Theology That Bites Back
“Social calamities, therefore, must not be understood as ‘random bad things’—our God is a God who keeps covenant, and this necessarily includes covenant blessings and curses. And this cannot be understood apart from a diligent study of Scripture and church history up to the present.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 125
“The teaching of the Bible here is that the chaos of panic is not a response to chastisement but is part of the chastisement itself.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 124
“Even though this is America, we have no constitutional right to easy answers.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 124
“We see the lying ways in which we handle our laws, wanting them to be as slippery as our hearts.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 121
“Because the possibility of any kind of creedal discipline is negligible in our day, those who have abandoned the Gospel are now openly seeking to make their distinctive into negotiable items and want to be held by all as being ‘within the pale.’ Thus, we do not have to agree with them, but we do have to agree to disagree, and to do so as fellow . . . evangelicals. They do not resist disagreement; in fact, they welcome it. But the disagreement must come in the form of continuing dialogue, and not in the form of showing them the door.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 117
“If a man wants a garden full of weeds, he does not need to do a thing. And if a church wants its lampstand removed, in a fallen world, all that is necessary is a little more standing around”
The Cultural Mind, p. 116
“Christians are people of the Word, and as a result they are people of words. We love the Truth, and this is why we must necessarily love truths. The flip side of this is that when a love for the Lord Jesus declines, one of the first places it manifests itself is in an obvious contempt for words. Words become little lumps of neutral clay on which a dishonest heart can exercise its creativity. But the real source of this rebellion in the little things, and the final direction of it, is hostility to the ultimate Word”
The Cultural Mind, p. 115
“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
“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
“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
