Tag: Chrestomathy

“Instead of seeking to persuade others that we should confess these sins lest God respond in judgment, we in the church should begin to confess the sins for which these things are the judgment. This is hard for us because, when we think back to the time before this cultural meltdown began, we do not see a self-satisfied complacency that angered God. Rather, we see a paradise of traditional values. Conservatives like to look back at that golden age, before the Beatles came to America, when June Cleaver vacuumed while wearing pearls. We want to think that we had it good back then, but we threw it all away. Actually, we were in high rebellion against God back then. This means that in the judgments that have befallen us, God is stripping away our illusions. And about the only people today who are seeking to retain the old illusions are the Christians. More than a few Christians are urging us to get away from the judgments—and back to the sin.”

The Cultural Mind, pp. 267-268

“Many conservative Christians who are concerned about the state of our nation are fearful of judgment in the simpler sense. They believe that if we do not turn from the course we are on, at some future date we will fall under the judgment of God. Almost no one sees that we already have fallen under His judgment.”

The Cultural Mind, p. 266

“If a certain modern doctrinal assumption is to be believed, God had an olive tree in the Old Testament, but He chopped it down in the first century and now watches over a second tree He planted, which is a peach tree.”

The Cultural Mind, p. 262

“In the light of history, to insist that Paul served grape juice at the Lord’s Supper is as silly as maintaining that he wore a necktie.”

The Cultural Mind, p. 259

“The classical Protestant, when asked where his church was before the Reformation, replies by asking, ‘Where was your face before you washed it?’”

The Cultural Mind, p. 258

“When it becomes apparent that the food on the table is still there after we open our eyes from saying grace, we should close them again to thank Him again.”

The Cultural Mind, pp. 254-255

“If I am the end product of atoms careening through a mindless universe, there is no one to whom I may show my gratitude, and yet my ethical need to be grateful is genuine. There, there is a God, and I thank Him for the green hills I saw yesterday.”

The Cultural Mind, p. 254

“When it comes to the ‘ecumenical question,’ we appear to have divided between two positions. The first says we should accept all kinds of heretical ‘Christians’ with all friendliness. The other says we should reject their heresies, along with their title to the name Christian. We have two positions. The first is that husbands cannot commit adultery, and the second is that adulterers are not husbands, and hence not adulterers. What never occurs to anyone is the duty of fighting our fellow Christians to the last ditch, as Athanasius did with Arius.”

The Cultural Mind, p. 247

“The Bible is not a grab bag of infallible truths, thoughtfully provided by God so that we could have an axiomatic starting point for our subsequently autonomous reasoning. The Scriptures are authoritative. We are men, with our breath in our nostrils. We are creatures with little pointy heads.”

The Cultural Mind, pp. 243-244

“Of course the Bible does not contain errors. But neither does my claim that triangles have three sides. What is the difference between the Bible’s inerrancy and my occasional bursts of it? The difference is the other essential component of sola Scriptura—ultimacy.”

The Cultural Mind, pp. 242-243