Angels in the Architecture Quotes

“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.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“If it does not come at the last to gladness, then to hell with it.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“How is it possible to live like a machine and bear fruit like a tree?”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“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.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“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.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“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).”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“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.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“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?”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Modern evangelicalism is just that-modern-in love with modernity, in love with individualism, egalitarianism, and perfect boxes. Like other moderns, evangelicals have no love of beauty; it is at most optional and indifferent, not the rhythm of life.”
― Douglas M. Jones III, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

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― Douglas M. Jones III, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Each sharp-eyed generation tires of everything except their joy of rebellion, playing it over and over again, in an endless roll. Everything is boring except their own eternal rebellion. This is their totally "new and different program for the future." This is modernity's barbarism-hollow hearts led about by sterile matter, perversely mocking those with full lives.”
― Douglas M. Jones III, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Yet, the great irony of the Christian Right is that though their families are often messes and their churches splintering, they think they have the wisdom to wield the sword. In search of "real change," they charge out to conquer the institution that is most impotent in actually bringing it about. We haven't changed I11LICh from our ancient Israelite brothers. We want a king or a sword just like everybody else. We don't understand how God has structured the world, how real change occurs.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Coming to worship the Lord in the "beauty of holiness" somehow gets translated into the "warmth of niceness." Almost entirely gone is the experience of being run through, pierced by the numinous.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Exalt and sing the Lord on high, of wine dark sea and tumbling sky.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“For some reason foreign to our modern ears, God tells us that celebration is central to pleasing Him; it is central to leading a good life. Modern American life has no time for serious celebrations as did life in centuries past. We've got work to do; projects and deadlines press us. And yet for all our industrial-strength pragmatism, few if any truly important things get accomplished. We have forgotten that celebration isn't just an option; it's a call to full Christian living.
Celebration is worshiping God with our bodies, with the material creation He has set up around us. Celebrating-whether in feasts, ceremonies, holidays, formal worship, or lovemaking-are all part of obeying God's command to "love the Lord thy God with all thine heart,
with all thy soul, and with all thy strength" (Deut. 6:5; Mk. 12:30). We are to show our love for God not just with one portion of our being (the spiritual aspect); we are to love God with our whole body, heart and strength and legs and lips.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Following the Lord's authority, one of the distinctives of
Christian cultural understanding is that it also is minimally concerned with politics. The restoration of the nations is not, in any important sense, a political process. Rather, the process is one of baptism and catechism. The means given for the conversion of the heathen were the waters of baptism and the words of instruction. When the lessons have been learned, there will of course be some political consequences. But they will be minimal for the simple reason that the state itself, in a nation that has come to repentance, will also be minimal. For the Christian, the political realm is a creature to be redeemed, sinful like the rest of us and with a long way to go before it retires to more biblical proportions.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Attaching "produced at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT" to a ridiculous argument immediately makes it cogent to many. That's part of life, but let's not pretend that it's rationality.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“To say that someone is a conservative does not tell us what he is interested in conserving.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“That's why moderns have to have hobbies. They can't find satisfaction in their money-earning work, so many seek creative satisfaction in model planes and trains.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“The State is not the hope of the world; it is an institution grounded in the threat of violence, whether via capital punishments or petty bureaucratic intrusions.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Violent overthrow of the revolution is revolutionary, and compromise with the revolution is revolutionary.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“The medievalist has the capacity, and the desire, to harmonize. He believes the planets sing in harmony; why cannot technology also sing?”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Only a madman would try to market headache medicine today under the name John's Headache Pills. This would be insufficiently techno-marvelous. No, the name must sound like it carne out of a laboratory yesterday ... Zantistat 100, or something like that.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“Modernity is a busy place, spinning with silicon speed that goes ever faster but never forward, people pressed into cities full of loneliness.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth