Quotes from George M. Marsden

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.

When I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Regeneration, in other words, changed the whole person by changing the love at the heart of the person's being.

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.

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