Inspirational Quotes on Culture

“To conform to a sick society is to become sick.”

“The kingdom of God works in all spheres of culture, whether church, family, education, government, arts, business, or media. It is time to stop operating under the mindset that these spheres ought to be separated into secular and Christian, hoarding all the ‘sanctified spheres’ into the church, thereby leaving the world struggling in a vacuum of death. When we suck all the living water into the church, the world is left to die of thirst.”

“In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”

“We make a mistake in thinking that something is right or wrong because culture deems it such. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, culture may approve or disapprove, but if there is no overarching umbrella of truth beyond culture, our times may wreak havoc in the name of culture. Slavery is an example of this. People did not flinch at the barbaric practices that were tolerated for so long. The abuse of marriage is no less a crime against humanity.”

“What God says to His Church at any given period depends altogether upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour.”

“There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”

“Culture is critical in marriage because in a real sense, culture is the behavioral expression of one's values, appreciations, tastes, and relational style in both simple and serious matters of life. Add to this the dimensions of language and cultural memory, and you have worlds within worlds. In effect, culture provides the how and why of an individual's behavior.”

“Contrary to popular culture, love can say no. What we cannot do is let the world tell us [followers of Christ] where we should draw the line; the world should not tell us what we can do and can’t. Our cultural elites tell us that if we were ‘loving’ we would do what they think we should. But we derive our definition of love from God’s Word, not from the vicissitudes of the cultural currents.”

“Through technology the whole world has now become the media's parish, talk-show hosts the prophets, actors and musicians the priests, and any script will do for the Scriptures as long as moral constraints are removed. Sitting before a well-lit box is all the cultic performance needs, and each person can enthrone his or her own self as divine. Truth has been relegated to subjectivity; beauty has been subjugated to the beholder; and as millions are idiotized night after night, a global commune has been constructed with he arts enjoying a totalitarian rule.”

“It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means.”

“We may rifle the treasures of antiquity and make the heathen contribute to the gospel even as Hiram of Tyre served under Solomon's direction for the building of the Temple.”

“The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and certainly exposed by the modern world.”

“When we cross borders culturally, we experience some alienation from our own culture and gain an objective perspective toward our own culture at the same time. A bicultural individual comes to identify home as a culture outside his or her original identity, and may vacillate in commitment and loyalty to both cultures.”

“We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.”

“How shortsighted and how uncultured, then, are the efforts of believers in Christ when they seek for snatches of worldly culture for themselves by placing themselves, as they think, on common ground with those who are not believers in Christ. How dishonoring to their Christ if they allow that any culture endures unless it be because of the power of his resurrection in the world. If you have been taken out of the miry clay, do you jump back into it because of some glistening objects that you see in it? Do you run back into the house now almost burned to the ground in order to save your silverware? It is only those who are believers in Christ that will inherit the earth and all the fulness thereof.”

“We need encouragement, not sermonizing, and we need clear-eyed acknowledgement of the situation, not a sanctified gloss that pushes us toward saying, 'I see I must not admit my pain because, after all, I'm a Christian. I'll just have to cover it up.”

“Let those of us in our churches not sit in judgment of the world, however, for all too often, we are the world, sharing in our culture’s since and failures. Remember, it was because of Jonah and not the pagan sailors that the storm blew on the sea! Too often we are blind to our own darkness. We criticize the world for calling darkness, but perhaps we do the same.”

“The arts, as they develop, grow further apart. Once, song, poetry, and dance were all parts of a single dromenon. Each has become what it now is by separation from the others, and this has involved great losses and great gains. Within the single art of literature, the same process has taken place. Poetry has differentiated itself more and more from prose.”

“All things being equal, attitude wins. All things not being equal, attitude sometimes still wins.”

“For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.”