Quotes about Culture

1

Reform is no answer for a culture like ours. Redemption is what is needed, and that occurs at the individual, not societal level. The church needs to get back to the real task to which we are called: evangelizing the lost. Only when multitudes of individuals in our society turn to Christ will society itself experience any significant transformation.

2

We must repudiate our confused loyalties and concerns for the passing world and put aside our misguided efforts to change culture externally. To allow our thoughts, plans, time, money, and energy to be spent trying to make a superficially Christian America, or to put a veneer of morality over the world, is to distort the gospel, misconstrue our divine calling, and squander our God-given resources. We must not weaken our spiritual mission, obscure our priority of proclaiming the gospel of salvation, or become confused about our spiritual citizenship, loyalties and obligations. We are to change society, but by faithfully proclaiming the gospel, which changes lives on the inside.

3

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. 

4

Is it our task to force the biblical doctrine of God to answer to modern culture, or (is it our task) to address modern culture with the biblical doctrine of God? If modern culture-or any culture-establishes the baseline for the doctrine of God, such a doctrine will certainly bear little resemblance to the God of the Bible.

5

As we approach the twenty-first century, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that our entire culture is in trouble. We are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, and we can no longer afford to act like it’s loaded with blanks… Our society has replaced heroes with celebrities, the quest for a well-informed character with the search for a flat stomach, substance and depth with image and personality. In the political process, the makeup man is more important than the speech writer, and we approach the voting booth, not on the basis of a well-developed philosophy of what the state should be, but with a heart full of images, emotions, and slogans all packed into thirty-second sound bites. The mind-numbing, irrational tripe that fills TV talk shows is digested by millions of bored, lonely Americans hungry for that sort of stuff (J.P Moreland).

6

Here is the great evangelical disaster – the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this – namely accommodation. The evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age. First, there has been accommodation on Scripture, so that many who call themselves evangelicals hold a weakened view of the Bible and no longer affirm the truth of all the Bible teaches – truth not only in religious matters but in the areas of science and history and morality… This accommodation has been costly, first in destroying the power of the Scriptures to confront the spirit of our age; second, in allowing the further slide of our culture. Thus we must say with tears that it is the evangelical accommodation to the world spirit around us, to the wisdom of this age, which removes the evangelical church from standing against the breakdown of our culture.

7

True Christianity…resists cultural captivity. It posits a transcendent moral law that is above and beyond human laws and customs, giving a framework by which cultures can be judged. In doing so, trans-cultural Christianity has managed to shape and transform human cultures.

Recommended Books

How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

Francis Schaeffer

We Will Not Be Silenced

Erwin Lutzer

Counter Culture: Following Christ in an Anti-Christian Age

David Platt

Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

Daniel B. Wallace and Daniel Block

Culture Shift: The Battle for the Moral Heart of America

Albert Mohler

We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture

Albert Mohler