“Looking back to [Christendom's] youth, we recall the emotional stirrings, the deep sense of Christian purpose, when a temple, say, challenged the existing social order... Where is our Christian duty, our Christian aim? We do not know, we cannot say. Yet our ignorance and silence are certainly not due to the fact that the welfare state has made Christian thinking out of date and irrelevant. The reason we have nothing to say to the contemporary situation is that we have not been thinking about the contemporary situation. We stopped thinking about these things long ago. We stopped thinking Christianly outside the scope of personal morals and personal spirituality. We got into the habit of stepping out of our Christian garments whenever we stepped mentally into the field of social and political life. Becuase the subject was social or political, we left all of our well-tried and well-grounded Christian concepts behind us, and adopted the vocabulary of secularism. We put aside all talk of vocation, or God's providence, or man's spiritual destiny, and instead chattered with the rest about productivity, assembly line psychology, and deployment of personnel.”

“We ourselves have so long ceased to use it [the Christian worldview] except for the discussion of the moral, the liturgical, or the spiritual, that it is rusty and out of date. We have no Christian vocabulary to match the complexities of contemporary political, social, and industrial life. We have long ceased to bring Christian judgement to bear upon the secular public world.”

“We are all caught up, entangled, in the lumbering day-to-day operations of a [social] machinery, working in many respects in the service of ends which we as Christians reject. This situation, the present [schizophrenic] situation of thousands of thinking Christians is the end product of a process that began the day Christians first decided to stop thinking Christianly in the interests of national harmony; the day when Christians first felt that the only way out of endless public discussion was to limit the operation of acute Christian awareness to the spheres of personal morality and spirituality. From that point, the spheres of political, cultural, social, and commercial life became dominated by pragmatic and utilitarian thinking.”

“We twentieth-century Christians have chosen the way of compromise. We withdraw our Christian consciousness from the fields of public, commercial, and social life. When we enter these fields we are compelled to accept, for purposes of discussion, the secular frame of reference.”

“What is the place of art in the Christian life? Is art- especially the fine arts- simply a way to bring worldliness in through the back door? What about sculpture or drama, music or painting? Do these have any place in the Christian life? Shouldn't a Christian focus his gaze steadily on "religious things" alone and forget about art and culture?As evangelical Christians, we have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life. The rest of human life we feel is more important. Despite our constant talk about the lordship of Christ, we have narrowed its scope to a very small area of reality. We have misunderstood the concept of the lordship of Christ over the whole man and the whole of the universe and have not taken to us the riches that the Bible gives us for ourselves, for our lives, and for our culture.The lordship of Christ over the whole of life means that there are no platonic areas in Christianity, no dichotomy or hierarchy between the body and the soul. God made the body as well as the soul, and redemption is for the whole man.”

“I don't know. I only think the Austrians will not stop when they have won a victory. It is in defeat that we become Christian.""The Austrians are Christians-- except for the Bosnians.""I don't mean technically Christian. I mean like Our Lord."He said nothing."We are all gentler now because we are beaten. How would our Lord have been f Peter had rescued him in the Garden?”