Theology That Bites Back
“We think that it is a virtue to tolerate, forgetting that the Lord Jesus rebuked a church for tolerating that woman Jezebel. Everything hinges on what we are tolerating, and our global love for smooth words indicates that what we are mostly tolerating is our own hardness of heart.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 49
“If our hearts were a slab of concrete, and we wanted to keep them that way, our desire to have them caressed with a feather duster would exhibit no love of tenderness, but rather the contrary. The one who really wanted a tender heart would be calling for the jackhammer. Hard words, hard teaching, are the jackhammer of God . . . When Christians call for smooth words, easy words, the result is hard people. When we submit to hard words, we become the tenderhearted of God.”
The Cultural Mind, pp. 47-48
“We are not to give to others because we have been infected with wealth, and we, the guilty, want to pass on the cooties. We are to give from a sense of enjoyment and gratitude. A man plagued with guilt will give only enough to bring down the level of the guilt. A man giving from gratitude will always give much more.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 46
“Throughout the book of Revelation, the earth has many plagues that rain down upon it. Over the last two thousand years, Revelation has itself been treated to nearly the same number of interpretations, some of them the size of hailstones.”
When the Man Comes Around, p. 4
“When a man enrolls in a math class, we hope he is not surprised when he encounters math problems. When a man is living under the blessing of God, his temptations will of course come from those blessings.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 44
“When a man comes to Christ and begins to obey him, this means working with his hands and living a quiet life in all diligence. One of the consequences of this behavior is that the cocaine bill goes way down.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 43
“James tells us that a great deal of warfare comes about because we want and can’t have. This observation is not limited to toddlers grabbing things in the nursery; it includes kings and regiments, presidents and strike forces.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 42
“As many isolated and lonely Christians have found out, any reluctance to throw oneself into the cauldron of war fever is usually taken as some species of treachery.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 41
“While their benefits have no doubt been many, church pageants have also had the unfortunate result of making us think that biblical characters did little more than stand around in their bathrobes.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 39
“When the Spirit is grieved by elder boards packed with schoolmarms, liberty disappears along with any understanding of what true liberty even is. And when we have lost this understanding in the community of saints, we are dreaming to think we can find it anywhere else . . . Not to put too fine a point on it, we are becoming slaves of men in the political realm because we do not care enough about understanding liberty in the church. Freedom frightens us.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 37
