Topic: Christianity

Quotes

Michael Horton, Introducing Covenant Theology (2006)

• Commands issue from Sinai with smoke and peals of thunder, but there is nothing distinctive in the Mosaic economy that actually provides for its fulfillment.#
• Wherever there is a discussion of unity in the New Testament, the sacraments are close at hand.#
• Recalling the fig tree that withered at Jesus’ curse, symbolizing the pronouncement of woes and the parables of the kingdom, the picture is of an Israel that, despite its national judgement as a covenant-breaker, is nevertheless kept alive by extensive pruning and grafting at the level of individual salvation through Christ.#
• Law and gospel are not in opposition unless we seek to find satisfaction before God. But they are always distinguished at every point.#
• Those who confuse civil righteousness with righteousness before God will be likely to confuse moral reform in society with the kingdom of God.#
• If Calvinists are not expected to endure tyranny, they are also not given liberty to take justice into their own hands or to exercise the judgement reserved for the King of Kings on the last day. Nor are they to seek to impose their distinctively Christian convictions on society through the kingdom of power, as both Rome and the radical Anabaptists tried to do. Rather, they are to pursue their dual citizenship according to the distinct policies proper to each kingdom. The Bible functions as the constitution for the covenant people, not for the secular state.#
• The kingdom of God advances through the proclamation of the gospel, not through force.#
• By identifying the kingdom of God with the advance of Christianity in the world here and now, it was easy to take the further step of identifying the fortunes of Christianity with those of the empire. Christendom is the result of this unholy alliance.#
• No one in the Old Testament obtained the inheritance by works, but only by promise. Yet Israel’s national status in God’s land depended on fulfillment of the treaty’s terms.#
• No one will be justified by “works of the law,” according to Paul, not because there has never been an arrangement in which that was possible (i.e. creation), but because since the fall (which the history of Israel recapitulates), all of humanity (including Israel) is now “in Adam.” The direct problem is not being under the law, but being found “in Adam,” a transgressor of the law.#
• God’s predestination is hidden to us, but Christ is not.#
• “Law” and “promise” do not represent the Old and New testaments respectively, but characterize two different kinds of covenants that obtain within the same history.#
• While the basis of the covenant of grace is God’s unconditional, electing, and redeeming grace (no confusion of law and gospel), there are clearly, in its administration, both commands and promises.#
• Only through Sinai could Israel be established in the land – by the personal loyalty of the people themselves to the covenant. But only through the covenant of promise could anyone – Israelite or Gentile – become children of Abraham in the sense identified in the New Testament.#
• Whenever God shows leniency by not executing the curses of the covenant upon Israel’s transgression, the basis of such leniency is never the Sinaitic covenant itself, but the Abrahamic (or Davidic) (cf. 2 Kings 13:23).#
• God is transcendent. Therefore, any relationship that one might have with this God would have to be something other than a natural relationship.#
• We cannot say that the new covenant replaces obligations of law with those of love, since the law had always been regarded as the specification of love’s duties.#
• God will save his elect, overcoming every obstacle in his way, including us.#
• Jesus did not make the law easier, but more difficult. When Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount, corresponding to Moses’ giving of the law at Sinai, all notions of a “kinder, gentler” Moses in the person of Jesus are put to flight.#
• What the Scriptures labor to demonstrate is not that there are no normative laws for Christians, but that there is no way that we, being who we are, can become heirs of God’s kingdom by keeping them.#

John Piper, Martin Luther: Lessons From His Life And Labor (2012)

• [M]any say this assertion [of the authority of scripture] nullifies or minimizes the crucial role of the Holy Spirit in giving life and light. . . . One might [also] argue that emphasizing the brightness of the sun nullifies the surgeon who takes away blindness. #

John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1974)

• That God orders and uses the powers does not reveal anything new about what government should be or how we should respond to government.#
• After the invitation to wives we saw that the Haustafeln addressed a similar and immensely more novel call to husbands to love their wives; after calling slaves to be subject, the early Christian moralists called upon the masters to be equally respectful; after calling children to remain subordinate to parents, the admonition was turned about and addressed to parents as well. When, however, the call to subordination is addressed to the Christian in his status as political subject, then in these texts exhortation is not reversed. There is no invitation to the king to conceive of himself as a public servant.#
• To make of Gal. 3:28 a “modern” statement on women’s liberation, from which one can then look down on the rest of Paul’s thought, not only misplaces this text logically . . .; it also misreads the text itself.#
• The cross of Calvary was not a difficult family situation, not a frustration of visions of personal fulfillment, a crushing debt or a nagging in-law; it was the political, legally to be expected result of a moral clash with the powers ruling his society. Already the early Christians had to be warned against claiming merit for any and all suffering; only if their suffering be innocent, and a result of the evil will of their adversaries, may it be understood as meaningful before God (1 Pet. 2:18-21; 3:14-8; 4:1, 13-16; 5:9; James 4:10).#

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

• What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public [by a ruler] obtains in modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian.#
• No Christian more firmly believes that Atheism is false, and tends to the dissolution of society, than Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity.#
• Christians who are tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first martyrs must have been worse men than they themselves are, ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.#

Henry Rogers, “An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Jonathan Edwards” (1834)

• The real difficulty [with the doctrine of original sin] is not to reconcile the imputation of sin and guilt where there is no sin and guilt at all, (for that is not the case supposed,) but to vindicate the reasonableness of a constitution by which one being becomes depraved by his dependence on another who is so, or by which the moral condition of one being is remotely determined by the moral condition of another.#

Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (1969)

• The character of salvation itself is conceived of as in no sense an eternization of man, but as a restoration and development of this original perfection. The work of Christ did not remove anything of the finitude of man; it removed the sin of man.#

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (1961)

• If [the love of God] is consistent with hurting us, then he may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.#

Jonathan Edwards, Concerning the End for which God Created the World (1765)

• We must suppose that God’s revealed law, and the law of nature, agree; and that his will, as a lawgiver, must agree with his will as a creator. Therefore we justly infer, that the same thing which God’s revealed law requires intelligent creatures to seek, as their last and greatest end, that God their creator had made their last end.#
• Though these communications of God – these exercises, operations, and expressions of his glorious perfections, which God rejoices in – are in time; yet his joy in them is without beginning or change.#
• If we suppose God has real pleasure and happiness in the holy love and praise of his saints, as the image and communication of his own holiness, it is not properly any pleasure distinct from the pleasure he has in himself; but is truly an instance of it.#
• That perfection of God which we call his faithfulness, or his inclination to fulfil his promises to his creatures, could not properly be what moved him to create the world.#

Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754)

• On the whole, it is manifest, that God may be, in the manner which has been described, the orderer and disposer of that event, which, in the inherent subject and agent, is moral evil; and yet his so doing may be no moral evil.#
• These events will be ordered by something. They will either be disposed by wisdom, or they will be disposed by chance; that is, they will be disposed by blind and undesigning causes, if that were possible, and could be called a disposal. Is it not better, that the good and evil which happen in God’s world, should be ordered, regulated, bounded, and determined by the good pleasure of an infinitely wise being, who perfectly comprehends within his understanding and constant view, the universality of things, in all their extent and duration, and sees all the influence of every event, with respect to every individual thing and circumstance, throughout the grand system, and the whole of the eternal series of consequences; than to leave these things to fall out by chance, and to be determined by those causes which have no understanding or aim?#
• Inasmuch as sin is not the fruit of of any positive agency or influence of the Most High, but, on the contrary, arises from the withholding of his action and energy, and, under certain circumstances, necessarily follows on the want of his influence; this is no argument that he is sinful, or his operation evil, or has anything of the nature of evil; but, on the contrary, that he, and his agency, are altogether good and holy, and that he is the fountain of all holiness.#
• It is equally improper to talk of months and years of the Divine Existence, as of square miles of Deity: and we equally deceive ourselves, when we talk of the world being differently fixed, with respect to wither of these sorts of measures.#
• It is as absurd to say, that God decreed the dependence of the world upon himself, as it is to say, he decreed that two and two shall be equal to four, rather than five.#

Michael Horton, “Calvin and the Law-Gospel Hermeneutic” (2002)

• [M]any Reformed Protestants, especially in America, have allowed these trends rather than confessional distinctives to determine the reading and preaching of Scripture. . . . It is often moralized, exegeted in verse-by-verse isolation, psychologized, politicized, and always with the demand for “more application”—which really means “more Law.”#
• The Law is merely a written rule for the believer’s conformity to Christ’s image, although it can never produce the slightest effect toward that end.#
• The Reformers rejected either the tendency to collapse the New Testament into the Old or the Anabaptist tendency to radically separate the two testaments. In fact, Luther and Calvin both concentrated not so much on the nature of Scripture as its content.#
• “The Law” can be used in two different senses: the eschatological . . . (emphasizing the unity of revelation), and synonymous with “Old Testament,” and the theological (emphasizing the antithesis between word of judgment and word of promise). . . . Thus, the Law is filled with Gospel promises if by “Law” one means the Old Testament, but in its special office as a theological-hermeneutical category, there is no Gospel in the Law, nor Law in the Gospel.#

John Piper, The Future of Justification (2007)

• God’s freedom in election is not capricious but aims at a definite global purpose – “to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory.”#
• The essence of the righteousness of God is in his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of his name.#

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1898)

• On the same grounds on which Calvinism rejected Rome’s theory concerning the world, it rejected the theory of the Anabaptist, and proclaimed that the Church must withdraw again within its spiritual domain, and that in the world we should realize the potencies of God’s common grace.#
• The Church may not be forced to tolerate as a member one whom she feels obliged to expel from her circle; but on the other hand no citizen of the State must be compelled to remain in a church which his conscience forces him to leave.#
• Rome perceived very clearly how liberty of conscience must loosen the foundations of the unity of the visible Church, and therefore she opposed it. But on the other hand it must be admitted that Calvinism, by praising aloud liberty of conscience, has in principle abandoned every absolute characteristic of the visible Church. #
• I not only deplore that one stake [at which Servetus was burned], but I unconditionally disapprove of it; yet not as if it were the expression of a special characteristic of Calvinism, but on the contrary as the fatal after-effect of a system, grey with age, which Calvinism found in existence, under which it had grown up, and from which it had not yet been able entirely to liberate itself.#
• For, indeed, without sin there would have been neither magistrate nor state-order.#
• Thence it follows that the true Calvinist adjusts himself to these ordinances not by force, as though they were a yoke of which he would like to rid himself, but with the same readiness with which we follow a guide through the desert, recognizing that we are ignorant of the path, which the guide knows, and therefore acknowledging that there is no safety but in closely following in his footsteps.#
• The effect of every clerical interposition invariably was, and must be, to make religion external and to smother it with sacerdotal forms. Only where all priestly intervention disappears, where God’s sovereign election from all eternity binds the inward soul directly to God Himself, and where the ray of divine light enters straightway into the depth of our heart-only there does religion, in its most absolute sense, gain its ideal realization.#
• [Calvinism] has at once placed to the front the great principle that there is a particular grace which works Salvation, and also a common grace by which God, maintaining the life of the world, relaxes the curse which rests upon it, arrests its process of corruption, and thus allows the untrammeled development of our life in which to glorify Himself as Creator.#
• [Calvinism] does not seek God in the creature, as Paganism; it does not isolate God from the creature, as Islamism; it posits no mediate communion between God and the creature, as does Romanism; but proclaims the exalted thought that, although standing in high majesty above the creature, God enters into immediate fellowship with the creature, as God the Holy Spirit.#

Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will (1525)

• Let wretched men abjure that blasphemous perversity which would blame the darkness of their own hearts on the plain scriptures of God!#
• What fear may we suppose there was among the Jews, when the Gospel freed all men from the law of Moses? What scope did not this great liberty appear to give to evil men? Yet the Gospel was not, on that account, taken away; instead, the godly were told not to use their liberty to indulge the flesh, and the ungodly were left to their own devices.#
• There is no easier or commoner failing in dealing with the Scriptures than to bring together diverse passages as if they were alike.#
• By the omnipotence of God I mean, not the power by which he omits to do many things that he could do, but the active power by which he mightily works all in all.#
• This is what we come to when we seek to measure God and make excuses for him by human reason . . . we are overwhelmed by the glory . . . and instead of a single excuse we vomit out a thousand blasphemies.#
• God preached works to the end that sin and death may be taken away, and we may be saved. But God hidden in majesty neither deplores nor takes away death, but works life and death, and all in all; nor has he set bounds to himself by his word, but has kept himself free over all things.#

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1946)

• Christianity will indeed accomplish many useful things in this world, but if it is accepted in order to accomplish those useful things it is not Christianity. Christianity will combat Bolshevism; but if it is accepted in order to combat Bolshevism, it is not Christianity: Christianity will produce a unified nation, in a slow but satisfactory way; but if it is accepted in order to produce a unified nation, it is not Christianity: Christianity will produce a healthy community; but if it is accepted in order to produce a healthy community, it is not Christianity: Christianity will promote international peace; but if it is accepted in order to promote international peace, it is not Christianity. Our Lord said: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” But if you seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness in order that all those other things may be added unto you, you will miss both those other things and the Kingdom of God as well. #Quoted in Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ (2004)

Luis Lugo, “Caesar’s Coin Revisited (comments on Man, Society, and the State)” (1996)

• The Vatican in its social thinking throughout most of the modern period did not sufficiently understand the varieties of liberalism with which it was dealing. Being based on the continent, it saw a more militantly secular type of liberalism with a whole metaphysics it correctly found to be offensive, and it did not appreciate until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century how the Enlightenment project had been moderated significantly in the Anglo-American tradition by pre-existing Christian sources.#

David Lipscomb, Civil Government (1913)

• As God appoints ministers having characters fitted to do the work for which he appoints them, and Nero was a chosen minister to do this work, it is clear that a true humble faithful Christian could not be chosen to do the same work.#
• Not only were these evil institutions God’s ordinances, but wicked men who directed them were recognized as his servants. They constituted the constituency or the subjects of these Divine institutions because God used them to accomplish his work of punishing sin, and destroying his enemies. In this sense, God ordained all the institutions of earth, and used the vilest sinners of earth as his servants. He used the rebellious and the wicked to punish his disobedient children, and to destroy others whose measure of wickedness was full; then in turn, he punished the wicked individuals and peoples that he had used, for doing the very work he had used them to accomplish, because they did it from a wicked, selfish, and cruel spirit.#

Augustine, City of God

• It is true that wicked men do many things contrary to God’s will; but so great is his wisdom and power, that all things which seem adverse to his purpose do still tend toward those just and good ends and issues which he himself has foreknown. And consequently, when God is said to change his will, as when, for example, he becomes angry with those to whom he was gently, it is rather they than he who are changed, and they find him changed insofar as their experience of suffering at his hand is new, as the sun is changed to injured eyes, and becomes as it were fierce from being mild, and hurtful from being delightful, though in itself it remains the same as it was.#
• For though God is said to change his determinations (so that in a tropical sense the Holy Scripture says even that God repented), this is said with reference to man’s expectation, or the order of natural causes, and not with reference to that which the Almighty had foreknown that he would do.#
• And indeed, this is already sin, to desire those things which the law of God forbids, and to abstain from them through fear of punishment, not through love of righteousness.#
• Wherefore it is not without meaning said that all sin is a lie. For no sin is committed save by that desire or will by which we desire that it be well with us, and shrink from it being ill with us. That, therefore, is a lie which we do in order that it may be well with us, but which makes us more miserable than we were.#
• His [God’s] leisure, therefore, is no laziness, indolence, inactivity; as in his work is no labor, effort, industry.#
• When the will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil – not because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked.#
• In scripture they are called God’s enemies who oppose his rule, not by nature, but by vice; having no power to hurt him, but only themselves. #
• Vice, too, is so contrary to nature, that it cannot but damage it. And therefore departure from God would be no vice, unless in a nature whose property it was to abide with God. So that even the wicked will is a strong proof of the goodness of the nature. But God, as he is the supremely good creator of good natures so he is of evil wills the most just ruler, so that while they make an ill use of good natures, he makes a good use even of evil wills.#
• There is no true virtue except that which is directed toward that end in which is the highest and ultimate good of man.#

Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

• The fact that Christians have found kinship between Christ and the prophets of the Hebrews, the moral philosophers of Greece, the Roman Stoics, Spinoza and Kant, humanitarian reformers and eastern mystics, may be less indicative of Christian instability than of a certain stability in human wisdom.#
• Faith in this sense is prior to all reasoning, for without a cause – let it be truth, or life, or reason itself – we do not reason.#
• The Christ who commended a good Samaritan for pouring oil and wine into wounds would scarcely likewise honor a man who, trained in contemporary methods of giving first aid, regarded the Biblical example as his absolute guide.#
• If we look to the revelation of God for knowledge of geology, we miss the revelation; but if we look to geology for faith in God, we miss both him and the rocks. If we make a rule for civil government out of the structure of the early Christian community, we substitute for the spirit of that community, with its dependence on Christ and his giving of all good gifts, a self-righteous independence of our own; if we regard our political structures as kingdoms of God, and expect through papacies and kingdoms to come closer to him, we cannot hear his word or see his Christ; neither can we conduct our political affairs in the right spirit.#
• As he cannot derive the laws of medical procedure from the gospel when he deals with a case of typhus, so he cannot deduce from the commandment of love the specific laws to be enacted in a commonwealth containing criminals.#
• [Jesus] thought no temporal value as great as the life of the soul; but he healed the sick in body when he forgave their sins.#
• The idea of ascribing “infinite” or “intrinsic” value to the human soul seems wholly foreign to Jesus. He does not speak of worth apart from God.#
• The word ‘Father’ on the lips of Jesus is a greater, more faithful, and more heroic word than is evident when fatherhood and deity are identified.#
• A Celsus moves from attack on Christianity to an appeal to believers to stop endangering a threatened empire by their withdrawal from the public tasks of defense and reconstruction. The same Christian attitude, however, arouses Marx and Lenin to hostility because believers do not care enough about temporal existence to engage in all-out struggle for the destruction of an old order and the building of a new one.#
• Christianity seems to threaten culture at this point not because it prophesies that of all human achievements not one stone will be left on another but because Christ enables men to regard this disaster with a certain equanimity.#

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

• Ethical principles for the reform of the world could not be found in Luther’s realm of ideas.#
• The idea that the glory of God requires the subjection of the damned to the discipline of the Church was gradually superseded by the other idea, which was present from the beginning and became gradually more prominent, that it was an insult to His glory to partake of the Communion with one rejected by God. That necessarily led to voluntarism, for it led to the believers’ Church the religious community which included only the twice-born.#
• Predestination made it fundamentally impossible for the State really to promote religion by intolerance. It could not thereby save a single soul. Only the idea of the glory of God gave the Church occasion to claim its help in the suppression of heresy. Now the greater the emphasis on the membership of the preacher, and all those that partook of the communion, in the elect, the more intolerable became the interference of the State in the appointment of the clergy.#
• A healthy fear is a better sign of grace than certainty, says Spener, Theologische Bedenken.#

Max Stackhouse, “A Protestant Response (in Caesar’s Coin Revisited)” (1996)

• The Aristotelian and Thomistic concepts of virtue and the humanistic understanding of it as the cultivation of innate goodness were undercut by the Reformation insistence that human effort could not add to human merit for the purposes of salvation.#

James Skillen, “Reformed… And Always Reforming?” (2009)

• Most Christians today … are Anabaptists in the sense that they contend for free churches in open societies with governments that give equal treatment to all citizens regardless of their faith.#

Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ (2004)

• When the primary outlet of evangelical engagement with social and political matters is a political action committee rather than the community of the church, the shaping authority on matters of social and political outlook all too often becomes polling data or party platforms, rather than an authoritative text. Political solutions are then grounded in the social contract of a “moral majority” rather than by the righteousness of the coming Kingdom of God in Christ. In such a situation, when the “silent majority” is culturally marginalized, so is the witness of evangelical Christianity.#