Matthew Soergel

“According to Tim Keller, nearly all Presbyterian Church in America presbyters subscribe to The Westminster Confession of Faith ‘with only the most minor exceptions (the only common one being with regard to the Sabbath).’ If, however, such an exception amounts to a wholesale rejection of the confessions’s approach to the Sabbath, its authors might have judged Keller a master of understatement. Were the Westminster Confession a garment, you would not want to pull this ‘minor’ thread, unless you wanted to be altogether defrocked. And perhaps the reason that some people pull at this thread is because they regard the confession as more of a straightjacket than a garment. Unbuckle the Sabbath, and you are well on your way to mastering theological escapology.

If this seems overstatement to rival Keller’s understatement, let me say that biblical law, with its Sabbath, is no easily dispensable part of the Reformed doctrinal infrastructure. And what applies to the theology of the Reformed churches often applies to wider Protestant theology. Attempts at performing a precision strike on the Sabbath produce an embarrassing amount of unintended damage. Strike out the Sabbath and you also shatter the entire category of moral law and all that depends on it.”
― Philip S. Ross, From the Finger of God: The Biblical and Theological Basis for the Threefold Division of the Law

“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.”
― Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

“Citizens are not governed for their good and for the true glory of the supreme King when the secular authorities do not rule according to the divine Law and are not set to observe it themselves. For where God is not recognized and obedience to Him is not required before all things, there peace is not peace, justice is not justice, and that which should be profitable brings injury instead.”
― Martin Bucer, Instruction in Christian Love [1523]

“I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

In Memoriam A.H.H. Section 5”
― Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam