Theology That Bites Back
“Joseph did not find himself ruling Egypt because he graduated from the right law school. Daniel did not find himself a great man in Babylon through some shrewd Mesopotamian logrolling. They got where they did because they had backbones that would not bend.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 148
Another “error is the idea that since the Gospel will have political effects, politics can have a Gospel effect.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 148
“The first is the error of the man who insists we should ‘just preach the Gospel,’ but who also believes intensely that the Gospel can permeate an unbelieving society without throwing that society into cultural upheaval. In order to get the desired calm result, the Gospel that is preached has to be ethereal, otherworldly, and impotent.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 148
“The point of preaching is never to make Christ acceptable. But in a man-centered era, this is automatically thought to be the task of the preacher—somehow making God acceptable to man. The problem that confronts us in the Bible is actually quite different. The real problem is one of sin, and how to make sinful man acceptable to a holy God. The solution, which made holy angels stop their mouths, was the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection. That is how sinners are made acceptable to God.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 145
“George Whitefield once said that the churches of his time were dead because dead men preached to them. We may expand the observation. The churches are effeminate because effeminate men with wireless mics stroll around platforms chatting with the congregants. The churches are leaderless because we are nervous about prophetic preaching and settle instead for bland and balanced leadership teams. The churches have no sense of the numinous because men refuse to preach the greatness and glory of the living God.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 144
[Regarding Eph. 6:1-4] “So we have ourselves a chicken and egg problem. The fact that Paul commands fathers to begin a Christian process of enculturation means that he saw, with the eye of faith, the end result, which would have to be a Christian culture.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 141
“The message of ‘tax-supported anything but Christianity’ comes through loud and clear.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 140
“A conceited man thinks about himself all the time. A morbid, self-absorbed man does the same, and this means the two men have the same problem . . . ‘Learning how to love yourself’ is not the first step in obedience; it is clambering onto a veritable squirrel-cage run of disobedience.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 137
“So a humble man and a proud man are not distinguished from one another because the latter does what he wants and the former does not. Rather, they are distinguished because they want different things. No creature ever desired anything from a base outside its own desires. So a humble man delights in God, and a proud man delights in that which is not God.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 136-137
“In order to argue anything, a man has to be able to say this, not that; here, not there; A, not A. In short he has to be able to make distinctions. So argumentation depends on this, and distinctions in their turn depend on having an ultimate ground for making distinctions. In the historic Protestant view, the ultimate and greatest distinction that must be maintained at all times is the distinction between the Creator and the creature.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 132
