Quotes from Douglas Wilson

There is no such thing as 'invisible' honor or respect.

We ought not to think that when men are converted, they each become a little lamp, and if enough of them get converted, they will be able to form a consortium and pool their lamps to try to make a sun. The vision of the coming noontime glory does not depend at all on us trying to get some momentum up. The sun has risen, and it will continue to do what rising suns do.

I didn't know the stakes at the start. But I do know now, and now is when God decided to let me know what the stakes might be. Maybe He didn't trust me with that info earlier.

if the athletic program is not helping the kids understand God, man, sin, and salvation, then the program is failing, regardless of the win/loss record. But the same thing is true of the "classroom program.

A husband cannot say, "All my behavior notwithstanding, I still honor my wife, even though I never show it." Husbands must honor their wives.

How can an unexamined piety differ from the blind gropings of the fool? What is the hallmark of wisdom in this fallen world? The answer is joy at the end of the tether. But before we can learn joy at the end of the tether, we must learn the strength of that tether. The Lord is God and we are not.

If clichés were candied fruit, walnuts, and raisins, the Book of Psalms in The Message would be a three-pound fruitcake.

We have to come to grips with the fact that when God became man, that one event altered human history forever. Jesus was not born of a virgin in order to conduct "a short visit" of thirty-three years, after which everything returned to normal. The Incarnation† was the beginning of the great transformation.

As preachers of the gospel spread throughout a society, and new life comes to more and more of the population, the preconditions for an open society are being established. The more the law of God is written on hearts and minds, which is what happens under the new covenant, the less necessary it is to have standards of public decency urged upon us from billboards.

used to describe some occult practice, related to drug use—potions, drugs, and so forth. This means that the translation of sorcery in Galatians 5:20 is probably a good one. But even today, the connection between drug use and occult practices is not entirely severed. But even when there is no occultism, this does not make the prohibition of pharmakeia irrelevant to the modern "secular" drug user. Ancient drug use was

Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen of them, to give him an 87 percent. But we go far beyond this. A student writes an essay on a sunset, let us say, and the teacher writes 87 percent at the top of that paper. What he is saying, in effect, is that there is a mathematical metaphor operative here. The figure of 87 is to 100 what this submitted essay is . . . to what? What on earth is this supposed to mean?

How then does circumcision relate to baptism? Just as circumcision was a sign and seal of the Christ who was to come, so baptism is a sign and seal of the Christ who came. Circumcision looked forward in history, and Christian baptism looks back in history, but they both testify to the same Christ, the same Lord of the Covenant. Neither circumcision nor baptism primarily testifies concerning the inward state of the individual who bears the sign and seal; they testify of Christ.

If there is no God, and if Christ did not come back from the dead, then the bipedal carbon unit that doesn't believe in Jesus is nothing more than 200 pounds of protoplasm with an average temperature of 98.6, and endowed by blind evolutionary processes with nothing in particular to speak of.

Talking about what "religion" does in the world is like defining "medicine" as "pills in bottles." I am not sure you should take that. My aunt took a pill from a bottle once and was sick for a week.

Modernity is a busy place, spinning with silicon speed that goes ever faster but never forward, people pressed into cities full of loneliness.

Some men carry their sin in front of them like a shield, and others drag it behind them, like a rope. With some men, we see the consequences of the sin right away. With others, we don't see it for a good seventy-five years, and even then there is debate among the learned.

Scripture focuses on the political rulers, and this is because it is where the fundamental challenge was mounted.

When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride.

your readings are the trees where your fallen leaves would come from. Mind mulch. Cognitive compost.

Good writing is like a great cathedral. The echoes are lovely.

The long war against God has always been a conflict that boils down to the same thing. Can we somehow have access to the fruit of the tree of life without actually coming to the tree of life?

The trick is to state what we know in a recognizable fashion but in a way that is slightly off, in a way that arrests us.

Secularism refers to the idea, popular for the last few centuries, that it is in fact possible for nations to be religiously neutral.

The Church does not create the truth, the Church supports the truth. And the Church is also described as a pillar, lifting up the truth so that all might see and honor it.