The Gagging of God Quotes

“In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because [it's] uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation's grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude:

Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“When Postman wrote the introduction to his important book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he set forth the stance he adopts by contrasting the warnings of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think…. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.34”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most “evangelistic” movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“The impact of philosophical pluralism on Western culture is incalculable. It touches virtually every discipline—history, art, literature, anthropology, education, philosophy, psychology, the social sciences, even, increasingly, the “hard” sciences—but it has already achieved popularity in the public square, even when its existence is not recognized. It achieves its greatest victory in redefining religious pluralism so as to render heretical the idea that heresy is possible.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Second, it is imperative that we remind ourselves how innovative philosophical pluralism is. When Machen confronted the impact of modernism on Christianity, his driving point was that the liberalism of his day, whatever it was, was not Christianity at all, even though that was the way it paraded itself.116 At least he recognized what was at stake, and addressed the fundamental issues. Today we must recognize that philosophical pluralism is not only non-Christian (though some Western pluralists think of themselves as Christians), but that the nature of the relativism it spawns and the worldliness that it engenders are in some respects qualitatively new, and must be addressed in fresh terms. Many generations have recognized how difficult it is for finite and sinful mortals to come to close agreement as to the objective truth of this or that subject, but this is the first generation to believe that there is no objective truth out there, or that if there is, there is no access to it. This necessarily changes the character of at least some of the debate.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Still, I think that one of the most fundamental problems is want of discipline. Homes that severely restrict viewing hours, insist on family reading, encourage debate on good books, talk about the quality and the morality of television programs they do see, rarely or never allow children to watch television without an adult being present (in other words, refusing to let the TV become an unpaid nanny), and generally develop a host of other interests, are not likely to be greatly contaminated by the medium, while still enjoying its numerous benefits. But what will produce such families, if not godly parents and the power of the Holy Spirit in and through biblical preaching, teaching, example, and witness? The sad fact is that unless families have a tremendously strong moral base, they will not perceive the dangers in the popular culture; or, if they perceive them, they will not have the stamina to oppose them. There is little point in preachers disgorging all the sad statistics about how many hours of television the average American watches per week, or how many murders a child has witnessed on television by the age of six, or how a teenager has failed to think linearly because of the twenty thousand hours of flickering images he or she has watched, unless the preacher, by the grace of God, is establishing a radically different lifestyle, and serving as a vehicle of grace to enable the people in his congregation to pursue it with determination, joy, and a sense of adventurous, God-pleasing freedom. Meanwhile, the harsh reality is that most Americans, including most of those in our churches, have been so shaped by the popular culture that no thoughtful preacher can afford to ignore the impact. The combination of music and visual presentation, often highly suggestive, is no longer novel. Casual sexual liaisons are everywhere, not least in many of our churches, often with little shame. “Get even” is a common dramatic theme. Strength is commonly confused with lawless brutality. Most advertising titillates our sin of covetousness. This is the air we breathe; this is our culture.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“the pressures from philosophical pluralism tend to squash any strong opinion that makes exclusive truth claims—all, that is, except the dogmatic opinion that all dogmatic opinions are to be ruled out, the dogmatic opinion that we must dismiss any assertion that some opinions are false.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Thus despite the best efforts we rebels can mount, God will not be gagged. We invent new ways of gagging God, of silencing him, of marginalizing or dismissing his revelation. But God has spoken, and by his Spirit through the Word still speaks.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Of the many distinctions that have been attempted between modernism and postmodernism, perhaps this is the most common: modernism still believed in the objectivity of knowledge, and that the human mind can uncover such knowledge. In its most optimistic form, modernism held that ultimately knowledge would revolutionize the world, squeeze God to the periphery or perhaps abandon him to his own devices, and build an edifice of glorious knowledge to the great God Science. But this stance has largely been abandoned in the postmodernism that characterizes most Western universities. Deconstructionists have been most vociferous in denouncing the modernist vision. They hold that language and meaning are socially constructed, which is tantamount to saying arbitrarily constructed. Its meaning is grounded neither in “reality” nor in texts per se. Texts will invariably be interpreted against the backdrop of the interpreter’s social “home” and the historical conditioning of the language itself. Granted this interpretive independence from the text, it is entirely appropriate and right for the interpreter to take bits and pieces of the text out of the frameworks in which they are apparently embedded (“deconstruct” the text), and refit them into the framework (“locatedness”) of the interpreter, thereby generating fresh insight, not least that which relativizes and criticizes the text itself.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“The Spirit is the , the downpayment and guarantee of the promised inheritance: there is an eschatological dimension to spirituality, as the bride, the church, joins the Spirit in crying, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22). And so we could go on, adding dimensions to any construct of spirituality controlled by the Word of God, correcting ourselves and our experience by Scripture, so that we may enjoy the fullness of the heritage that is ours in Christ Jesus, while remaining entirely unwilling to be seduced by every passing fad. Only then shall we approximate an all-of-life approach to spirituality—every aspect of human existence, personal and corporate, brought under the discipline of the Word of God, brought under the consciousness that we live in the presence of God, by his grace and for his glory. We shall cry to God that all our expressions of spirituality may be truly spiritual.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Despite the sincerity of their motives, one wonders more than a little to what extent the growing popularity of various forms of annihilationism and conditional immortality are a reflection of this age of pluralism. It is getting harder and harder to be faithful to the “hard” lines of Scripture. And in this way, evangelicalism itself may contribute to the gagging of God by silencing the severity of his warnings and by minimizing the awfulness of the punishment that justly awaits those untouched by his redeeming grace. Newbigin is right: “It is one of the weaknesses of a great deal of contemporary Christianity that we do not speak of the last judgement and of the possibility of being finally lost.”56”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“1. If postmodern thought has tried to gag God, unsuccessfully, by its radical hermeneutics and its innovative epistemology, the church is in danger of gagging God in quite another way. The church in Laodicea, toward the end of the first century, thought of itself as farsighted, respectable, basically well off. From the perspective of the exalted Christ, however, it was blind, naked, bankrupt. The nearby town of Colossae enjoyed water that was fresh and cold, and therefore useful; the nearby town of Hierapolis enjoyed hotsprings where people went to take the cure: its water, too, was useful. But Laodicea’s foul water was channeled in through stone pipes, and it was proverbial for its nauseating taste. The church had become much like the water it drank: neither hot and useful, nor cold and useful, but merely nauseating. Jesus is prepared to spue this church out of his mouth (Rev. 3:16). This church makes the exalted Jesus gag. I cannot escape the dreadful feeling that modern evangelicalism in the West more successfully effects the gagging of God, in this sense, than all the postmodernists together, in the other sense. 2. This calls for repentance. The things from which we must turn are not so much individual sins—greed, pride, sexual promiscuity, or the like, as ugly and as evil as they are—as fundamental heart attitudes that squeeze God and his Word and his glory to the periphery, while we get on with religion and self-fulfillment. 3. At issue is not only what we must turn from, but also what we must turn to: We will not be able to recover the vision and understanding of God’s grandeur until we recover an understanding of ourselves as creatures who have been made to know such grandeur. This must begin with the recovery of the idea that as beings made in God’s image, we are fundamentally moral beings, not consumers, that the satisfaction of our psychological needs pales in significance when compared with the enduring value of doing what is right. Religious consumers want to have a spirituality for the same reason that they want to drive a stylish and expensive auto. Costly obedience is as foreign to them in matters spiritual as self-denial is in matters material. In a culture filled with such people, restoring weight to God is going to involve much more than simply getting some doctrine straight; it’s going to entail a complete reconstruction of the modern self-absorbed pastiche personality.94 4. It follows that teachers and preachers in seminaries and churches must be people “for whom the great issue is the knowledge of God,”95 whatever their area of specialization might be. Preachers and teachers who do not see this point and passionately hold to it are worse than useless: they are dangerous, because they are diverting.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Some churches try so hard to be user-friendly and relational that the Bible is implicitly ignored or depreciated. In one evangelical church that I recently attended, the morning’s skit came in three secenes that devoured about fifteen minutes. The closing lines on true love and friendship emerged from a scene in which one woman was giving comfort and love to another who had just had a miscarriage. The latter thanked her for not quoting verses like Romans 8:28 at her, but just loving her. Now I realize that quoting verses “at” someone can be done in an insensitive and triumphalistic fashion. Yet the fact remains that no Christian who passes through deep waters draws much comfort from God until he or she realizes that God really is in control, God really does love his own people, God really is wise and good, God really can use pain in this fallen world in remarkable ways.77 To turn people away from such God-centered truths to appeal to purely human comfort I might have expected from a liberal church; it is crushingly disappointing in a church that nominally retains its evangelical statement of faith.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“To be perfectly blunt, sin is being redefined within the evangelical tradition. What was sinful a generation ago is no longer sinful today. When confronted with this reality, evangelicals will more or less trivialize their heritage by saying, “Those behaviors were not really sinful, but a mere religious and social quirkiness of our forebears.”…Contemporary society is more permissive than that of the past, and the evangelical community is being affected by that permissiveness…. [T]here is less and less continuity with the past.58”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“This is the time for Christians to be drumming home some fundamentals as part of our witness in the larger world. Whatever fine points we express or even fight over in our own Christian communities, on the larger scale we should be hammering away at a few basic points. It is painfully disappointing to find many clerics and Christian gurus, on the few occasions they find themselves asked for a Christian outlook on this or that question, unable to deliver themselves of more than a few ethical platitudes veneered with Christian vocabulary. We must constantly say that we were made by God and for him; that all of us will have to give an account to him; that our Creator is our Judge; that the grace we ourselves have received in Christ Jesus impels us to good works, but that our ultimate hope for the future is the end of history, a new heaven and a new earth that only God himself can bring about; that human hubris stands humbled not only before our individual deaths, but before the deaths of civilizations and finally of the world itself; that a society that does not recognize these points finally becomes grotesquely self-serving and exposed to the judgement of God.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“The generation brought up during the Great Depression and the Second World War, still in measure steeped in the much-maligned Protestant work ethic, resolved to work hard and provide a more secure heritage for their children. And, in measure, they did. But the children, for whom the Depression and the War belonged to the relics of history, had nothing to live for but more “progress.” There was no grand vision, no taste of genuine want, and not much of the Protestant work ethic either.83 Soon the war in Vietnam became one of the central “causes” of that generation, but scarcely one that incited hard work, integrity in relationships, frugality, self-denial, and preparation for the next generation. That ’60s generation, the baby boomers, have now gone mainstream—but with a selfishness and consumerism that outstrips anything their parents displayed. There is no larger vision. Contrast a genuine Christian vision that lives life with integrity now because this life is never seen as more than the portal to the life to come, including perfect judgment from our Maker. At its best, such a stance, far from breeding withdrawal from the world, fosters industry, honest work for honest pay, frugality, generosity, provision for one’s children, honesty in personal relationships and in business relationships, the rule of law, a despising of greed. A “Protestant work ethic” of such a character I am happy to live with. Of course, a couple of generations later, when such a Christian vision has eroded, people may equate prosperity with God’s blessing, and with despicable religious cant protest that they are preparing for eternity when in their heart of hearts they are merely preparing for retirement. But a generation or two after that their children will expose their empty fatuousness. In any case, what has been lost is a genuinely Christian vision. This is not to say that such a vision will ensure prosperity. When it is a minority vision it may ensure nothing more than persecution. In any case, other unifying visions may bring about prosperity as well, as we have seen. From the perspective of the Bible, prosperity is never the ultimate goal, so that is scarcely troubling. What is troubling is a measuring stick in which the only scale is measured in terms of financial units.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“The situation is so serious that many pundits are commenting on it (though with no observable change thereby being effected). One of the best of these is the essay by Robert Brustein, which includes this memorable if slightly hyperbolic sentence: “The time is nigh when 8-year-olds will have more knowledge about Native American totem rituals than about the multiplication table and will be better instructed in how to use a condom than in how to apply the rules of grammar.”63”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“At time of writing, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council, set up by the Clinton Administration,61 is due to prescribe what students in grades five through twelve are supposed to know about American history. Not a single one of the thirty-one standards set up mentions the Constitution. Paul Revere is unmentioned; the Gettysburg address is briefly mentioned once. On the other hand, the early feminist Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments receives nine notices. Joseph McCarthy is mentioned nineteen times; there is no mention of the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Robert E. Lee; Harriet Tubman receives six notices. The Ku Klux Klan is mentioned seventeen times; the American Federation of Labor comes up with nine appearances. The role of religion, especially Christianity, in the founding and building of the nation is totally ignored; the grandeur of the court of Mansa Musa (King of Mali in fifteenth-century Africa) is praised, and recommended as a topic for further study.62 Such standards are linked in the minds of many with “outcome-based-education” (OBE). If the “outcomes” were well balanced and not less than thoroughly cognitive (though hopefully more than cognitive), there would be few objections. But OBE has become a lightening-rod issue precisely because in the hands of many it explicitly minimizes cognitive tests and competency skills, while focusing much more attention on attitudes, group conformity, and the like. In other words, granred the postmodernism that grips many educational theorists and the political correctness that shapes their values, this begins to look like one more experiment in social engineering.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“The inevitable result is that judges make decisions that are in line with their politics, their prejudices, their cultural alignments, their value systems, without reference to anything that claims to be stable or in any sense culture-transcendent. The best of them are very clever people who can always use the Constitution to support their biases. They are, in short, a reflection of the philosophical pluralism reigning in the land; we should not expect otherwise. Second, for various complex reasons, this is increasingly a time when judges rule. The people rule less and less, even through their duly elected legislators; unelected judges rule.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Fourth, as the previous chapters have shown, the rise of philosophical pluralism and of secularizing tendencies, especially in the media and in the academy, project an image of believers as old-fashioned, quaint, ill-informed, red-necked, “fundamentalist”—and therefore needing to be tamed. The left demonizes the right, and the right returns the compliment—but the left holds virtually all the positions of leadership in the media and in the academy. In short, the culture of our age firmly opposes all claims to transcendent authority, with the result that there is often a bias against believers. No small irony rests in the fact that the Pilgrim fathers left England because they were not free to practice the truth, and then left Holland for America because they perceived that the amorphous tolerance they found there was in danger of corroding their love of the truth.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Third, the increasing empirical pluralism and consequent privatization of religion may lead to the creation of what Hannah Arendt calls the “atomistic mass.”31 She argues that for totalitarianism to occur there must be the progressive elimination of intermediate structures in society, and consequently the growth of direct dependency of every individual upon the central goverment. Sooner or later totalitarianism becomes almost inevitable.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“What is unsure is how long democracies can survive once they lose a controlling vision of the common good that extends beyond the merely pragmatic. It may take a long time—I certainly hope so—but it is hard to be optimistic. What seems so difficult for Westerners to grasp at the moment is that our problems are not merely economic (though many are tied to economics), but reflect the most fundamental questions of cultural cohesiveness. They touch all of life. They are as much tied to religion, philosophy, the family, heritage, direction, vision of the future, language, and everything else that contributes to any culture, as to the interest rate and the federal deficit.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Over the last several decades, government power has been in the process of massive expansion. One doubts whether this expansion can be turned around by the periodic triumph of a particular party, because the moral consensus necessary for sustained restraint is no longer present. On the long haul, people without a controlling vision beyond economic advancement will simply vote for more. That “more” may mean a temporary tax-break, but only rarely will it mean a cut in services. The more we demand, the more government takes; the more it takes and the more it provides, the more we think it unthinkable that we could do without what is provided. Such a world allows no aristocracy of excellence, for there are no agreed criteria as to what is praiseworthy, and therefore no direction toward which the country as a whole “pulls.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Second, although it is notoriously difficult to chart simple causes and effects at the societal level, few would be so bold as to deny that one of the factors that has powerfully contributed to the changes convulsing Western culture is the decline in Judeo-Christian assumptions, allied with (but emphatically differentiable from) the shift from modernity to postmodernity.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Two introductory remarks may prove helpful. First, there is widespread recognition that Western culture is in trouble. A very long chapter would be needed merely to chronicle the range of troubled reflection.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“In this framework, although church discipline is being thought through afresh by many Christian groups,44 one of the areas where more thought is still needed is the manner in which churches that draw lines in the moral arenas—however graciously, humbly, gently, sometimes by degrees, but also firmly—are not only taking steps to align themselves with Scripture (and with the main strands of Christian heritage, for that matter), but are taking on the culture. Such steps become not only a matter of nurturing and protecting the faithful, but of showing a pluralistic world what Christian living looks like. This will alienate some; under God’s good hand, it will draw others, not least because the freedoms promised by pluralism are tearing society apart. In any case, we have little choice: elementary faithfulness demands it.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Orthodoxy often requires us to be hard precisely where the world is soft, and soft where the world is hard. It means condemning the homosexual lifestyle and being labeled bigots. It means caring for AIDS patients though many think us fools. It means respecting the rule of law though our culture is increasingly lawless. It means visiting the prisoners who offend that law though our culture would prefer to forget them. In every way that matters, Christianity is an affront to the world; it is countercultural.43”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Liberalizing tendencies today are not usually associated with those seeking a return to Scripture.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Something of the same difficulty attaches to a number of other books. For example, while one deeply appreciates the tact, humility, and good spirit Fackre displays in one of his recent works,35 pretty soon one recalls the fundamental point Machen made more than half a century ago: At some point one must face the fact that the kind of disavowals and denials one finds in many branches of classic liberalism, and repeated by the major proponents of religious pluralism, are much deeper even than the chasms between, say, Russian Orthodoxy and American Pentecostalism, or between Roman Catholicism and classic evangelicalism; we are dealing with “different religions,” in the strongest sense of that expression.36”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism