Douglas Wilson Quotes

Become the kind of person the kind of person you would like to marry would like to marry.

Education is the process of selling someone on books.

Immodest and attractive is easy. Modest and repulsive is easy too. But modest and attractive is an art form.

This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them.

To reject Christ because the church has sin of this sort in it is like rejecting hospitals because they are full of sick people.

God gave us minds to think with and hearts to thank with. Instead we use our hearts to think about the world as we would like it to have been, and we use our minds to come up with rationalizations for our ingratitude. We are a murmuring, discontented, unhappy, ungrateful people. And because we think we want salvation from our discontents...

If boys don't learn, men won't know.

Remember that Jesus has a body in this world. You are His hands and feet. But remember also that His hands and feet were pierced.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

God picks us up where we are, not where we should have been

If there are weeds in my garden, I have a problem. But it does not lead me to question the existence of lettuce.

Beware of anyone who claims to be neutral, for they always have an agenda.

When the parent is qualified to discipline, he probably does not feel like it, and when he feels like it, he is probably not qualified.

Be at peace with being lousy for a while. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. He was right. Only an insufferable egoist expects to be brilliant first time out.

Honor must start in the heart, but if it ends there, it isn’t honor. Honor must be expressed through words, symbols, actions, or gestures. Honor is among the most incarnational of the virtues. It must have feet and hands.

But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.

For the people of God, the Word of God leaves pleasant bruises.

Wealth is a gift from God, and pride is bequeathed to us from the devil.

Your writing advances a particular view of the world. Pretending that it does't just confuses everybody, starting with you.

The fact that you can't remember things doesn't mean that you haven't been shaped by them.

A lot of aspiring writers quote the right people, but they do so like Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. They quote Austen like Mary quoted her eighteenth-century bromides, and were Austen here to see them do it, she'd slap them right into her next book, and it wouldn't be pretty.

The independence of art from worldview and worldview concerns is a myth. Every work of art is produced within a framework of worldview assumptions.

Collections do not leave the collector unaffected. The art of collecting results in a certain turn of mind.

I believe firmly in plodding. Productivity is more a matter of diligent, long-distance hiking than it is one-hundred-yard dashing. Doing a little bit now is far better than hoping to do a lot on the morrow. So redeem the fifteen minute spaces. Chip away at it.

The TSA must think we're mushrooms. You know, the way they are trying to keep us in the dark, and the way they keep feeding us a fertilizing agent that comes from the south end of a north-bound cow.

The brain is not a shoebox that 'gets full,' but rather a muscle that expands its capacity with increased use. The more you know, the more you can know.

Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed.

I have often told people that they need to evaluate their lives by the video, and not by the snapshot. That is, they should not just look at one moment in time, but rather consider trajectories, tendencies, and narrative arc as well.

Pace yourself in your reading. A little bit every day really adds up. If you read during sporadic reading jags, the fits and starts will not get you anywhere close to the amount of reading you will need to do. It is far better to walk a mile a day than to run five miles every other month. Make time for reading, and make a daily habit of it, even if it is a relatively small daily habit.

Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don't own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coercive means, destroys industries. Organized labor is piracy without the boats and eye patches. Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor?

You read widely to be shaped, not so that you might be prepared to regurgitate.

Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks.

If I were to announce that I had suddenly converted to Catholicism, I know that Larry Taunton and Douglas Wilson would feel I had fallen into grievous error. On the other hand, if I were to join either of their Protestant evangelical groups, the followers of Rome would not think my soul was much safer than it is now, while a late-in-life decision to adhere to Judaism or Islam would inevitably lose me many prayers from both factions. I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

God is not an actor within the larger scheme of things. He is not a muscle-bound Jupiter, bullying the littler ones. He is the Author of the whole thing. We never ask how much of Hamlet's role was contributed by Hamlet, and how much by Shakespeare. That is not a question that can be answered with 70/30 or 50/50 or 90/10. The right answer is 100/100. Hamlet's actions are all Hamlet's and they are all Shakespeare's. Douglas Wilson

We are like fruitflies, measuring everything in terms of our own lifespan. But since our lifespans are so short, our perspective is entirely wrong. God, who inhabits eternity, sees things differently. He knows that our lives are just a mist. We should trust Him. It was not that long ago that Jesus came and it will not be that long before He returns.

Know something about the world, and by this I mean the world outside of books. This might require joining the Marines, or working on an oil rig or as a hash slinger at a truck stop in Kentucky. Know what it smells like out there. If everything you write smells like a library, then your prospective audience will be limited to those who like the smell of libraries.

Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write.

Stories in themselves are not automatically good; it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.

...if the Democrats suggested a plan to burn down the Capitol building, the Republicans would counter with a plan to do it over the course of three years.

I don’t feel safe around anything when Jesus is not the Lord of it. Calvinism without Jesus is deadly; it’s fatalism, it’s simply Islam. We need Jesus. When the precious doctrines [of Calvinism] are used to perpetuate gloom, severity, introspection, accusations, morbidity, slander, gnat-stringing, and more, the soul is not safe.

Propaganda (things to be propagated) is inescapable. It is not *whether* certain values will be propagated, but rather, *which* values will be propagated.

The fulfillment of the cultural mandate involves hard work, and men need to be hard in order to do the work.

If it does not come at the last to gladness, then to hell with it.

Your deep interests should always have a dog-eared place on your nightstand.

He who walks with the wise will be wise, Scripture saith, and he who walks with the witty will eventually start to pop off himself.

You do not create ex nihilo. You rearrange and recombine. You are the same old flour and eggs in search of a new recipe.

People who insist upon dressing casually also want to think casually. And in a fallen world, thinking casually means being wrong more often than not.

Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.

How is it possible to live like a machine and bear fruit like a tree?

Once young girls used to play with baby dolls, seeing themselves in the role of the nurturing mother; now they can be seen playing with Barbie dolls, seeing themselves in the place of the doll. And of course, the doll is both pretty and stacked. The pressure is on and stays on.

Whenever two unbelievers quarrel, the may both say some very insightful things about the unsightly habits of the other. The postmodernists are very good at pointing out the pretensions of the modernists. And the modernists are very good at pointing out the incoherence of the postmodernists.

There are two basic approaches to life- one in which the world is a world of scarcity, given to us by the skinflint god, and the other in which the world is a world of endless possibilities, bestowed on us by a loving Father.

The Biblical educator must not only have a Christian understanding of the material, he must have a Biblical understanding of the student. If he does not, then the result will be a hybrid Christian methodology employed to achieve a humanistic goal.

You have to have that rare combination of thick skin and a tender heart. Most writers get it backward and have a tender skin and a thick heart... Every critic, however ill-informed, represents a point of view which is likely not limited to just him... Sometimes you will disagree with your critic, but you can always gain from him.

Joy is deep satisfaction in the will of God, and this must be coupled with recognizing the reality that God’s will is everywhere and in everything. There is no place where we may go and be allowed to murmur or despair because God’s will is somehow “not there.

Plod diligently. Plodding generally goes in the same direction, while pottering doesn't.

God blesses giving, so every use of language, down to the lowliest tweet, ought to be thought of as a gift to others.

Criticism should be received as a kindness (Ps. 141:5).

Information can get from a professors lecture notes and into a student's notebook without passing through the mind of either.

And so it easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a teenager to enter the kingdom of heaven listening to the Dave Matthews Band.

...one of the glories of education is the opportunity to hear the truth come out of a human being with blood in the veins and air in the lungs, and not just off a printed page.

If boys don't learn, men won't know

Certain grammatical rules are arbitrary, but the need to have these arbitrary rules is not arbitrary.

It is quite true that Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. But of course we now know that Marxism is the crack cocaine of the people.

Whether the Bible is Law or Gospel depends on the spiritual condition of the one hearing it. If someone is regenerate and loves God, then the whole Bible is Gospel to him. If someone is unregenerate and hates God, the whole Bible is Law to him, the whole thing condemns him.

The apostle James tells us that a man who can control his tongue can control the rest of his body as well. This goes double for the man who is putting what the tongue does into a more permanent setting.

Modern evangelicals like to compare holy things to soft drinks, designer clothes, [and other products in] our modern consumerist culture. The problem with this is not ... the comparison to a created thing. The problem is that it is ... bad poetry. The Bible compares God to very mundane things, but does so with poetic wonder. God "shall come down like rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth.

Allusion is lovely, and experience with other forms of writing brings the ability to use that device pervasively. This in turn sets high expectations for the reader- in that you are expecting him to pick up on it- and this is a way of respecting your readers. And when you respect your readers, they will come to respect you.

The ground for the necessity of Christian schools lies in this very thing, that no fact can be known unless it be known in its relationship to God. And once this point is clearly seen, the doubt as to the value of teaching arithmetic in Christian schools falls out of the picture. Of course arithmetic must be taught in a Christian school. It cannot be taught anywhere else.

Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This is why individual heart transformation, not legislation, is fundamental to national reformation. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.

One of the elements of writing that is most delightful to the engaged reader is the element of surprise. And one of the ways to surprise the reader is to set up an expectation that you then veer away from it at the last moment. A stitch in time saves the penny earned. Or something like that.

If you like to eat what you like to eat, this means that you are a human being. If you are morally indignant about the food choices of others, this means you are well on the way to becoming a food leftist. Leftism is that impulse that wants to establish coercion and call it community (p. 139)

The issue is not the thing, but rather our approach to the thing. Same as with food. Our temptation is to objectify the problem, trying to locate sin in the stuff—in the tobacco, in the alcohol, in the gun, in the donut—instead of where sin is actually located, which is right under the breastbone.

Every culture has blasphemy laws. They are not always called that, but no society allows citizens to rail against the reigning deity. In our pluralistic times, these blasphemy laws are called “hate crimes” legislation, among other euphemisms, but they are really religious protections to keep the reigning god, demos, from being blasphemed.

We sometimes do not appreciate the magnitude of the problem here. How could the eternal Word of the eternal Father take on limits? How can infinitude and finitude marry? The doctrine of the Incarnation proclaims frankly and without embarrassment the most stupendous miracle that can be imagined. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the Incarnate Deity.

Anyone who subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith is a Christian nationalist.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous. —Edward O. Wilson

As you read, allow your reading to cluster around your interests.

Collect and read dictionaries. Take a couple of minutes every day to read a page. Highlight fun words you didn't know before and write them down somewhere else.

Sins are like grapes; they come in bunches.

We confess that Jesus is Lord. He is not simply Lord of a spiritual zone somewhere, but He is Lord of the nations.

Blaming public Christians for being ‘too political’ is like blaming Noah’s ark for being ‘too wet

In a world of spiritual eunuchs, it is good to find a man who is more than simply male.

Relationships are supposed to mature. This maturing means growth and improvement, not the constant buzz of the initial rush.

if God doesn’t want us to do it, He doesn’t want us to get pleasure from thinking about doing it

The point of a true education is to, by the grace of God, learn how to refuse to let the soul get old.

Reformers must remember always that religion shapes culture, and culture trumps politics.

I have long said that good teaching consists in loving the subject you are teaching in the presence of students whom you also love.

The reign of Christ has been established. The nations who object to this settlement trouble the decrees of God about as much as dogs barking at the moon trouble the moon.

Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This

A racist, then, is someone who takes the scripturally insufficient grounds of racial differences to justify his own malice or petty pride.

You cannot receive what you are unwilling for God to give to someone else also.

To mock the color of a man’s skin is to defy the handiwork of God.

We are currently living under a form of government that our Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent.

But with all this said, wine was given to gladden the heart of man (Ps. 104:15), and one of the duties a father has is that of teaching his son to drink.

...he hardly knew any facts and was thus having trouble sticking to them.

The Anglo-Saxons had a great word for the right word, the word that you need right now, when another one simply would not do. That word is wordriht.

Our good God, our overflowing God, our God of yes and amen, has always been able to promise far more than we are able to believe.

Our God is able to deliver us, but even if He does not, be it known, o king, that we will not consent to applaud the use of a man as though he were a woman.

If you do not discipline your children effectively, you hate them.

One of the most pernicious errors that has gotten abroad in the Christian community is the error of sentimentalism - the view that evil is to be evaded, rather than the more robust Christian view that it is to be conquered. The Christian believes that evil is there to be fought, the dragon is there to be slain. The sentimentalist believes that evil is to be resented.

They want to keep the government ‘out of our bedrooms.’ What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my own bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows and what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms? The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar.

One of the most important things we can learn from Scripture is how to see ourselves accurately in the story in which we find ourselves. What story is God telling, and how does it concern us?

One of the reasons why Christians are so discouraged by the turn events have taken is that they have not been steeped in the right kind of stories. Smaug is great, but Bard has one arrow left.

We test students right after they read something mostly to ensure that they have in fact read it. From this, many have drawn the erroneous conclusion that the only good that can be extracted from their reading is that which can be displayed on or measured by a test. This is wildly inaccurate. Most of the good your reading and education has done for you is not something you can recall at all.

Men are created to exercise dominion over the earth; they are fitted to be husbandman, tilling the earth; they are equipped to be saviors, delivering from evil; they are expected to grow up into wisdom, becoming sages; and they are designed to reflect the image and glory of God. Some of these following terms may seem somewhat cumbersome, but let’s call them lords, husbandmen, saviors, sages, and glory-bearers.

Most of what is shaping you in the course of your reading you will not be able to remember. The most formative years of my life were the first five, and if those years were to be evaluated on the basis of my ability to pass a test on them, the conclusion would be that nothing important happened then, which would be false. The fact that you can’t remember things doesn’t mean that you haven’t been shaped by them.

For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. (1 Cor. 15:25–26) In the common assumption shared by many Christians, at the Lord’s return the first enemy to be destroyed is death. But the apostle here says that it is the last enemy to be destroyed. The Lord will rule from heaven, progressively subduing all His enemies through the power of the gospel, brought to the nations by His Church. And then, when it would be easy to believe that it just couldn’t get any better, the Lord will come and deliver the kingdom to His Father, and God will be all in all.

Unbelief squashes; faith teaches. Faith takes a boy aside, and tells him that this part of what he did was good, while that other part of what he did got in the way. “And this is how to do it better next time.

The point is not to read widely so that your voice will be sort of a mutt descended from them all. The point is to read widely enough to know what delights you, what you would like to imitate, and what you want to stay away from.

Disagreements about things like the necessity of Christian education are actually disagreements about the nature of knowledge, the meaning of common grace, the authority of natural revelation, and the possibility of neutrality in education.

Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths. Now we worship Motor Oil. If our rejection of the old idols were Christian repentance, God would bless it, but what is actually happening is that we are sinking below the level of the ancient pagans. But when we turn to Christ in truth, we find that He has ordained every day of marriage as a proclamation of his covenant with the church. A man who embraces what is expected of him will find a good wife and a welcoming hearth. He who loves his wife loves himself.

Liberty is not a middle position between legalism and license; it is another thing entirely. We have a hard time with this. Liberty is not moderate legalism or moderated license. Liberty is stricter than legalism, and liberty is freer than license.

Fresh corn tastes better than canned corn, and who knew? So if you want to pay extra for that, great. Be our guest. But quit acting like it is a ‘conscience and responsibility’ thing, because canned corn is nutritionally better than no corn.(p. 91).

In Acts 14:1, we are told, "At Iconium Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue. There they spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Gentiles believed." This is what should be sought in Christian schools, not just teaching, but effective teaching. Christian content alone is insufficient. It must be presented in a certain way, and that way cannot be reduced to technique. Nevertheless, God has graciously made it possible to bring people the truth by how the truth is presented.

Husbands must, therefore, concentrate on being strong for the sake of their wives. Ungodly men are strong for selfish reasons, and not for the sake of others. A godly husband uses his strength to give to her; he does not use his strength to take from her.

Christian men ought not refrain from the sexual pollutions that surround us because they object to lovemaking; they refrain because they object to the wanton vandalism of it. Our culture is doing to sex what people who chew with their mouths open do to food.

I don’t have any beef against wealthy people enjoying superior food . . . I do have a beef against upper middle class NPR listeners strolling down to farmer’s markets as though they were earthy peasants in touch with the rhythms of the earth. Why are they in touch with the rhythms of the earth? Well, because they are wealthy enough to pay three times more for corn on the cob than a guy who lives in a trailer on the edge of town, works at the sawmill, and buys his corn on the cob at Sam’s Club, the Philistine (pp. 87-88)

A creedal church is one in which the words I believe in God the Father Almighty provoke tears of gladness in strong men. A creed muttered in nominal unbelief is oxymoronic. The word creed comes from "credo," I believe. A creedal church believes certain things to be true, and acts as though truth mattered.

Every Christian school must adopt an implicit, absolute, childlike wonder at the glory of the Scriptures. We must be people of the Book, knowing it top to bottom, front to back. And we must resolve, before the fact, to have absolutely no problem with any passage of Scripture once the meaning of that passage has been ascertained through honest exegesis. This means, among other things, that Christians must be prepared to condemn sodomy, embrace the doctrine of creation, say that husbands are the heads of their wives, believe in giants and dragons, and believe in Noah’s ark right down to, if necessary, the giraffe’s head sticking out the window.

This is as good a place as any to insist that all the characters in Evangellyfish are fictional, and I made them all up out of my own head. Any resemblance to any real people, living or dead, is their own darn fault. If they quit acting like that, the resemblance would cease immediately and we wouldn’t have to worry about it.

All this said, fussy grammarians need friends too, and so you may seek out and encourage them. Drop them a little note, telling them that they are your very favorite fussy grammarian, out with whom you like to hang. And if anybody winced there at my use of a plural pronoun for an indefinite singular, then may I suggest counseling?

The carnival of carnage that takes place every day, month and year in the realm of industry; the thousands of useful lives that are annually sacrificed to the Moloch of greed; the blood tribute paid by labor to capitalism, brings forth no shout for vengeance and reparation; no tear, except from the family and friends of the victims.

A malicious racist is someone who directs malice, spite, or hatred toward another human being of another race because that person belongs to that other race. A patronizing racist is someone who takes personal ego credit for any superiority he may have (whether real or imagined, usually imagined) over someone who belongs to another race.

We need to make sure we are doing what Jesus said and not what we thought Jesus must have said. The textbook case against Christian activism can be made in one word—Prohibition—the word that would have made the Lord Jesus at Cana into a moonshiner felon. We did a great job there of setting aside the Word of God for the sake of our tradition

We are starting to slide when we start to judge our brother’s motives by whether or not he experiences the same gut response of reactive compassion to the outrage we are assigned to deal with. But a Christian nurse in Romania who has dedicated herself to caring for abandoned orphans with birth defects may never have heard of Roe v. Wade. She doesn’t need to.

The unity our nation needs—and we do desperately need it—is not a “group hug” unity, and it is not that kind of unity with a Jesus shine put on it. The message is not “Jesus could help us to like each other better,” although that would be a downstream consequence. The message we rather need to hear, and which the church needs to declare, is “Jesus forgives our sins.

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.' (Prov. 27:17) In a similar way that conversation sharpens a man's countenance, conversation with men throughout history sharpens a man's mind... If this is the case, and it is, then a point should be made to seek out profitable companions in a disciplined fashion throughout your life with books.

Light - both physical and moral - was a central concern to the men and women living in the medieval age. They attempted to explore its properties in the colors of a stained glass canopy, in the tenor of a brisk saltarello, in the lilt of a Jongleur's ballad, in the sweet savor of a banqueting table, in the rhapsody of a well planned garden, indeed, in every arena and discipline of life.

This tells us that the fundamental law/gospel divide is not to be found in the text of Scripture. It is found in the difference between regenerate and unregenerate man. For the regenerate, everything from God is sweeter than the honeycomb. All of it is grace. For the unregenerate, the whole thing is the stench of death, including the good news of Christ on the cross. All of it is law and condemnation.

Imagination, as Napoleon once remarked, rules the world. One of our great problems is that we have relegated imagination to various artsy ghettos, there to let it play. But imagination, including—especially including—artistic imagination, has to be understood as a practical science. It must govern everything, and if it is detached from the praxis of life and then uprooted, it goes off to the art museums to die. For

We are told that this child was born in order to rule, for the government will be upon his shoulder. And the second thing we are told about His government is that it will continually increase (v. 7). He will bear the government upon His shoulder, and it will be a continually increasing government. This increase—unlike the growth of secular governments—will be a blessing, and not a pestilence. This is the real big government.

I take it as a given that any conservative Christian who addresses cultural issues at all is not worth his salt if he does not get himself accused of racism. I am convinced that unless we are drawing that charge somehow, some way, then we are not doing our part to threaten the prevailing multicultural hooey. It is therefore important to incur the charge of racism. It is equally important that the charge be a slander and a falsehood.

Nonbelievers can teach the truth in any given area only on the basis of common grace—that is, if they borrow Christian categories on the sly in order to do so. But when nonbelievers grow increasingly aware of their epistemological assumptions, they begin rejecting the very concept of truth—every manifestation of it—and they embrace the absurd. And this is why the only place where academic integrity can flourish over time is in a Christian school. The

Eternity and time confound The buckling minds of mortal men, Who rail at God as though He were A lesser god or one of them. They hate discriminating love And drag it into human courts To try to crucify the cross. “Will you try Me?” our Lord retorts. Though pearls may fall beneath the swine, They do not therefore cease to be, And trampling won’t deface a shine Decreed before eternity. So hold your peace, rebellious pot, The Lord is God—and you are not.

But the important test question here isn't whether Christianity teaches egalitarianism or an old earth, but what if it clearly didn't? Would we be embarrassed then? What if Scripture really taught all those horrible things mocked so loudly by moderns-would we be ashamed? This is a wonderful personal test. Think of the most horrible moral or scientific accusation raised against the Christian faith and then ask, what if it's true? Would we be embarrassed to stand by Christ?

When sinners fight with other sinners, the problem is never one of finding a plausible target. The problem with the spirit of accusation is that it is diabolical and destructive, not that it is inaccurate. The flaming darts of the evil one frequently find a suitable target. But there is a difference between the condemnation offered by the devil and the spirit of conviction offered by the Spirit of God. They both strike at the darling sin, but one with a cudgel and the other with a surgeon’s scalpel.

Nothing can take the puff out of the scientific chest more than a study of its history. Perhaps that's why it's so rare to find science departments requiring courses in the history of science. The history of science provides great strength to the inductive inference that, at any point in its history, that day's science will almost certainly be deemed false, if not laughable, within a century (often in much less time). As the saying goes, if you marry the science of today, you will be a widow tomorrow.

God directly inspired the writers of the New Testament canon and so the words recorded by them in the autographs are God’s Word absolute, inerrant and infallible in all they affirm. This inspiration extends down to the Greek equivalent of jots and tittles—Jesus was emphatic about that (Matt. 5:18). And if inspiration is applied to the smallest pen strokes, it certainly should also apply to sentences, paragraphs, pericopes, and more. The relevance of the doctrine of inspiration extends into all the corners.

Gelernter says, “If there is to be justice in the world, America must create it.”17 When I read things like that, I usually have my jumpin’ Jehoshaphat reaction. Did he really say that? Yes, he did, but the reason he is able to get away with it is because of the massive loss of confidence and faith that Christians have in Scripture. How can we be appalled when he says that if we are not willing to counter immediately with, “No, if there is to be justice in the world, and in this nation, Jesus must do it”? The

The reformation of the church must occur so that there is a reformation of our subculture, and then our subculture will affect the larger polis. Expecting our faith to affect the larger polis when it has not yet changed the average shelf at the local Christian book store is expecting something that is not going to happen. With the weird exception of baseball, where the ball is handled entirely by the defense, you can’t score points until you have the ball. And reformers will not have the ball until they have a culture.

What Satan offered Christ in the temptation in the wilderness, Christ refused. But Christ did not refuse the offer because He didn’t want what was offered. He didn’t want it on those terms, but the reason He had come down to earth was to obtain those very kingdoms. He refused the tempter’s offer because He was planning to knock him down and take the kingdoms of men from him. “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. And then he will plunder his house” (Mk. 3:27).

If anyone seriously thinks by going natural, he will be escaping The Establishment, finally getting away from The Man and from the clutches of the good corporations, I have a bit of bad news. The corporations are way ahead of you. There are high-powered boards sitting around half-an-acre mahogany tables on the thirty-third floors of skyscrapers in New York City, and they are meeting right this minute, and they are making decisions on the marketing of the ponderosa pine bark chips, lightly salted. If you slice them thin enough, they approach being edible

Christian equality can be described as equity, or even-handedness. Egalitarianism, in contrast, demands sameness, or equality of outcome. These two visions of equality are about as comparable as dry and wet. Think of it in terms of ten teenage boys trying to dunk a basketball: equity means that they all face the same ten-foot standard, and only two them them can do it — equity thus usually means differences in outcome. Egalitarianism wants equality of outcome, and there is only one way to get that — lower the net. Sameness of outcome requires differences in the standards.

We cannot know the ways in which God will weave together all the details of human history into the most beautiful story that has ever been told. We know that He will do exactly that, but we don’t know how He will do it. And we don’t even know the nature of most of the subplots. We know that Christ crucified and risen is at the center of the great story, because He has told us that part, and we know that the story is a comedy, not a tragedy. The story begins in a garden, and ends with a garden city. It begins with a simple wedding in a garden, and it ends with a magnificent royal wedding in that garden city.

The Bible is a collection of documents for the Church; it is the library of the Church—the first and foundational church library. We can say that it is, in a certain limited sense, for every individual Christian, but we cannot say that it was written to every individual Christian. And in order for us to find out what it means for us, we have to first determine what it meant for the people who received it at the first. The order is this: the Word of God comes, first, to those to whom it is addressed, second, it is for the entire Church of God, and third, in descending order of importance, we may say that it is for the individual Christian.

Now things have changed. In our day, evangelicals almost yearn to be described as "sour, gloomy, and severe," as we grovel in our self-centered pietism and political campaigns for external morality. What a different world we would live in if Christians were characterized, not as those calling for Federal prohibitions on this and that, but for the right to celebrate? What if we were known by our enemies, not for our shallow sentimentalism and indifference to beauty, but as that community most exuberantly living life to the fullest, full of eating, drinking, and merriment (Eccl. 8:15)? Perhaps then we could be slandered like our Lord for being gluttons, winebibbers, and friends of sinners (Matt. I I:19).

Someone might object that they have been taught that God loves sinners, including those who sin racially, unconditionally. No, God loves sinners in Christ. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. The only place where a sinner can possibly be a recipient of God’s love is in Christ. God’s love for sinners was bestowed and manifested in one place only, and that place was the cross of Christ. And so what happens to those who hate Christ, who despise His cross, who insist on turning their face away from Him? What happens to those who stand aloof from God’s solitary provision for sinners? They remain outside in the twilight—a twilight that is rapidly becoming the outer darkness. Where they stand, they hate God, and God hates them.

If you are writing for an educated audience and, to take an example, you use the phrase mutatis mutandis, you are not showing off—you are communicating. You are using words to do what words are supposed to do. It reminds me of the time that someone complained to William F. Buckley about all the unusual words that he would employ. His reply was that the words were not unusual to him. Words are there for a reason, and foreign phrases can often do the trick that more homey phrases cannot. But if you are blogging about your adventures as a shopping mom, and you write about your purchase of a 48-pack of corn dogs at Costco, and you describe them as de provenance étrangère, it had better be a joke. Unusual words or phrases (foreign and domestic) are a barrier to understanding, unless the point is to communicate to the reader that you know something they don't. Then they understand what you are doing quite well.

You all are in a hopeless bind here. Standards are inescapable. Imposed standards are inescapable. You want to pretend that this is not the case, all the while vigorously telling us how you would impose them. The funniest thing about this is that you cannot see (or will not admit) what you are doing. We (conservative Christians) have a standard, we know the basis for it, and we are willing to live by it and defend it. You [progressives] have a standard, you are willing to impose it on the rest of us, but when called upon to defend or explain your standard (and why it is authoritative over all of us), you surround yourselves with a cloud of clichés. But no society can exist unless the adherents of the worldview in power are willing to act via the law as though the adherents of various minority views are just flat wrong. Just admit that this is what you are currently doing to us. The rest of your day will be sunny and filled with epistemic relief.

One of the most difficult things for modern men to understand is how they are responsible for their wives. Men come into a marriage pastoral counseling session with the assumption that “She has her problems,” and “I have mine,” and the counselor is here to help us split the difference. But the husband is responsible for all the problems. This is the case for no other reason than that he is the husband. This does not mean that the wife has no personal responsibilities as an individual before God. She certainly does, just as her husband has individual responsibility. They are both private persons who stand before God. But he remains the head, and just as Christ as the head assumed all the responsibility for all the sins of all His people, so the husband is to assume covenant responsibility for the state of his marriage. If a husband says that he objects to this because it is not fair for him to be held responsible for the failings of another, he is really saying that he objects to the gospel. It was not “fair” for Christ to assume responsibility for our sins either. But while it may not have been fair as we define it, it was nevertheless just and merciful.

A man who is the head of his wife is preaching all day about Christ and the Church—his obedience or disobedience will determine whether his preaching is full of lies or not, but the very nature of his relation to his wife means that he is preaching, like it or not. Picture Christ murmuring against His wife to the Father, “The woman Thou gavest . . .” Imagine Christ blaming the Church, pointing an accusing finger. Try to picture Christ wishing that He were with someone else. Every situation we might come up with piles absurdity on absurdity. When a man learns this and begins to treat his wife in a manner consistent with that insight, he soon sees the difference between sentimental attachments and covenantal identity. Christ loved His bride with an efficacious love; He loved the Church in a way which transformed her. In the same way a husband is to assume responsibility for his wife’s increasing loveliness. One man marries a pretty woman and hopes, fingers crossed, that she will manage to stay that way. But a federal husband marries a beautiful woman and vows before God and witnesses that he will nourish and cherish her in such a way that she flourishes in that beauty. Christ bestowed loveliness on His Church through His love. A Christian man is called to do the same. Covenant loving bestows loveliness. Federal commitment imparts beauty.

One time G. K. Chesterton, the rolypologist, was patted on the stomach by his adversary, George Bernard Shaw, a beanpole of an infidel, and was asked what they were going to name the baby. Chesterton replied immediately that if it was a boy, John, if a girl, then Mary. But if it turned out to only be gas, they were going to name it George Bernard Shaw.

that the severest blow of retaliation for that sin fell upon Himself. What kind of God is this? God gave Adam a perfect world, a perfect wife, a perfect environment, a perfect commission, a perfect vocation, and then, even when Adam and Eve transgressed, doing the one thing in that perfect world that was not permitted, even then God promised that the seed of the woman would destroy the seed of the serpent, crushing its head (Gen. 3:15). Imitate that. The environment of your home should be full of grace. When you have a home filled with grace, it is not without standards. You are not introducing moral anarchy. Grace is not an amorphous, gelatinous mass. Grace has a backbone. However, when the standards are broken, the heaviest sacrifices in the work of restoration are made by the guardians of grace, not by enforcers of law, finger-pointers, parental accusers, or people who correct in a nasal tone of self-pity.

A man may not be a vocational theologian, but in his home he must the resident theologian. The apostle Paul, when he is urging women to keep silent in church, tells them that "if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home" (1 Corinthians 14:35). The tragedy is that many modern women have to wonder why the Bible says they should have to ask their husbands. "He doesn't know." But a husband must be prepared to answer his wife's doctrinal questions, and if he cannot, then he must be prepared to study so that he can remedy the deficiency. This famous passage is not such a restriction for wives as it is a requirement for husbands. If he doesn't know, he must find out.

In the long run, pragmatism doesn’t work. Focusing on the GDP alone is bad for the GDP. It does not profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul, and there is an additional sting when he then loses the world too. Whatever you worship in place of God is another thing you lose. Whatever you surrender gladly to Him is returned to you, pressed down, shaken, and running over.

And, while administrators at the Wilson Metals Lab might not allow students to create trimethylaluminum, this exotic metal really is pyrophoric (spontaneously combusts).

The Bible teaches us that lovemaking is to be honoured among Christians; to honour something means to esteem it highly. Those Christians who have reacted to public immorality by retreating into blue-nosed prudishness in their own bedrooms are very much part of the problem

Husbandry is the careful management of resources - It is stewardship. And when someone undertakes to husband a woman, he must understand that it cannot be done unless he acts with authority.

But a man who has not been the head of his home must confess his abdication as sin - He must treat it the same way he would treat theft, or adultery. It is disobedience.

When it comes to the history of ideas, it is relatively simple to show that religious toleration, which includes tolerating verbal expressions of ideas repugnant to you, is an idea that germinated in Christian soil. In Christian history, we see it as early as Lactantius (an early church father who tutored Constantine’s kids), and it comes to full bloom in the American Bill of Rights. Letting other people express their errors without fear of reprisal is a distinctively Christian ideal.

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lost once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.1

Scripture focuses on the political rulers, and this is because it is where the fundamental challenge was mounted.

Of course, marriage in one sense changes who you are in certain ways, but it also simply amplifies what you are. Many people think that when they got married, they turned into selfish people. What actually happened is they plugged the guitar into the amp and turned it up to eleven, and the selfish tune they had been playing the whole time suddenly became audible.

The issue is not the rate at which things get dirty. Marriages will always include bumps, fusses, misunderstandings, and problems. However, when these problems arise, you will either push them away or you are going to deal with them right away. When you do not deal with them right away, they accumulate. Marriages that are put together are marriages where sin is not allowed to accumulate.

Spurgeon once said, “Faults are thick where love is thin.

The issue is not the sale of goods to sinners, but rather the celebration of sin with sinners….You do not want your expertise in making things look attractive and winsome to be used in making iniquity look attractive and winsome. The reason these particular professions have become the battleground is that homosexual activists are demanding, not our co-participation in the same economy, but rather our approval. They will not stop until they have that approval, and we shall rather die than give it.

Historical optimism about Christ’s kingdom on earth means that we believe—because the child was born two millennia ago—that since that time, the increase of His government and peace has been unceasing. We believe that the government is on His shoulder, not that it should be. Jesus believed the same thing, because when He sent His disciples out, it was with this truth as the basis for the commission. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Mt. 28:18, niv). For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. (1 Cor. 15:25–26)

Words form societal expectation; words catechize; words build. And if there is another civilization in the way, words tear down.

Never forget that the devil at heart is a prohibitionist.

Excellence in education is the result of vision, hard work, parental love, and a clear sense of mission. It does not depend upon bureaucratic accreditation.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

We have a perennial temptation to locate sin as resident in the stuff. Some refuse to see sin in the stuff, and therefore conclude that there must not be any sin. These are the technophiles. Others see clearly that there is sin, and so they conclude that it must be in the stuff, though maybe it is not in the earlier stuff. These are the technophobes

Now, what we call technology is simply an array of tools laid out on the bench for us. Technology is therefore a form of wealth. The reason this is important is because the Bible says very little about technology as such, but it gives us a great deal of blunt and pointed teaching on the subject of wealth. If we learn how to deal with wealth scripturally, then we will have learned how to deal with technology.

So if technology is wealth, then we are all surrounded with astounding amounts of it. This is what I refer to as tangible grace.

If you get together with a friend and talk about how so-and-so is having trouble in his marriage, and you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. You are a gossip. But if you tell a friend who asked about it that your brother in Christ installed your kitchen cabinets upside down, that is not gossip. People who do not want public evaluation of the quality of their work are people who have no business being in business. They should just buy a shovel and dig where they are told to.

First, work is a good thing, and the hard way is actually the easy way. As a general rule, the difficult parts should be moved to the front of the project. There is a way of avoiding work that multiplies work, and there is a way of embracingwork that saves work in the long run. “The way of the slothful man is as an hedge of thorns: But the way of the righteous is made plain” (Prov. 15:19). As the saying goes, if you don’t have time to do it right, then how will you have time to do it over?

In order to be rights at all, human rights have to be grounded in a reality that is completely out of the reach of our elected and appointed officials. And that means religion. For the best results, it needs to be the true religion. False ones let you down.

We are not privileged to imitate the American Founders in one respect. We do not have the option of sailing to a new world and starting over. We cannot move out of this dilapidated house in order to go build a new one. No, it must be a remodel project. The house is run down, and so we must fix it up. Not only so, but we have to do this while the house is also on fire. And at the same time, many of the other residents like it just the way it is and are fighting us tooth and nail. All this means that we need to have a robust theology of resistance.

We do not hang on to free speech so that we might talk about Jesus. We hang on to Jesus so that we might talk with each other.

Anyone who believes that Romans 13 offers a blank check to tyrants is someone who simply has not read it carefully and is not comparing Scripture with Scripture (Isa. 5:20; Ps. 11:3).

What we call Enlightenment modernity was just the period when our public authorities fell into unbelief. Postmodernity is when they discovered that unbelief is a slippery place, and they fell into it deeper. The guy at the bottom of a collapsed ladder does have some bumps and bruises, and perhaps a broken bone or two, but he also has better things to do than to call his condition post-structuralism.

We cannot pray for the purification of the silver, and then despair when we begin to approach the furnace that removes the dross.

Faithfulness can be found in apparent defeat as easily as in victory. Deliverance is given to faithful men, and faithful men are those who care about certain things more than deliverance.

If the history of the world is a story, then theology is a type of literary criticism. We do not just read the story and go with the flow of it, we are also to reflect on it as we read. What is the meaning of the story? We do not just want to know that the infinite God was born as a baby at Bethlehem, we should also want to know what that staggering reality might mean. Of course we must include the great events—creation, fall, the flood, the exile to Babylon. And when we include them, we must rank them, and if we do that, the birth of the Christ in Bethlehem is one of the greatest plot points ever.

We serve and worship the God who overwhelms, who delights to overwhelm. At His right hand are pleasures forevermore—a cascading waterfall of infinite pleasures, with no top, no bottom, no back, no front, and no sides. Nothing but infinite pleasure in motion, and every one of those pleasures is attached to His promises.

Knowing we are in a story does not prevent real story grip from happening.

Think for a moment about what a bizarre place the universe actually is, and how we moderns have tried to use our powers of imagination to tame it, instead of using our imaginations for the purpose that God gave them to us—to enable us to see it. The unbelieving mind and heart looks around at the “given” world he sees, and just takes it as a birthright norm. This is the way things “just are” he boasts, and he is “a realist” for seeing it. If someone comes back from the other side of the world with some strange tales, then the traveler is laughed to scorn for his superstitious naiveté. But the failure of the modernist imagination can be seen starkly here. The hide-bound rationalist cannot put himself in another place, and he cannot conceive of his so-called normal world being described to creatures far off, and having them laugh at it as “way too bizarre to be real.

Second, the right kind of work—when a particular result is desired—quenches the wrong kind of desire. “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on” (Prov. 16:26, esv). Men hustle when they’re hungry, and a refusal to work inflames the wrong kind of desire. “The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing: But the soul of the diligent shall be made fat” (Prov. 13:4). Not having a job means that he can think about that flat screen television that he wants so much, and he can think about it all day long. “The desire of the slothful killeth him; For his hands refuse to labour. He coveteth greedily all the day long: But the righteous giveth and spareth not” (Prov. 21:25–26). Workers are generous. Loafers are not.

Professionalism begins in the heart, but it does not remain there: “He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: But the hand of the diligent maketh rich. He that gathereth in summer is a wise son: But he that sleepeth in harvest is a son that causeth shame” (Prov. 10:4–5). Put another way, the lazy son is not being lazy in his heart. He is being lazy in the harvest.

The issue is not whether we are saved by works. Of course not. The issue here, rather, is what salvation looks like. We are saved by grace, but grace works. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12–13, esv).We are not saved by good works (Eph. 2:8–9), but we are saved to good works (Eph. 2:10). Immediately after this famous verse where Paul says we are saved by grace through faith, he then says that we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand for us to do. This salvation by grace is a salvation unto good works.

Our first parents were clothed to cover the shamefulness of their nakedness, but we do not need to assume that clothes would never have been developed in a world apart from sin. Presumably there would have been some hikes that required shoes, and some temperatures that required warmth, and other occasions which would require majesty and glory. So, working outward, the first line of media would be clothing.

Now wherever Christians go, they go as themselves. “Now they which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phenice, and Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word . . .” (Acts 11:19a). Wherever hypocrites go, they also go as themselves. “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves” (Matt. 23:15). Your country can only export whatever it is your farmers are growing. When you go somewhere, or when you send a message somewhere, you are simply projecting what you already are.

So, again, what is media? I said earlier that media includes our clothes, other people, tools (especially tools for communication), and infrastructure. These are all means through which Christians communicate—first with God, then with the other saints, and then with unbelievers. Respectively, we pray through Christ, we have fellowship in Christ, and we proclaim Christ. What do we use as we do all these things? We use, among other things, ink, newsprint, microphones, email, toner, power point, algorithms, video clips, all of which are made out of molecules. They are things. This means that, because of the way we are created, we cannot love others without media because love, like sound, doesn’t travel in a vacuum.

When we speak about the law of supply and demand (outside the control of any human agency), we are talking about the Author of that law, and of others. (I refer to the law of gravity, for example, or the three laws of motion.) In other words, the free market does not decide the price of the new zippers. That decision is made by the Lord Jesus.

Whether we are talking about a small-scale disruption or a large one, there is one sure thing about it. If slipshod work is allowed to fail, then quality work will remain. The external pressures of the free market with ensure that. But for Christians who want to be faithful in their work, their internal motivation will also contribute to the quality of the work. We are to put our hand to the work, doing the best we can with it, and we are to keep our hands off the future.

Wealth is the technical ability to summon the labor of others, either in person or through the application of tools, but the person in possession of that wealth has to have the ability to know how to do it.

The first step toward genuinely productive work is to make it a point to work coram Deo, in the presence of God. I don’t mean to limit this to formalities like opening with prayer or closing with a benediction, but this certainly means more than just some kind of formal recognition. And by saying this I don’t mean to imply that opening and closing with prayer is necessarily a “formality.” No, not at all. But if it is limited to that, it soon will be a dead formality.

Now if my body is a living sacrifice, this means that everything it rests upon is an altar. The car I drive is an altar, the bed I sleep in is an altar, and the desk where I work is an altar. Everything is offered to God, everything ascends to Him as a sweet-smelling savor. Faith is the fire of the altar, and it consumes the whole burnt offering, the ascension offering. What ascends to the Lord is the sweet savor of our good works: “So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:10, esv). Bearing fruit in every good work is fully pleasing to Him.

As Chesterton points out somewhere, sexual license is the first and most obvious bribe to be offered to a slave. For many in our era, that was the bribe that ushered them into their bondage to the state.