“We have come to believe that experience in sin qualifies us to speak authoritatively. Christians should know better. The only man who can speak with full authority on the subject of sin is the Lord Jesus—who never sinned.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 20
As In Our Own Time
“Malcolm Muggeridge once quoted the wit who identified a similar problem in the time of Britain’s decline: ‘Everything was at sea except for the fleet.’”
The Cultural Mind, p. 17
The Three Branches
“One of the principal causes of grief in our broader culture today is that we have taken His instructions to Larry and assigned them to Moe, and the instructions given to Curly have been taken up by Larry.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 16
Principled Thought
“As we look at the eternal antithesis between right and wrong as it looked when clothed in the details of another time, we will be equipped to see what can never be buried and what should be. We will see ideological fads and fashions, as well as the permanent things.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 14
The Devil’s Stragglers
“The biblical pattern of evangelism was not at all like our modern method of picking off the devil’s stragglers, but rather a pattern of bringing the good news to household after household.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 8
But It Is Not Close Enough
“Too often the picture of men at church is that of the hapless drone, maneuvered through the doors by a pious wife. He is not exactly spiritual, but he is docile, and that is reckoned to be close enough.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 7
Or Skin Tint
“The feminist movement is a sham because there is no scriptural covenant binding all women together into a sisterhood—any more than solidarity exists between people with the same birthdays, or eye color.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 2
A Shapeless Sack
“Without a legitimate bond, all attempts at community will be fragmented and atomistic. Because of our modern emphasis on individualism, this is a common problem. Our ‘communities’ have lost their former molecular strength—we see families and communities that have the atomistic structural rigor of a sack full of BBs.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 2
All Connected
“A Christian worldview is not a patchwork crazy quilt, with all kinds of oddments thrown together and sewn on. No, a Christian worldview is more like a scarf knitted from one skein of yarn. Everything in it is connected to everything else.”
The Cultural Mind, p. xv
Beware of the Hot Words
“Nothing ages more rapidly than the current lust for contemporary relevance, and nothing ages more gracefully than an attitude of caring more about whether an observation is true than whether it is contemporary, or edgy, or emergent. Emergent was a hot word back then.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. xiii-xiv