Best book ever?

Okay, an overstatement, but I found myself telling Sara this as I finished it up last night.

Not an overstatement: this is the best "worldview" book I've ever read.

"To assert that truth is real, and objectively so, is to state a dogma that is contrary to the dominant position of our age. But the biblical writers commonly took positions that were contrary to the accepted wisdom of their ages. When the apostle Paul said that the wisdom of his age was rubbish (1 Cor 2), he provided a model we should take more seriously than we are accustomed." (pg 300).

"Christians must learn to recognize when idolatry dons the guise of the Christian virtues. They must stop lauding the evil impulses of envy and hatred that often lurk behind such benign phrases as 'social justice.' Inevitably, this raises throny issues that cause practical people to doubt whether stopping idolatry is feasible, There are always practical reasons to stay with whatever idol seems to bring results. If we no longer sacrifice children to Molech, what will that do to the unemploymnet rate in a few years?.... Once it is accepted that idolatry can be defended on practical grounds, there is no hope." (pg 308).

"[Christians] now living in a post-Christian world... [are] subversives in an alien culture.... The repeated New Testament call for separation demands that we refuse to think and act like those around us.... The drive for respectability, the concern not to be thought odd, makes us vulnerable to the errors of fashion, of snobbery, of servility, of hypocrisy." (Pg 309-10).

"The appropriate response to the dominant culture, then, is to refuse subservience to it, to reject the domination of its norms, to withdraw support selectively from all institutions that base their activities on the idolatries that control American life. In short, to rebel." (Pg 311).

"The old delusion that poverty is a sign of immoral living and wealth of moral worth is being replaced by one that says the opposite.... [but] the amount of wealth was of little importance in assessing a person.... poverty and wealth are morally neutral: neither one is an evil to be ashamed of nor a sign of special worth or transcending glory." (pg 313-4)

"An association [church] that merely occupies its members for a few hours a week reinforces the fragmentation of the individual's life among numerous loyalties and makes it virtually impossible to build genuine community." (pg 321).

Okay, I'll stop, and just say, GET THIS BOOK.