John G. Stackhouse Jr. > Quotes

“When society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, the church avoided scandal by going along with it - fundamentally evil as patriarchy was and is. Now, however, that modern society is at least officially egalitarian, the scandal is that the church is NOT going along with society, not rejoicing in the unprecedented freedom to let women and men serve according to gift and call without an arbitrary gender line. This scandal impedes both the evangelism of others and the edification - the retention and development of faith - of those already converted.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender

“Beyond the family or particular Christian tradition, how much effort do we make to consider what the Mennonites or the Episcopalians, the Baptists or the Pentecostals, the Methodists or the Presbyterians have to say to the rest of us out of their DIFFERENCES, as well as out of the affirmation in common with other Christians? As I suggested earlier, our patterns of ecumenicity tend to bracket out our differences rather than to celebrate and capitalize upon them. Finding common ground has been the necessary first step in ecumenical relations and activity. But the next step is to acknowledge and enjoy what God has done elsewhere in the Body of Christ. And if at the congregational level we are willing to say, 'I can't do everything myself, for I am an ear: I must consult with a hand or an eye on this matter,' I suggest that we do the same among whole traditions. If we do not regularly and programmatically consult with each other, we are tacitly claiming that we have no need of each other, and that all the truth, beauty, and goodness we need has been vouchsafed to us by God already. Not only is such an attitude problematic in terms of our flourishing, as I have asserted, but in this context now we must recognize how useless a picture this presents to the rest of society. Baptists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics failing to celebrate diversity provide no positive examples to societies trying to understand how to celebrate diversity on larger scales.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World

“Jesus treats patriarchy the way he treats much else of the law and custom of his time: ambiguously, suggestively, and sometimes subversively, but never immediately revolutionarily outside the central matter of his own mission and person...The main scandal of Jesus' career is properly JESUS - not Jesus and feminism, or Jesus and the abolition of slavery, or Jesus and Jewish emancipation, or Jesus and anything else. Those other causes are good, and they are implicit in Jesus' ministry. But they are incipient at best, and Jesus' accommodation to these various social distinctions needs to be acknowledged and then accounted for in one's paradigm regarding gender.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender

“Everything. Everywhere. Every moment. That is the scope of God's call on our lives, and that is the dignity our lives enjoy.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World

“As I look hard at the Bible, however, and at the two thousand years of church history since the Bible's completion, it seems evident that God has accommodated himself over and over to the weakness and even the sin of human beings. He also has called his faithful ones to a similar accommodation. The 'already but not yet' tension is clear not only with the coming of Christ but also throughout the Old Testament story of redemption. God chooses a people as a vehicle for global salvation and then works with them in a convoluted trajectory of obedience and blessing, disobedience and punishment, first this way and then that way. God puts up with a compromised plan for the conquest of Canaan, blesses a monarchy he did not want, forestalls the prophesied judgment on both northern and southern kingdoms for generations, and even then preserves a remnant and reestablishes it in Jerusalem. God works not only through Israel but also through the empires of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Rome. God works not only through prophets and saints but also through Joseph's brothers, Balaam and his donkey, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, Caiaphas and Pilate.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender

“Among those ways and thoughts of God, then, is the principle of accommodation. God works within human limitations - both individual and corporate - to transform the world according to his good purposes. To be blunt, God works with what he's got and with what we've got. He does not create a whole new situation but instead graciously pursues shalom in the glory and the mess we have made. The living water of the Holy Spirit pours over the extant topography of the social landscape and rarely sweeps all before it. The Spirit usually conforms himself to the contours he encounters. But as he does so, like an irresistible flow of water, he shapes them by and by, eventually making the crooked ways straight and the rough places a plain (Isa. 40:3-4).”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender

“My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no?”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World

“No Christian can safely decide against what he or she understands Scripture to say, since God has specially blessed Scripture as his written revelation. Still, because we are human beings with limited intellectual capacities and, worse, we are still subject to the influence of sin, we must beware of our interpretations of anything, including Scripture, as at least possibly mistaken and maybe even self-serving.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Partners in Christ: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism

“We trust that the God who specializes in bringing good out of evil will make something beautiful out of our efforts to love him and our neighbors in creation.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World

“Evangelicals simply cannot be identified immediately with the political right. Non-
Anglican Protestants in Britain were long aligned with the political Left, and Australia’s
left-wing parties have also enjoyed a measure of evangelical support. Canada’s major
left-wing political organization, the New Democratic Party, came to prominence under
the leadership of a Baptist pastor, Tommy Douglas.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction

“Evangelicalism increasingly became a global culture. By the 2020s, the largest
congregations in the world were not in Texas or Georgia or California, but in Korea,
Nigeria, and Brazil.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction

“CRT poses, in essence, a sharply pointed question. What, really, were the chances that the white, propertied men of the early American Republic would set up a judicial and political and economic system that didn’t privilege...white, propertied men? Critical Theorists would say those chances would be, approximately, . . . zero.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Woke: An Evangelical Guide to Postmodernism, Liberalism, Critical Race Theory, and More

“Conservative” should not be used as a synonym for “evangelical.” Evangelicals have
been only selectively conservative. Many evangelicals have also been progressive, and
sometimes even radical—in doctrine, in ethics, in politics, in art, and more: whatever
gets the job done.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction

“Especially in the cause of mission, Christians must be sensitive to language—every bit as much as foreign missionaries must be sensitive to language in their crosscultural contexts. How do we hope to win the attention and appreciation of others if we offend them on secondary issues? So keeping up with trends in polite (or “correct”) speech isn’t merely to be trendy. It might be just considerate.”
― John G. Stackhouse Jr., Woke: An Evangelical Guide to Postmodernism, Liberalism, Critical Race Theory, and More