Status Updates From The Church in Dark Times: U...

“Job’s friends… took a single idea (justice) and distorted the rest of their moral universe to conform to it. Their version of God was a tyrant… like every ideology, this provides an explanation and a pattern with which one can make sense of the chaos and unpredictability of life. Embracing it allowed them to create a psychological distance between themselves and Job’s suffering.” p. 81

“As a result, our culture has a hard time bearing the burden of terrible knowledge. When that pent-up burden meets other factors in the modern world… It contributes to the eagerness with which individuals embrace ideology. The modern age assumes that having acknowledge is, in end of itself, good.” P.69

“Ideology universalizes the local church, making it success of cosmic importance. This heightened urgency cast a shadow over conscience and conviction and in the name of what is ‘good,’ we will be tempted to do terrible things. Only by resisting that exchange… will we have the capacity to discern the circumstances…and resist the grandiosity that would make evil good and good evil.” P.62

“We need to ‘think what evangelicals are doing’ and consider the degree to which our church’s doctrine and dogma have been supplanted, supplemented, or subverted by modern ideology. We need to consider the moral distortions those ideologies have wreaked on our churches and what we owe the ‘bodies behind the bus’ who suffered because we mistook the momentum of an ideology for the kingdom of God” P. 38

“Love for a group inclines a person to act in ways that serve the group’s ends and purposes. If one isn’t careful, concern for the many in the group can quickly overwhelm concern for the few… these loyalties and affections… shouldn’t overwhelm a person’s capacity to think and judge clearly, including the ability to speak truths that might make one seem disloyal.” - p.11