Paul was talking there (Phil. 4:13) about this profound death and resurrection cycle in his life, while we tend to think it is about jumping higher, running faster, hanging with cute girls afterward, …
Just About There
“When it comes to revivals, the reason why it always comes as such a surprise to us is simple. God — in order to keep the glory where it needs to be kept — makes sure that we are in such a bad way, in such a condition of hopelessness, that nobody expects a resurrection. …
Inevitable Improbabilities
“Any historical event, once it occurs, however unlikely, can be shown to have been inevitable by any competent historian. But reading the clues before it all happens is a different matter. And so we declare, with certainty, the inevitability of the highly improbable” (Rules, 264).
The Word First
“The world is not something that produces information. Information is something that produces the world (Rules, pp. 263-264).
Sour Grapes
“True patronage will often be dismissed as philistinism by those who didn’t make the cut” (Rules, p. 258).
Funding the Wrong Thing
“I would argue that more patrons are willing to be patrons than artists are willing to be artists. Responsible patrons are put off by the bohemian posturing. If they are not put off by it, then they are funding the decadence of intellectual rot. If they run across a little lord byron in skinny jeans, …
Dumb in the Grand Style
“How many of us have had the experience of staring at a movie screen, thinking that thing up there the ‘dumbest thing I ever saw,’ while at the same time reeling under the weight of the knowledge that the dumbest thing you ever saw cost 75 million to make? And somebody — let us call …
Or Three Good Cameras
“It will never be possible to fix a bad story with good cameras” (Rules, p. 255).
That Kind of Calvinist
“And by Calvinist, I do not mean someone who grew up in the environs of Grand Rapids, and whose thought processes are tinctured with some elements of a by-gone Reformed tradition. I mean somebody who actually thinks that God is God, all the way up, all the way down, and all the way across” (Rules, …