Friday, September 19, 2008

Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues With Timeless Truth - By R. Albert Mohler Jr.

"Love of neighbor for the sake of loving God is a profound political philosophy that strikes a balance between the disobedience of political disengagement and the idolatry of politics as our main priority." (pg. 4)

"With the advent of modernity, and now the postmodern age, the view that public law is or ought to be predicated on Christian morals is no longer taken for granted. Not only is the idea questioned, but it is even rejected out of hand." (pg. 8)

"...if we accept the argument that Christian moral arguments are forbidden entry into the public space, we have decided not only to violate the clear intention of our Constitution's framers, not only to reject the inherited civilization that has brought us to this point, not only to redefine what it means to be a liberal democracy, but we have actually privileged one form of religious discourse over another. That is, we have privileged irreligious religious discourse over self-consciously religious discourse." (pg. 18)

"Christians must not only contend for the preservation and protection of free speech - essential for the cause of the gospel - we must also make certain that we do not fall into the trap of claiming offendedness for ourselves. We must not claim a right not to be offended, even as we must insist that there is no such right and that the social construction of such a right will mean the death of individual liberty, free speech, and the free exchange of ideas." (pg. 35-36)

"Moral relativism has denied any objective judgment of right and wrong. A naive non-judgmentalism often masquerades as moral humility. But a refusal to make moral judgments is not humility. It is insanity." (pg. 48-49)

"Spirituality is what is left when authentic Christianity is evacuated from the public square. It is the refuge of the faithless seeking the trappings of faith without the demands of revealed truth." (pg. 51)

"The God Gene is a parable for our postmodern times, further evidence of the lengths to which clever humans will go in trying to deny that we were made by a Creator who designed us with the capacity to know Him. Hamer's book is bad science and bad theology combined, but it does succeed in making one point clear: materialism just can't answer the big questions." (pg. 80)

"Keyes identifies the academic world as the source of much confusion when it comes to honesty. Postmodern philosophers routinely dismiss objective truth and assert that all truth is simply social construction and invention. Authorities in power simply invent truth in order to buttress their authority, the postmodernists allege. Following this logic, lying becomes a means of liberation." (pg. 101-102)

"Having established a truce with the naturalistic world-view, liberal theology simply accommodates itself to the secular temptation by denying God's active and sovereign rule. In other words, God's goodness is affirmed while His greatness is denied. Process theology does this by putting God within the created order, struggling along with His creation toward maturity." (pg. 130-131)

R. Albert Mohler Jr., Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues With Timeless Truth (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 2008)