we will arrange for 'religion' to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe - harmless, in fact - with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever.

so many theological terms, words like 'monotheism' are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology

The church doesn't have a monopoly on kitsch or sentimentalism, but if you want to find it, the church may well be the easiest place to start.)

The mode in which that glory is to be seen in the present is praise. "I will sing praise to my God while I have being." The glory of God, said the theologian Irenaeus, is a human being fully alive.

humans were made to be "vicegerents." That is, they were to act on God's behalf within his world. But that is only possible and can only escape serious and dangerous distortion when worship precedes action.

The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers. The question of divine action and human action is seldom a zero-sum game. If the worlds of heaven and earth have rushed together in Jesus and the spirit, one should expect different layers of explanation to reside together, to reinforce one another.

The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even, heaven help us, biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way into the postmodern world with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom.

The consequences of an ungrateful spirit are not as readily seen as, say, those of a contagious disease. But they are no less deadly. Western civilization has fallen prey to an epidemic of ingratitude. Like a poisonous vapor, this subtle sin is polluting our lives, our homes, our churches, and our culture.

The grateful heart that springs forth in joy is not acquired in a moment; it is the fruit of a thousand choices.

If movies and music are vehicles for emotionally "hooking" people into Hollywood worldviews, then the best countermeasure is to create more compelling, more beautiful forms of art that express a biblical worldview.

Art is a visual language, and Christians have a responsibility to learn that language.

Long before pragmatism was developed into a full-blown American philosophy (see chapter 8), it had already been formulated and practiced by evangelical leaders.