Quotes from Greg Forster

the more a Christian intentionally cultivates the joy of God in daily life, the more deeply embedded the joy of God will become in American civilization, through him.

I think the failure of The American church to affirm the goodness of civilizational life is our greatest failing today.

The society with lots of open disagreement and social conflict is the one surging with power in art, science, commerce, constructive social reform, and (most of all) religious revival; the hushed-up society where everyone is afraid to say what he thinks is on the brink of violence and collapse.

Many Americans resent evangelicals because they perceive us as thinking we have a right to rule them. That perception is not always unreasonable in light of the way many evangelical leaders spoke and acted throughout the twentieth century. This is one of the most important reasons Christianity has gradually lost influence over the past century. While the believers in the Christian

life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.

The scholarship of Christian academics isn't recognized as scholarship at all unless it conforms to the prevailing rules of scholarship in the academic disciplines. This forces Christian scholars to accommodate and blend in; even when their work is excellent, it isn't identified as Christian.

We have a tendency to boil the Reformation down to two points: the authority of Scripture and justification through faith apart from works. However, the Reformers emphasized three essential components of their message, not two. The third was the doctrine of "vocation" or calling. Discipleship must transform all of life because God has a calling for you in every area of your life. The Reformation's championing of calling took the idea of cultural transformation to a new level.

One thing we can easily predict is that anything worth accomplishing will take time, and the bigger our goals are, the more time they will take.

One of the great dangers of our time is the illusion that moral obligations are somehow weaker if they're not chosen. We are blessed with the freedom to make choices that people in most times and places don't get to make. The special temptation of living in a society where we have personal liberties is the seductive idea that obligations are less binding, or not binding at all, if we came under them through birth or other circumstances beyond our control.

And by that remarkable fact there hangs . . . a story. This ambiguity was not a historical accident; it was, in fact, the whole point of the American founding. An adequate history of Christianity and America ought to be built around the story of this ambiguity. And quite a story it is. We might call it the "cooperative founding" story, because Christianity and its spiritual enemies created America together.