George M. Marsden > Quotes

“The critics of modernity were warning that one must be vigilant against the demands of hyperorganized commercial society and consumerism lest they undermine one’s true humanity.”
― George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief

“When I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell.”
― George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards

“Jonathan Edwards is sometimes criticized for having too dim a view of human nature, but it may be helpful to be reminded that his grandmother was an incorrigible profligate, his great-aunt committed infanticide, and his great-uncle was an ax-murderer.”
― George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards

“Lippmann declared that “if what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent’, then we are outside the traditions of civility.”
― George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief

“Having once thought that most of his parishioners shared the life-changing encounter with blazing beauty, it was all the harder for him to see them day after day preoccupied with petty jealousies, avarice, and lusts, and to endure their sullen expressions and bored irreverence as they went through the forms of weekly worship.”
― George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards

“Martin Marty, a young Lutheran scholar, offered further insights into the situation in The New Shape of American Religion, which appeared in 1959. The so-called revival of religion, Marty explained, was largely a revival of “interest in religion.” Unlike earlier American awakenings, this one was not primarily a renewal of Protestantism but “a maturing national religion”
― George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief

“Mainstream liberal thinkers could thus, on the one hand, be consistent believers in a purely naturalistic universe that did not furnish any absolute first principles, yet on the other hand have a dedicated faith in the shared principles of the current American consensus.”
― George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief

“Why would a perfect being, such as God, need to create any less perfect beings? The answer, said Edwards, is that God is perfectly loving and so wishes to share that love with creatures capable of love. Edwards's starting point was that a loving God stands at the heart of the universe. So for Edwards the universe is most essentially personal; it is the creative expression of a person. Edwards's emphasis on personality at the center of reality presents a sharp contrast to most modern views. Since the Enlightenment many modern thinkers have built their theories on the premise that the universe is essentially impersonal, controlled by natural laws. Edwards challenged that view with a vital alternative: that at the core of reality is a loving God, and that love is the dynamic behind the creation of the universe and everything in it. Starting with a sense of God's love at the center of reality then shapes the way we think of true virtue. At the core of reality is the beauty of the love of God pouring forth, so that the highest good is to return that love to God.”
― George M. Marsden, A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Library of Religious Biography

“affluent Americans typically became quickly bored with their material things. So the rates of alcoholism and suicide in America were among the highest in the world, and escapist entertainments were everywhere. Modern societies promoted short-term “happiness,” but they did not cultivate truly humanistic lives characterized by relatedness, creativity, individuality, loving relationships, reason, and “a frame of orientation and devotion.”
― George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief

“Edwards followed what he believed the proper procedure whenever contemplating a move: he agreed to convene an ad hoc council of clergy that would meet in May to advise him what to do.26”
― George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards

“Faith preceded understanding, and so faith informed and shaped understanding. Working from this principle, Kuyper insisted that reason, natural science, and methodological naturalism were not ideologically neutral. Even the most technical of natural sciences, he observed, operated within the framework of the faith, or higher commitments, of the practitioner.”
― George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief

“True saints," Edwards observed with typical God-centeredness, are "inexpressibly pleased and delighted with ... the things of God." Hypocrites, by contrast, revel in themselves. "The hypocrite has his mind pleased and delighted, in the first place, with his own privilege, and the happiness which he supposes he has attained, or shall obtain."58”
― George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards

“Regeneration, in other words, changed the whole person by changing the love at the heart of the person's being.”
― George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards

“Christians’ trust in God may be mingled or confused with some culturally formed assumptions, ideals, and values. Inevitably it will. The danger is that our culturally defined loves, allegiances, and understandings will overwhelm and take precedence over our faithfulness to God. So the identification of cultural forces, such as those with which this book is concerned, is essentially a constructive enterprise, with the positive purpose of finding the gold among the dross.”
― George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture

“Fundamentalism then has become a rather specific self-designation. Though outsiders to the movement sometimes use the term broadly to designate any militant conservative, those who call themselves fundamentalists are predominantly separatist Baptist dispensationalists.”
― George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism

“I find that a Christian view of history is clarified if one considers reality as more or less like the world portrayed in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. We live in the midst of contests between great and mysterious spiritual forces, which we understand only imperfectly and whose true dimensions we only occasionally glimpse. Yet, frail as we are, we do play a role in this history, on the side either of the powers of light or of the powers of darkness. It is crucially important then, that, by God’s grace, we keep our wits about us and discern the vast difference between the real forces for good and the powers of darkness disguised as angels of light.2”
― George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture

“Since God works among imperfect human beings in historical settings, “pure” or “perfect” Christianity can seldom if ever exist in this world. God in his grace works through our limitations; for that very reason we should ask for the grace to recognize what those limitations are. So we may—and ought to—carefully identify the cultural forces which affect the current versions of Christianity.”
― George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture

“the public role of mainline Protestantism was rapidly diminishing, the mainstream culture had no provision for encouraging a wider variety of religiously informed views in its place.”
― George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief

“Yet it would be a failure of imagination if we were to start out-as today's histories sometimes do-by simply judging people of the past for having outlooks that are not like our own. Rather, we must first try to enter sympathetically into an earlier world and to understand its people. Once we do that we will be in a far better position both to learn from them and to evaluate their outlooks critically.”
― George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards