I've just reread Trust in an Age of Arrogance and am extremely grateful that someone in the U.S. Anglican tradition still believes in the sinfulness of sin and the greatness of grace, the bondage of the will in the sense of Article X. God gets all the credit for our salvation!
Bishop Allison catches the essence of the gospel with unforgettable phrases:
"This spiritual asthma [of religious self-righteousness] chokes our civilization and counterfeits the Christian faith"
"We have arrogated to ourselves the attributes of deity and given to God the responsibility to justify himself, repent, change, or disappear as irrelevant."
"Some theologians in England now applaud the sucking sound of this long departing faith."
"The amputation of purpose from the mystery of human identity is fatal."
"The Sermon on the Mount is the necessary, rigorous, and devastating purging of Pharisee yeast. It's chemotherapy for the Pharisee cancer."
"The idiocy of our times that has emptied God of his awesomeness leaves us with no laxative for our arrogant constipation."
"Within Anglicanism, Jeremy Taylor placed the banana peel of Pelagianism on the cliff of Unitarianism."
"The decrees of the Council of Trent about sin and justification are to Pharisaism as cigarettes are to cancer."
"We come into this world unfree."
This book and his earlier, The Rise of Moralism, should absolutely be required reading for every seminarian, and for anyone who wishes to know the answer to: If the foundation of the English Reformation was so good (Cranmer, Hooker, Jewel, Andrews), how did it end up so bad?
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