Destroying Our Private Cities

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“Piously, or politically, we cripple ourselves with the need to bring about God’s righteousness on earth, failing to hear what Jesus so vividly declares: that we need not shoulder that burden because the goal itself does not need to be accomplished.  The goal is a fact, God’s fact, the fact of grace and promise.  No gap divides what God says from what God does; and the stories of the coming kingdom do not offer dreams and possibilities of what the Lord might or could do, but speak indicatively, and in the present tense of what is happening, and of what the future is becoming.  The kingdom need not—and cannot not—be worked for; it may only be accepted and awaited.  On the other hand this waiting for God’s indicatives cannot be dispassionate or passive…the gospel enslaves us again with its imperatives, demanding everything of us by way of repentance and discipleship” ~ Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: The Theology of Holy Saturday

“There is no shred of evidence in Paul’s letters to suggest that he judged the churches by the measure of their success in rapid numerical growth…this is nowhere appears as either an anxiety or an enthusiasm about the numerical growth of the church” ~L. Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission

"Put conversely, and bluntly, the secular world bores me to tears.  Its sky is low and thick with clouds, blocking the sun.  There is no Author and no great story of conquest against forces of darkness, advancing a kingdom of light, love and glory.  All is relativized.  Ideas are minimal.  Eyes closed to revelation, the cynic sees no glory, no intrinsic value to human beings; thus man is laid low.  Truth is dead, and so people grapple for power.  Goodness is analyzed and dismissed by the skeptic's small heart and mind.  Romance, imagination and enchantment fade, needing the transcendent to break in. ~Kelly Monoe Kullberg, Finding God Beyond Harvard: The Quest for Veritas

“So long as we expend our energies pointing to the failures and inconsistencies of one party in this contest while remaining oblivious to the failures and inconsistencies of the other, we are simply engaging in an ecclesiastical tug-of-war between two teams of pious hypocrites.  Meanwhile, life around us degenerates into hell on earth.”  ~Congressman Paul Henry, Politics of Evangelicals (1974)

“So long as evangelicals engage, then, in prescribing only moral clichés to difficult social and political problems, they are in fact avoiding any direct interrelating of their faith with the sociopolitical world around them.” ~Congressman Paul Henry, Politics of Evangelicals  (1974)

“Compared with the past, faith today influences culture less.  Compared with the past, culture today influences faith more.” ~Os Guinness

“Theologians have long been asking how Jerusalem can relate to Athens; here the claim is that Bethlehem has something to say about Rome—or Masada” ~John Howard Yoder in The Politics of Jesus

“History throws up too many instances in which the perfervid mix of religion and politics has destroyed the possibilities of civil discourse…When politics is conflicted by putatively divine revelations, there is little room for reasonable argument and compromise…The case can be made [however] that the great social and political devastations of our century have been perpetrated by regimes of militant secularism, notably those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. That is true, and it suggests that the naked public square is a dangerous place. When religious transcendence is excluded, when the public square has been swept clean of divisive sectarianisms, the space is open to seven demons aspiring to transcendent authority. As with a person so also with a society, the last condition is worse than the first. Nonetheless, the awareness of this truth does not alleviate our anxiety about forces that, no matter how much they deny it, seem bent upon establishing something like a theocracy.” ~Richard John Neuhaus in The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America

“Conversion, which had made Christians into distinct people—resident aliens—now was something that made people ordinary, not resident aliens but simply residents.” ~Alan Krieder

“…discontinuous change is much more disturbing and difficult.  Unlike the continuous form, it creates a situation that requires something different from and more potent than the normal habits and skills that were so useful during a stable period of continuous change.  Congregations do not do well with this unexpected, dramatic change; they need entirely different skills and capacities from those that have service them well in the past” ~Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk in The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach A Changing World, 2006

"Without some kind of 'meta-narrative' to discipline private consciousness, meaning inevitably dies, 'the triumph of wild and unregulated interpretation' is assured, 'stable meanings' disintegrate, Frederick Bauerschmidt notes, and the strong 'assert their will to power without regard to such eternal values as truth, goodness, unity, and beauty.'  Universal narratives about the meaning of life are 'shattered into micro-narratives of race, class, and gender'" ~David F. Wells in Above All Earthly Pow'rs, 2005

“Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year.  Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols” ~Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, 1924

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries” ~Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, 1924

“Moving step by step, in the majestic march of Progress, we have first vulgarised Christmas and then denounced it as vulgar.  Christmas has become too commercial; so many of these thinkers would destroy the Christmas that has been spoiled and preserve the commercialism that has spoiled it.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“If man would stop gazing and staring like the donkey by the manger, he would realize that he has been placed in a storm on the Spirit, and that God's wonder is the element of his life.” ~Hendrikus Berkhof

“He doesn’t like being tied down—of course he has other countries to attend to.  It’s quite all right.  He often drops in.  Only you mustn’t press him.  He’s wild, you know.  Not like a tame lion.” ~C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, from the Chronicles of Naria

"A church that is concerned about its own sustainability must have strategies other than the growth paradigm, which openly assess its impact and accountability in local and global terms.  Sustainability thinking points us to the future; our action or inaction now has consequences for communities and congregations yet to come.  Resilient communities are developed with a belief that our future patterns of life can be different if a distinct approach to change is initiated based on a renewed theological understanding of justice, stewardship, and inclusion." ~Andrew Davey in Urban Christianity and Global Order

"Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he most intelligent about his beastliness." ~Whittaker Chambers

"Sin is not the brute in us; it is, rather, the man in us..." ~Gresham Machen

"Every man, so far as he is apart from God, is morally insane." ~Augustus Strong

"Consumption used to be the name for a mortal wasting disease.  It still is." ~Anna Quindlen

“Jewish religious leaders certainly made no concerted effort to reach out to Gentiles with redemptive love…Part of their hatred of Jesus grew from the fact that He was unaffected by the barriers they had erected.  Gentiles, Samaritans, tax gatherers, prostitutes, lepers, women—all experienced Jesus' redemptive love.” 

“[Some Christians today] hide behind the church building's protective walls.  This kind of siege mentality sees the real world as the enemy of piety and separation from the world as the highest expression of faith…An unfortunate reality is that a person can use church activities to avoid a hurting world." ~Charles Roesel and Donald Atkinson in Meeting Needs, Sharing Christ: Ministry Evangelism in Today's New Testament Church

“The imagination of faith refuses to be content with human arrangements—social, economic, political, urban, rural—that are not based on the practice of human freedom in the presence of God.  That imagination will pertinently challenge those arrangements through envisioning alternatives, through prophetic speech and action, through the creation of communities that include, strengthen, and give integrity to those at the margins” ~Andrew Davey in Urban Christianity and Global Order: Theological Resources for an Urban Future

“But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” ~Jeremiah (29:7)

“What a way to welfare, that hated Babylon is the place of well-being.  Thus exile is not only the place of unexpected word.  It is also the place of unexpected unacceptable vocation—exiles seeking welfare for others!  Seek only justice and righteousness, even in anxiety, and get the kingdom (Matt 6:33).  Seek shalom, and you’ll get the land” ~Walter Brueggemann reflecting on Jeremiah 29:7 in The Land—Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge, 1977

"Each year, we construct the equivalent of many cities, but the pieces don't add up to anything memorable or of lasting value.  The result doesn't look like a place, it doesn't act like a place, and perhaps most significantly it doesn't act like a place.  Rather it feels like what it is: an uncoordinated agglomeration of standardized single-use zones with little pedestrian life and even less civic identification, connected only by an overtaxed network of roadways" ~Andres, Duany, Elizabthe Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck in The Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000)

"...today's more experiential descendants of American's early Protestantism apply faith to but a small portion of their lives, and even less so to public life.  If they have a public faith at all, it is known mostly for its quest for political power.  This truncated faith has boundary lines between sacred and secular, with little cultivation of the commonwealth.  This faith has not bothered to translate truth into social ethics, political philosophy, or practical judgment.  And unlike that of the early Protestants, it gives an inordinate attention to the state, while being culturally impoverished." ~Don E. Eberly in Restoring the Good Society

"We live in enemy-occupied territory, not neutral ground.  As long as no effort is made to proclaim the gospel throughout the city, the devil may even come to church and make a substantial contribution.  But when signs of community appear in a deteriorating neighborhood, the beast is roused.  His bulldozer engines roar." ~Rev. Henry K. Yordon, former pastor of Congregational Church on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut.

“…contrary to what is commonly argued, our problem in the public square is not ‘religious totalitarianism,’ and the solution is not a ‘multilingual relativism’ that bans all absolute and exclusive claims.  In a day of exploding diversity, the real question is: how do we live with our deepest differences when many of those differences are absolute, including those of secularism?  This question…is vital for the future of democracy…raising it properly frees us from the distortions of the current public debate” ~Os Guinness in Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in An Age of Genocide and Terror

"When it comes to the issue of wealth, the church exhibits its schizophrenia by the double standards seen in the life-styles of its members and the verbally contradictory message it proclaims." ~James Bell, in Bridge Over Troubled Waters

"Not all atheists are immoral, but morality as goodness cannot be justified with atheistic presuppositions.  An atheist may be morally minded, but he just happens to be living better than his belief about what the nature of man warrants.  He may have personal moral values, but he cannot have any sense of compelling and universal moral obligations.  Moral duty cannot logically operate without moral laws; and there is no moral law in an amoral world." ~Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism

"At one time theologians argued that the chief purpose of humankind was to glorify God.  Now it would seem that the logic has been reversed: the chief purpose of God is to glorify humankind.  Spirituality no longer is true or good because it meets absolute standards of truth or goodness, but because it helps me get along.  I am the judge of its worth.  If it helps me find a vacant parking space, I know my spirituality is on the right track.  If it leads me into the wilderness, calling me to face dangers I would rather not deal with at all, then it is a form of spirituality I am unlikely to choose." ~Robert Wuthnow

"Most people who accept the label 'conservative Christian,' or its synonyms, spend too much time throwing stones at the cultural citadels and too little acquiring and developing the skills and knowledge to allow them to compete in the ideological and cultural arena."  ~Cal Thomas

“Many a congregation when it assembles in church must look to the angels like a muddy puddle shore at low tide; littered with every kind of rubbish and odds and ends—a distressing sort of spectacle.  And then the tide of worship comes in, and it’s all gone; the dead sea urchins and jellyfish, the paper and the empty cans and the nameless bits of rubbish.  The cleansing sea flows over the whole lot.  So we are released from a narrow selfish outlook on the universe by a common act of worship.” ~Unknown

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” ~Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk

"We Americans want it all: endless and secure energy supplies; low prices; no pollution; less global warming; no new power plants (or oil and gas drilling, either) near people or pristine places.  This is a wonderful wish list, whose only shortcoming is the minor inconvenience of massive inconsistency." ~Robert J. Samuelson

"You don't have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world.  But you do have to know the few things that matter and then be willing to live for them and die for them." ~John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life (2003).

"Other years with all the rush of Christmas, with the concert by the choir, the Sunday school programme, the rush of shopping and gifts, the lights and gaiety, the hustle and bustle of the season, I never got within three feet of the manger.  [His eyes now beginning to tear.]  But this year, right within these four walls, with no wreaths, no tinsel, no trimming, I have a new appreciation of what Christmas really is--and believe it or not, it's my best Christmas ever!  I have got my text for next year:  'Of His kingdom there will be no end'." ~Reverend Hess, quoted in a past Alliance Life, date unknown, sometime in the 80's.

"We do not want a religion that is right where we are right.  What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong." ~G. K. Chesterton

"The Word itself creates its own hearing, as it once created its own world, by re-creating those through faith who once had no faith.  Nothing more needs to be done; no homiletical gimmicks or artificial techniques are required to make the gospel effective.  The gospel is mighty to work its way to those who have ears but do not hear.  It breaks hearts of stone to create hearts of flesh.  'Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces?' (Jer 23:29)." ~James Daane in Preaching with Confidence: A Theological Essay on the Power of the Pulpit

“It may be true that there are more Christians in America than ever before and that they have never had so much money at their disposal, such powerful technologies to use, such positions of influence to fill, or such a global opportunity to which to respond.  But the signs are that the opportunity will be squandered and that much of American Christendom is more modern and more American than it is decisively Christian.” ~Os Guinness in The Gravedigger File

"It is easy to paint people who put God first as dangerous fanatics, but from the point of view of the believer, the fanatic is the one so certain that the state is right that he is willing to use law to interfere with religious belief.  To take a simple example, I am not sure why it is more 'fanatical' for parents to tell their children that the creation story in Genesis is literally true than for the public schools to tell the same children, required by law to attend, that the religion of their parents is literally false. Or why it is more 'fanatical' to criticize the culture for not reflecting a particular religious view on, say, the role of women than to criticize a religion for not reflecting the culture's views on the same thing.  In short, the danger, if there is one, is mutual" ~Stephen L. Carter in God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics

"There [in the New Testament is] a community was formed, and here we have it today and we have something pretty empirical here... ...which is more likely: that these disciples got together when Jesus died and said, "Isn't this horrible; let's pretend he rose from the dead," and started a movement that has endured persecution for a lie or that he arose? ...The apostles saw and heard these things happen in time and space, and I have no reason to disbelieve the soundness of their testimony.  Rather I have more reason to trust their powers of observation because they signed their testimony in blood." ~unknown

"If it is for God, for His truth, for His people, for the alienated and trampled in life, then [the Church] must give up what the post‑modern world holds most dear.  It must give up the freedom to do anything it happens to desire.  It must give up self‑cultivation for self‑surrender, entertainment for worship, intuition for truth, slick marketing for authentic witness, success for faithfulness, power for humility, a God bought on cheap terms for the God who calls us to a costly obedience.  It must, in short, be willing to do God's business on God's terms.  As it happens, that idea is actually quite old, as old as the New Testament itself, but in today's world it is novel all over again." ~David Wells, in God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams

"The greatest question of our time is not communism versus individualism; not Europe versus America; not even the East versus West.  It is whether men can live without God." ~Will Durant

"If God is dead, someone is going to have to take His place...It will be the drive for power or the drive for pleasure; the clenched fist or the phallus; Hitler or Hugh Hefner." ~Malcohm Muggerridge

"The Christian way is different: harder, and easier.  Christ says, 'Give me All.  I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.  I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it.  No half-measures are any good.  I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down.  I don't want to drill the tooth,, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out.  Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked--the whole outfit.  I will give you a new self instead.  In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours'." ~C. S. Lewis

"Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack's wares…Grace without price; grace without cost.  The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.  Since the cost is infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite…Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church.  We are fighting today for costly grace…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl.  For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.  Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.  The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death” ~Neil Postman

"When you're done in four years, you should feel satisfied, and mature, and taught, but most important, you should feel tired...Burn the candle at both ends.  Never tell yourself there's no time to direct a play or sing in a choral group or play rugby.  Take a course in gene-splitting if you're an English major.  If you major in biology, take a course in short-story writing.  Study Chinese.  Learn statistics..."  ~William Martin, Harvard Yard (see comment)

Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty, I submit, for the consideration of the Congress and the country, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.

The Act does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done.  It charts a new course.  It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.  It can be a milestone in our one-hundred eighty year search for a better life for our people.

This Act provides five basic opportunities. It will give almost half a million underprivileged young Americans the opportunity to develop skills, continue education, and find useful work. It will give every American community the opportunity to develop a comprehensive plan to fight its own poverty-and help them to carry out their plans. It will give dedicated Americans the opportunity to enlist as volunteers in the war against poverty. It will give many workers and farmers the opportunity to break through particular barriers which bar their escape from poverty. It will give the entire nation the opportunity for a concerted attack on poverty through the establishment, tinder my direction, of the Office of Economic Opportunity, a national headquarters for the war against poverty. ~Lyndon B. Johnson's Special Message to Congress, March 16, 1964

“Where in the New Testament, the Church of the Fathers, or the history of the saints from Paul to Thomas More were the genuinely thoughtful promised any other lot, whether at the hands of the world or at the hands of their uncomprehending brethren, than contradiction and constant testing?” ~Bishop John Wright

"To embrace Darwinism you would have to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, and non-reason produces reason.  I don't have enough faith to believe that." ~Lee Strobel, interview in Servant Magazine

“Because Christians have said yes to the kingdom of God, they must say no to all exaggerated claims short of that kingdom.” ~Richard Neuhaus

“The protest of social evil that is offered in the name of the Church is too often selective, informed less by a transcendent and universal hope than by tactical and strategic considerations.” ~Richard Neuhaus

“Positive Christian engagement is unabashedly ‘for Christ’s sake.’  Thus Christian social action is sustained by a relationship of command and obedience—that is, of discipleship.” ~Richard Neuhaus

If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now--not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground--would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. ~C.S. Lewis

"With the exception of certain mathematicians and physicists, all the authors of the 'Great Books' are represented in this chapter [on God]. In sheer quantity of references, as well as in variety, it is the largest chapter. The reason is obvious. More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question...The whole tenor of human life is affected by whether men regard themselves as supreme beings in the universe or acknowledge a super-human being whom they conceive of as an object of fear or love, a force to be defied or a Lord to be obeyed. Among those who acknowledge a divinity, it matters greatly whether the divine is represented merely by the concept of God--the object of philosophical speculation--or by the living God whom men worship in all the acts of piety which comprise the rituals of religion." ~Mortimer Adler

"Every one of us, if we are Christians, had been called to move into the gap with the lord Jesus Christ.  In this gap, we have two options.  We either serve cross-culturally or live counterculturally.  Those who serve cross-culturally are the ones who actually leave their homeland, live in another culture and bridge the gap.  Those who don't go automatically fall into the second category of living counterculturally right where they are in order to be co-operators, participators and encouragers with those who serve cross-culturally.  One man expressed it this way: 'I want to live in North America in such a way that the devil would rather have me overseas as a missionary '" ~Sunder Krishnan

"The Ted Turners of our world should know that giving up their businesses in not their only option. The Christian community must demonstrate to those in the secular Marketplace that Jesus’ Lordship is to affect every area of life. Christianity must be relevant to all that we do, even managing the corporate empires; empires that should be brought under the controlling Lordship of Jesus Christ; and empires that reflect biblical righteousness." ~Chip M. Anderson, Servant magazine, 1991

"As more of us are better able every year to satisfy our wants and needs, we are not sharing a larger percentage of our income and wealth.  We are retaining it in savings or spending it on ourselves and our families.  Yet some segments of the population...are experiencing reductions in their well-being, notably children."  ~ Claire Gaudiani, in The Greater Good

"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend — it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep water beyond your own comprehension . . . Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not knowing where you are going is the true knowledge.” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer quotes Martin Luther, The Cost of Discipleship

"The world expects of Christians that they will raise their voices so loudly and clearly…that not even the simplest man can have the slightest doubt about what they are saying.  Further, the world expects of Christians that they will eschew all fuzzy abstractions and plant themselves squarely in front of the bloody face of history.  We stand in need of folk who have determined to speak directly and unmistakably and, come what may, to stand by what they have said."  ~Albert Camus

“One is either a good German or a good Christian.  It is impossible to be both at the same time.” ~Adolf Hitler

“Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"'Liberal intellectuals are always top candidates for the role of the fall guy, for the simple reason that it is of the essence of liberalism to be contemporaneous and of the essence of being an intellectual to know what is contemporaneous.'  [Peter Berger] need not have wasted his sympathy, for the wounds are all self-inflicted.  These intellectuals must have been the people W.R. Inge had in mind when he made his famous remark that he who marries the spirit of an age soon finds himself a widower." ~Herbert Schlossberg, in Idols for Destruction

The technical term for the private-zoo factor is privatization.  By privatization I mean the process by which modernization produces a cleavage between the public and the private spheres of life and focuses the private sphere as the special arena for the expansion of individual freedom and fulfillment. ~Os Guinness, in The Gravedigger File, quoting Peter Berger

"We have been studying cheerfully and seriously.  As far as I was concerned it could have continued in that way, and I had already resigned myself to having my grave here by the Rhine!...And now the end has come.  So listen to my piece of advice: exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis!  Keep to the Word, to the scripture that has been given to us. ~Karl Barth

"Through the appearance of the Messiah, as the great representative figure of the coming aeon, this new age has begun to enter into the actual experience of the believer.  He has been translated into a state which, while falling short of the consummated life of eternity, yet may be truly characterized as semi-eschatological."

"The conception of the Spirit proves that what Paul [the Apostle] meant to do is precisely the opposite of what is imputed to him.  Not to 'transmute' the eschatology into a religion of time, but to raise the religion of time to the plane of eternity--such [is] the purport of his gospel." ~Geerhardus Vos, 1912

"A traditional explanation for the persistent poverty of many less developed countries is that they lack objects such as natural resources or capital goods.  But Japan had little of either in 1950 and still has few natural resources, so something else must be involved.  Increasingly, emphasis is shifting to the notion that it is ideas, not objects, that poor countries lack.  The knowledge needed to provide citizens of the poorest countries with a vastly improved standard of living already exists in the advanced countries.  If a poor nation invests in education and does not destroy the incentives for its citizens to acquire ideas from the rest of the world, it can rapidly take advantage of the publicly available part of the worldwide stock of knowledge." ~Paul Romer

"It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? .... The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil." ~Ravi Zacharias

"Almost all intellectuals profess to love humanity and to be working for its improvement and happiness. But it is the idea of humanity they love, rather than the actual individuals who compose it. They love humanity in general rather than men and women in particular. Loving humanity as an idea, they can then produce solutions as ideas. Therein lies the danger, for when people conflict with the solution as idea, they are first ignored or dismissed as unrepresentative; and then, when they continue to obstruct the idea, they are treated with growing hostility and categorized as enemies of humanity in general." ~Paul Johnson

"I have never been able to find in any man's book or any man's talk anything convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world...The only remedy for Chinamen and for the rest of us is the change of hearts.  But looking at the history of the last 2,000 years there is not much reason to expect that thing, even if man has taken to flying...Man doesn't fly like an eagle, he flies like a beetle." ~Joseph Conrad

"What has changed historically, though, is the place given to transcendence in what may be called the 'official world views' of human societies...The loss is the heart of the process called 'secularization.'  Both social institutions and individual lives are increasingly explained as well as justified in terms devoid of transcendent referents.  Put differently: The reality of ordinary life is increasingly posited as the only reality.  Or, if you will: The common-sense world becomes a world without windows." ~Peter L. Berger

"Christians cannot take the way of Christ seriously, or society will fall apart, will sink into a spiral of unmitigated violence. Justice is at stake. Civilization itself is at stake. Jesus could not have meant that we take him seriously in the realm of social and political realities--after all, what would happen if everyone did that? Consequently, 'Jesus,' 'Christianity,' and even 'discipleship' are reduced to mere 'spirituality,' a realm that has little if anything to do with the concrete realities of culture, civilization, and politics." ~Lee C. Camp

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." ~Jim Elliott

"Just as it is difficult to imagine the concept of family independent of the home, it is near -impossible to imagine community independent of the town square or the local pub." ~Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation

“Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum.  The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum had been filled.” ~ Paul Johnson, Modern Times: World from the Twenties to the Nineties

"On the one hand there is enormous growth of the Church, and on the other its almost complete lack of influence." ~ Ronald Chapman (1954)

“We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man, or sink the man, in the plan or organization. God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.” ~ E.M. Bounds

"The much more important matter is what it means to think like a Christian about the nature and workings of the physical world, the character of human social structures like government and the economy, the meaning of the past, the nature of artistic creation, and the circumstances attending our perception of the world outside ourselves. Failure to exercise the mind for Christ in these areas has become acute in the twentieth century. That failure is the scandal of the evangelical mind." ~ Mark A. Noll

"No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time. No man can give the impression that he is clever and that Christ is mighty to save."  ~ James Denny

"When churches have reduced Christianity to tired and predictable moralizing, a sound understanding of the Scriptures is a powerful antidote...The first question is not, "what should be do?" but "What has God done, and what is God doing?" This is the way the Bible works."  ~ Anthony. B. Robinson

"It is no secret that Christ's church is not at all in good health in many places of the world. She has been languishing because she has been fed, as the current line has it, “junk food.”…As a result, theological and biblical malnutrition has affected [us]…[A] worldwide spiritual famine resulting from the absence of any genuine [diet] of the Word of God continues to run wild and almost unabated in most quarters of the church."  ~Walter Kaiser

"God uses contemporary preaching to bring his salvation to people today, to build his church, to bring in his kingdom. In short, contemporary biblical preaching is nothing less than a redemptive event."  ~ S. Greidanus

"…first, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.” ~Aslan, “The Silver Chair” by C.S. Lewis

"The sermon is a redemptive historical event where God's presence invades and the Kingdom of God is revealed in a moment in time, in a particular place, through the proclamation of His written Word."  ~ Chip Anderson

"As a message of salvation...preaching is in fact a coming of God into this world. It is not merely a presentation of salvation, an announcement of God's plan with requirements to be met by mankind, but it is an act of salvation by God."    ~ J. Kahmann

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