T. David Gordon > Quotes

“the entering seminarian today has the faculties of a sixth- to eighth-grader sixty years ago, and the seminary curriculum cannot make this seminarian an adult by the time he graduates.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“sermon length is not measured in minutes; it is measured in minutes-beyond-interest, in the amount of time the minister continues to preach after he has lost the interest of his hearers (assuming he ever kindled it in the first place).”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth, trans. and ed., The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). Also cf. Augustus Delafield Zanzig, Music in American Life, Present & Future (London: Oxford University Press, 1932); Alphons Silbermann, The Sociology of Music, trans. Corbel Stewart (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); and Wayne D. Bowman, Philosophical Perspectives on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal

“People
who would find it odd if we repeated the Gloria Patri or Doxology four times don't find it odd that we repeat the refrains to these choruses numerous times, even if they are less theologically significant.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal

“When properly done, the hearer longs to be rescued from that depravity from which no sinner can rescue himself; and the hearer rejoices to know that a kind and gracious God is both willing and able to begin that rescue, which will be completed in glorification.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“in the current situation, for some individuals the only aesthetic criterion they recognize is contemporaneity.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal

“To preach the Word of God well, one must already have cultivated, at a minimum, three sensibilities: the sensibility of the close reading of texts, the sensibility of composed communication, and the sensibility of the significant. Without these, a person simply cannot preach, any more than he could if his larynx were removed or he were utterly illiterate.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“sermon length is not measured in minutes; it is measured in minutes-beyond-interest,”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“the one inadmissible thing to a culture warrior (that cultural change is out of our hands) is the basic subtext of everything the Bible teaches.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“Now, since Christ rescues us from both the guilt and the power of sin, one aspect of his work is the work of sanctification, whereby he renews us into the image of God and conforms us to his own likeness. So Christian proclamation properly includes the shaping of a Christian moral vision, and preaching Christ crucified does not exclude, but intentionally includes, such a vision. But it is never appropriate, in my estimation, for one word of moral counsel ever to proceed from a Christian pulpit that is not clearly, in its context, redemptive. That is, even when the faithful exposition of particular texts requires some explanation of aspects of our behavior, it is always to be done in a manner that the hearer perceives such commended behavior to be itself a matter of being rescued from the power of sin through the grace of Christ.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“What I care about is the average Christian family in the average pew in the average church on the average Sunday. And the problem there is not that we don’t have “great” preachers; in many circumstances we don’t even have mediocre preachers.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“Bad preaching is insufferably long, even if the chronological length is brief.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“While our culture has not yet become entirely illiterate, it has become almost illiterate regarding the close reading of texts.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“Such Christological preaching feeds the soul and builds faith. Faith is not built by preaching introspectively (constantly challenging people to question whether they have faith); faith is not built by preaching moralistically (which has exactly the opposite effect of focusing attention on the self rather than on Christ, in whom our faith is placed); faith is not built by joining the culture wars and taking potshots at what is wrong with our culture. Faith is built by careful, thorough exposition of the person, character, and work of Christ.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

“This technology has its advantages: when someone suddenly becomes ill, we can call for an ambulance to be dispatched to the scene with lifesaving speed. But disadvantages attend these technological developments also, and while we cannot discuss all of them here, we must consider two: that we can hear people whom we do not see, and that we do not compose our thoughts as frequently or carefully as we once did.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers