95 Theses 
(To Be Nailed)

In 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, there was great need for reformation in a religious establishment run amok It has seemed not inappropri­ate to revisit this concept which issued in Luther’s prophetic act. A diverse company of sometime ethicists, theologians, historians, prophets, priests, malfeasants, miscreants, and malcontents were invit­ed to contribute to the enterprise. Their names are safely locked away in a vault in Zurich lest they be turned in to the IRS and subsequent­ly chained in a bottomless pit for a thousand years. So here I stand. God help me.

1. In his passionate tirade “Against the Execrable Bull of Antichrist” in 1520, Martin Luther’s defiance of religious authorities of his time may have exhibited certain parallels for our times.
2. Diligent effort to cover our sins with good works and generous gifts may not be the problem for us that Luther found it to be in his world.
3. A Diet of Worms would probably not go down with today's baby boomers.
4. If the dour monk of 1520 thought indulgences were bad in his day he ought to hang out in a modern urban mall the Saturday before Christmas.
5. Corruption, greed, lust, tyranny, materialism, perversion, strife, and heresy were not fully and finally wiped out with Reformation.
6. Martin Luther did not nail to his door the complete words and music to “There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in This Place.”
7. Prophetic passion may exist in inverse proportion to preoccupation with retirement benefits.
8. The moral imperative is a door through which the Lord bids his graced people to go, following righteousness and pursuing peace.
9. I complained because I had no fax machine until I met a man who had no cellular phone.
10. You can measure the character of an individual by the way he or she treats a defenseless person.
11. There is nothing so disgusting as a politician throwing a moral fit just before an election.
12. Before you kill yourself consider how many of your enemies it would make happy
13. A grown human being who has not made some enemies is a miserable failure.
14. If there is just cause for anger and you don’t get angry and then act, it is sin.
15. If you try to change the world, get ready to suffer and die; and if you don’t believe it, just try it in the county seat town.
16. I can argue more forcefully if you won’t confuse me with the facts.
17. The living Church of God in Christ is about the only good idea the world has left.
18. The world keeps stoning its prophets, crowning its clowns, and housebreaking its deities.
19. Of all the saints, Brother Francis of Assisi is the most admired and the least emulated.
20. The greedy who corrupt themselves with avarice corrupt the rest of us by provoking envy.
21. The TV channel flipper does not really want to know what is on TV; he wants to know what else is on TV.
22. When Paul said in Romans 13:8 Phillips, “Keep out of debt alto­gether,” he used Greek words that mean exactly what they do in English.
23. Conventional wisdom now holds that Rush Limbaugh has con­quered anorexia.
24. We never heard a sermon we didn’t get something out of: of course, we’ve had some mighty close calls.
25. “There’s no surer way to misread any document,” Learned Hand observed, “than to read it literally.”
26.  Everybody is hurting or fixing to hurt.
27. Never dilute the oil of anecdote with too much of the vinegar of truth.
28. It is nice to be introduced by a person with a glib tongue, a vivid imagination, and an elastic conscience.
29. My Pastor’s eyes I’ve never seen though light from them may shine, For when he prays he doses his and when he preaches mine.
30. Truth does not always come from the front of the room: Aristotle thought the brain was merely an organ for cooling blood and that women had fewer teeth than men; moreover, he was personally moderate to excess.
31. The secular religion is not humanism but hedonism. walk it in, and then get in the pulpit and preach it out.
32. One enthusiastic flea can worry a whole dog.
33. The water won’t clear up till you get the hogs out of the tank.
34. Don’t believe anything until it has been officially denied.
35. It is the nature of government to do as much harm as it can and as much good as it must to stay in power.
36. The world is wide in time and tide; then do not hurry. That one is blest who does his best and leaves the rest; then do not worry.
37. Sound bites fall short of the glory of God.
38. “Do I hear you saying” is a grave malady for which a state-of-the-art transistorized hearing aid might be considered.
39. New Dead Sea scroll discoveries do not prove that John the Baptist personally led his audiences in singing praise choruses about the sweet by and by
40. When John said, “Men agape darkness because their deeds are evil” (John 3:19), he created certain problems for untold thou­sands of teachers and preachers.
41. When Baptist theologian WT. Conner said, “The Bible doesn’t mean what it says: it means what it means,” he uttered an astounding word which might well get the great teacher fired in today’s climate.
42. Also astounding was Dr. Conner’s distressing observation that “the Bible doesn’t say ‘Believe on the virgin birth and thou shall be saved’ but ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”’
43. There are times and places when the spirit killeth but the letter giveth light.
44. It is a canny pastor destined for long tenure and great popularity who for his sermons regularly gets a good introduction and a good conlusion and then keeps the two close together.
45. Never squat down with your spurs on.
46. Power elites use remote control to keep the church house lights turned on for Sunday evening services.
47. There be three things which are too much for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of a preacher with last year’s statistical records when he really wants to move; the way of a politician in feather­ing his own nest from the plumage of the public bird; the way of a committee in guaranteeing the absolute necessity of yet anoth­er meeting; and the way of extremists in rewriting history, shuf­fling the facts, and twisting the record to serve their ideological ends.
48. The key to good preaching is to find a good text, get outside and
49. Human movements have two choices: they can institutionalize and die or they can refuse to institutionalize and die sooner.
50. It is the nature of most organisms to imagine that the rest of the universe revolves around them.
51. The first law of life is not self preservation but self sacrifice.
52. When the Bible says that righteousness and peace have kissed each other it is a way of saying that peace is always puckered when righteousness comes calling.
53. Separation of church and state is not a shibboleth of doctrinnaire secularism but the very cornerstone of our liberties.
54. What this country needs regarding citizenship is not a short leap-year fit but a continuing commitment to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and leaven for the lump.
55. The key to the New Testament message is repentance which is mentioned at least 56 times in the New Testament.
56. I am debtor for I have sat in the shade of trees I did not plant, eaten at tables I did not prepare, drunk from wells I did not dig, traveled on roads I did not grade, been sheltered under roofs I did not raise, and been warmed by fires I did not build.
57. Christian faith is not believing something in spite of the evidence; it is living life under the lordship of Christ in scorn of conse­quence.
58. Without a vision there can be no venture, and without a venture there can be no victory
59. The goads of self-discipline never prod like the whips of necessity.
60. The Bible which says that God is (Exod. 3:14 and Heb. 11:6) says further that (1) God is One (Mark 12:29; Deut. 6:4; 1 John 5:7), (2)God is Spirit (John 4:24, (3) God is Holy (1 Peter 1:16), (4) God is Peace (Judges 6:24 RSV), (5) God is Light (1 John 1:5), (6) God is Truth (1 John 5:6), (7) God is Love (1 John 4:8, 16), and (8) God is Word (John 1:1).
61. Wisdom leads us not to put asunder what God has joined togeth­er and not to join together what God has put asunder.
62. Native intelligence, natural gifts, and a good education are raw materials from which good judgment can grow.
63. When the Bible says that “the stars from their courses. ..fought against Sisera” (Judges 5:20) it is a way of saying that this is a moral universe.
64. Trust your fellowman but when you park your car always take the keys with you.
65. If I am having a hard time it is someone else’s fault; but if my neighbor is having a hard time, it is his own fault.
66. A thick theology does not issue in a thin ethic.
67. What unites the human family, said Paul Freund (who was for five decades a professor at the Harvard Law School), “is our com­mon ignorance of the central questions posed for us by the uni­verse: whence, and why and whither.”
68. The fog makes London beautiful.
69. Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate con­text of history therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint; therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is for­giveness.” (Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of Amen can History)
70. If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap;
      If you want happiness for a day, go fishing;
      If you want happiness for a month, get married;
      If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune;
      If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else. 
        Chinese Proverb quoted in
        Give to Love by Douglas M. Lawson
71. Sodom was not destroyed because the politicians had created a horrible public debt, the poor were on welfare, or sodomites were roaming the streets but because God could not find ten righteous people in the city.
72. A vital component of character is outrage at injustice.
73. The great problems of humanity are essentially insoluble; and what appear to be solutions are only small shots of adrenaline which pump enough courage in us to try again.
74. Don’t let it all hang out; it has taken us thousands of years to begin to get a little of it tucked in.
75. God has made us closer to the ants than to the butterflies; and useful work is both an inalienable right and a prerequisite to men­tal health.
76. Authentic Christian ethics issues from authentic Christian evan­gelism.
77. “Christianity is essentially a social religion; to turn it into a soli­tary religion is indeed to destroy it.” (John Wesley, Works, 1872 ed., V: 296)
78. He who speaks the truth should leave his car’s engine running.
79. Occasional flashes of silence can make a conversation truly delightful.
80. Writing is easy You just sit and stare at a piece of blank paper until drops of blood start to form on your forehead.
81. It is better to embrace the honest dourness of John Bunyan and John Knox than the facile claptrap of today’s health and wealth gurus.
82. The pruning and spraying, the digging and dunging, of the Christian’s fruit tree of life require far more effort, discipline, and attention than the planting of the seed.
83. To ask which comes first, evangelism or ethics, is to inject into revealed religion a prickly individualism that fractures the gospel and fragments the New Testament.
84. A weak doctrine of sin needs only a puny perception of grace; but grave sin needs great grace.
85. Unless our Lord is allowed to crush this serpent’s head, the sub­tlest beast of the field, Pride, will live on under the floor of the church like a temple snake in Greek antiquity.
86. Boredom is a grave sin because it is leveled against God for hav­ing created a world that is not interesting.
87. To be converted to Christ is to be thrown from the saddle of unbelief onto the firm ground of loving God with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves.
88. What madness would possess Baptists to be willing to sell free­dom, that pearl of great price, for the thin mess of portage that is creedalism?
89. Commitment to the ethical enterprise with its social involvement is not a matter of moral obedience but a condition of being in communion with God at all.
90. Christianity is the most worldly of all the great world religions; and this is so whether William Temple said it or not.
91. Only those who obey can believe and only those who believe can obey.
92. “I find more profit in sermons on either good tempers or good works than in what is commonly called ‘gospel sermons.’ That term has now become a mere cant word; I wish none of our soci­ety would use it. It has no determinate meaning. Let but a pert, self-sufficient animal that has neither sense nor grace bawl out something about Christ or his blood or justification by faith and the hearers cry out: ‘What a fine gospel sermon.”’ John Wesley
93. Cheap grace justifies sin but not the sinner, preaches forgiveness but does not call for repentance, hurries to baptism but does not demand discipline, provides communion but does not hear con­fession, and offers a crown but does not insist on a cross; but God’s way is the way of costly grace.
94. The best way to get liberty is to take it.
95. A journey of a thousand miles ends with a single step.

Updated Friday, November 23, 2001