“And so the Constitution must be kept around to provide the smell of a hoary antiquity, while a relativistic hermeneutic is slapped on to provide judges with the untrammeled liberty of doing whatever they want.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 113
The Eve of Battle
“Hermeneutics, the art and science of interpretation, sounds like a horribly dusty affair. And, of course, some have handled the subject along those lines. That is not how it should be; when the question of how a text is to be interpreted arises, we should feel a leaden weight in the gut and adrenaline in the veins, as men feel before a battle.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 111
Not Supposed to Work
“All secular idolatries must totter and fall. This is a wonderful part of the hope found in the biblical worldview—that in the long run, stupidity never works.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 108
Hidden Debts
“So this is how a layman in the church might come to object to the study of ‘all this humanistic philosophy,’ and yet have his own general worldview shaped by the objectionable philosophy in question. Because he does not know his own presuppositions, he does not know if he shares them with anyone else, including Messrs. Plotinus and Locke. Avoiding philosophy does not work. American fundamentalism is notorious for adopting in substance various philosophies that have somehow been purified through an ignorance of the adoption.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 105
The Genesis of Apostasy
“The tragedy of our time is that the Church currently wants to be cool, and for a host of reasons, as long as it remains recognizably Christian, it cannot be.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 101
Cooler Than Thou
“The category of cool represents a postmodern attempt to establish a relativistic antithesis. In this view, the human race is divided into two categories, square and hip, or, put another way cool and uncool. Unless the false conservative antitheses, the boundaries keep shifting. And unlike the liberal view, there really is an avowed antithesis between those who meet the standard and those who do not.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 100
Aesthetic Rot
“A man in error will pick up the wrong side of a debate. But a relativists says that all such debates are silly and unproductive. There is no debate, because there is no answer.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 98
Not Self Aware
“There is only one thing worse than being wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked, and that is to be all five of those things and add to it the sixth misery of not knowing about it.”
Artistic Atheism
“In the realm of aesthetics, we are almost as relativistic as the world outside . . . In this, we sound just like the people we debate in matters of truth and ethics. The reason we sound like them is that because, on this issue, we are like them.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 95-96
Pure Bred Spaniel
“Paul tells us what kind of character a prospective minister should have. He must be a one-woman man, he must be temperate, and he must not have a quick temper. We have a better idea, which involves a good deal of graduate study. In order to get his certification, he must ignore his wife for three years, and teach her what the back of his head looks like. Now this is in no way a criticism of the classical Reformed emphasis on a learned ministry. The problem is not that we seek wisdom and learning in our pastors; the problem is that we measure it by means of stamped papers, as though his wisdom was a pure bred spaniel.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 92-93