Quotes from Douglas Wilson

The future, like salvation, is the gift of God, and it must be apprehended by faith alone.

Attaching "produced at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT" to a ridiculous argument immediately makes it cogent to many. That's part of life, but let's not pretend that it's rationality.

But do you want to be efficient like a machine, or fruitful like a tree?

The fault with the older covenant was with the people, not with the covenant, but the heavenly covenant is founded on better promises—promises which take our sinfulness into account, promises which conquer our sinfulness. In this New Covenant we find the internalization of the law. The Old Covenant is on its last legs, and is about ready to vanish away.

One writer has helpfully noted that education is about formation, not so much information.

As Christ teaches us the nature of abiding, we see that He is not contrasting abiding with not abiding. The contrast is rather between abiding temporarily and abiding permanently. In this fallen world, apostasy, church discipline, fruitlessness, rebuke, and scandal are to be expected. The house of Christ still has slaves and sons, and we should not be surprised when the differences between them become manifest.

All hope is lost? Good. That means the conditions for a black swan revival are improving by the day. The stone-cold deader we get, the more God is hastening the day. Nothing is dying but what has needed to die for a long time.

In the classical liberal order, there was an arbitrary desire to hang the rights of man on a great big invisible sky hook. But whenever you bolt this sky hook into the azure blue, it does not much matter how many extra Kantian bolts you use-the thing simply will not stay up there.

If your everyday conversation is sloppy and scattered, a highly disciplined writing voice will come off like some kind of schizophrenia.

We are all living along the beach in our miserable little grass huts, and a great tsunami, a huge tidal wave of joy, is heading toward us. Our task is not that of trying to get the tidal wave to come. We cannot make it come any faster, and we most certainly cannot get it to slow down. We declare that it is coming—as the children say, ready or not—and that preparation matters a great deal.

It turns out that, however you might wish otherwise, you eventually wind up wherever it was you were going. If you get on the plane to Chicago, and I would ask you to follow me closely here, you are going to land in Chicago. We are now arriving where a godless education must necessarily go. The public schools in America were not secular, they were godless. The public schools in America were not neutral, they were godless. The public schools in America were not even agnostic, they were godless.

When we say New Covenant we should understand this as heavenly covenant. When we say Old Covenant we should understand heavenly shadow covenant.

And as the history of the church revealed in Acts shows, their central debate was over whether or not the Gentiles had to include their children in the New Covenant by means of circumcision—their debate was not whether the Jewish Christians had to start excluding their children.

At the heart of this covenantal relationship is the issue of responsibility. Whenever there is genuine federal headship, the head as representative assumes responsibility for the spiritual condition of the members of the covenant body, and the organic connection applies in both directions. We are covenantal beings; we were created this

Fortunately, given the state of criticism these days, lots of people miss—especially the feminists, who usually throw like a girl.

So it is a grace and a gift from God to excel in your work. It is another gift from God to reap the benefits of excelling in your work. Though they usually go together (but not always), the two must not be confused, and the order of the two must never be reversed. Doing this will enable us to keep our priorities right where they are supposed to be: "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold" (Prov. 22:1).

Henry Van Til once noted that culture is religion externalized. Cultus (worship) lies at the heart of every culture. And the reason our culture has forgotten God is because our worship services did that first.

More frequently, when husbands lose an understanding of the cross, they come to the point where they do not instruct their wives in the Word at all. Of course, as the head of the wife, an ignorant husband continues to teach, but the lessons have to do with how Christ is more interested in Monday Night Football than in communion with His bride.

We have grown accustomed to thinking of our democracy as a good thing, and it surprises us to learn that the founding fathers of our nation were deeply suspicious of democracy and tried to place whatever restraints on it they could. They established a constitutional republic, not a democracy, and it is a sign of our current ignorance that we do not even know the difference between the two. This

I would define media in this way: working out from and including our bodies, media also include our clothes, other people, and tools, including especially tools for communication and infrastructure.

Imitation is absolutely crucial for childrearing. You do not want your children imitating you unless you are imitating God.

The reformation of the church must occur so that there is a reformation of our subculture, and then our subculture will affect the larger polis. Expecting our faith to affect the larger polis when it has not yet changed the average shelf at the local Christian book store is expecting something that is not going to happen.

The church today is dominated by this theology of silly women.

Husbands, the world is watching you. You are to model what the saving looks like. Wives, the world is watching you. You are to model what the salvation looks like. Why is the world not streaming to the rod of Jesse? Why are the nations not turning away from their folly? Is it because the gospel the Church is presenting to them is a gospel that looks too much like our marriages?