Author Peter Leithart in the “acknowledgements” to his book Deep Comedy says: “This book is dedicated to my third daughter, MargaretAnn, who at five exemplifies as well as anyone I know what it means to live out of and in deep comedy. She is a constant source of amusement, with her bizarre, frequently gruesome stories, her prankishness, her wildly expressive eyes. More imprtantly and profoundly, she exudes the childlike confidence and careless freedom that comes from knowing all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. And with her on my lap or in my arms, I am reassured that it will.”

“The biblical narrative quickly makes it clear that divine speech is to be a fundamental aspect of the special relationship that exists between God and those made in his image. Genesis 1:28-30 establishes the basic status and duties of humanity in relation to the created world, with God speaking to the man and the woman and telling them what they are to do, what authority they have, what they may eat, and what they must not eat. The arrangement is articulated using words; it is linguistic in its basic form” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 53).

Plain was it made and published abroad among men that an avenger to succeed their foe live yet long while after that woeful strife — Grendel’s mother, ogress, fierce destroyer in the form of woman. Misery was in her heart, she who must abide in the dreadful waters and the cold streams, since Cain with the sword became the slayer of his only brother, his kinsman by his father’s blood. Thereafter he departed an outlaw branded with murder, shunning the mirth of men, abiding in the wilderness (J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, 49).

“Modern culture has not really rendered creeds and confessions untrue; far less has it rendered them unbiblical. But it has rendered them implausible and distasteful. They are implausible because they are built on old-fashioned notions of truth and language. They make the claim that a linguistic formulation of a state of affairs can have a binding authority beyond the mere text on the page, that creeds actually refer to something, and that that something has a significance for all humanity. They thus demand that individuals submit, intellectually and morally, to something outside themselves, that they listen to the voices from the church from other times and places. They go directly against the grain of an antihistorical, antiauthoritarian age. Creeds strike hard at the cherished notion of human autonomy and the notion that I am exceptional, that the normal rules do not apply to me in the way they do to others. They are distasteful for the same reason: because they make old-fashioned truth claims; and to claim that one position is true is automatically to claim that its opposite is false. . . . Truth claims thus imply a hierarchy whereby one position is better than another and where some beliefs, and thus those who hold those beliefs, are excluded” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 48).

“I have yet to read a [blog’s] “comments thread” on any topic of significance that does not quickly degenerate into moronic commentary that is as notable for its vacuousness as it is for its personal abuse” (Car R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 41).