“A Pelagian anthropology leads over naturally to a spiritualistic construction of the whole Christian salvation; in which, as their is no organic power of the Devil or kingdom of darkness, for men to be delivered from, so there will be no organic redemption either, no objective, historical order of grace, in the bosom and through the power of which, this salvation is to go forward; but all will be made to resolve itself into workings of God’s Spirit that are of a general character, and into processes of thought and feeling, on the part of men, with no other basis than the relations of God to man in the most common, simply humanitarian view. Is there then no organic redemption needed for men, into the sphere of which they must come first of all, in order that they may have power to become personally righteous, and so be able to work out their salvation with fear and trembling, as knowing it to be God that worketh in them both to will and to do of His own good pleasure? Has the Church been wrong in believing through all ages, that “we must be delivered from the power of darkness, and translated into the kingdom of God’s dear Son” (Col. i. 13), not as the end of our personal goodness and piety, but the beginning of it, and the one necessary condition first of all, without which we can make no progress in goodness or piety whatever? Has the Church been wrong in believing, that such change of state, such transplantation from the kingdom of the Devil over into the kingdom of Christ, must in the nature of the case be a Divine act; and that as such a Divine act, it must be something more than any human thought or volition simply, stimulated into action by God’s Spirit? Has the Church been wrong in believing, finally, that the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, the sacrament of initiation into the Church, was instituted, not only to signify this truth in a general way, but to seal it as a present actuality for all who are willing to accept the boon thus offered to them in the transaction?Baptismal regeneration! our evangelical spiritualists are at once ready to exclaim. But we will not allow ourselves to be put out of course in so solemn an argument, by any catchword of this sort addressed to popular prejudice. The Liturgy avoids the ambiguous phrase; and we will do so too; for the word regeneration is made to mean, sometimes one thing, and sometimes another, and it does not come in our way at all at present to discuss these meanings. We are only concerned, that no miserable logomachy of this sort shall be allowed to cheat us out of what the sacrament has been held to be in past ages; God’s act, setting apart those who are the subjects of it to His service, and bringing them within the sphere of His grace in order that they may be saved. We do not ask any one to call this regeneration; it may not at all suit his sense of the term; but we do most earnestly conjure all to hold fast to the thing, call it by what term they may. The Question is simply, Doth baptism in any sense save us? Has it anything to do at all with our deliverance from original sin, and our being set down in the new world of righteousness and grace, which has been brought to pass in the midst of Satan’s kingdom all around it, by our Lord Jesus Christ?”-John Williamson Nevin, A Defense of The Baptismal Liturgy
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“The central soteriological reality is union with the exalted Christ by Spirit-created faith. That is the nub, the essence, of the way or order of salvation for Paul. The center of Paul’s soteriology is neither justification by faith nor sanctification, neither the imputation of Christ’s righteousness nor the renewing work of the Spirit. To draw that conclusion, however, is not to de-center justification (or sanctification), as if justification is somehow less important for Paul than the Reformation claims. Justification is supremely important, it is absolutely crucial in Paul’s gospel of salvation (cf. Eph. 1:13). Deny or distort his teaching on justification and that gospel ceases to be gospel; there is no longer saving “good news” for sinners. But no matter how close justification is to the heart of Paul’s gospel, in our salvation, as he sees it, there is an antecedent consideration, a reality, that is deeper, more fundamental, more decisive, more crucial: Christ and our union with him, the crucified and resurrected, the exalted, Christ. Union with Christ by faith, that is the essence of Paul’s ordo salutis.”
-Richard Gaffin, By Faith Not by Sight
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“I believe these three things to be offered unto all men in the Supper and to be received of the faithful.
- 1. The signs, the bread and the wine being joined with the words of Christ. For the word is not separated from the figures, nor the signs from the word; or else the Sacraments were no Sacraments. For the word is added to the element and so the Sacrament is made.
- 2. The body and blood of the Lord, that is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. For as in the Divinity is not separated from the humanity, neither the humanity from the Divinity; even so unto us, the one is not offered without the other. Wherefore neither are they to be separated of us even in thought, but as the whole Christ is offered, so is the whole Christ to be received.
- 3. The New Covenant or Testament. I mean that which is renewed and confirmed in Christ. For this is that thing for whose cause chiefly the Supper is instituted and administered, to wit, that we being incorporated more and more into the person of Christ might have the covenant more and more confirmed unto us. Now the body and blood of Christ and the new Testament made in Christ are that Spiritual, but the elements of Bread and Wine are those earthly things whereof Irenaeus speaks.” -Jerome Zanchi
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“We must understand that the question of the dignity of human life is not something on the periphery of Judeo-Christian thinking, but almost in the center of it (though not the center itself because the center is the existence of God himself). But the dignity of human life is unbreakably linked to the existence of the personal-infinite God who has made men and women in His own image that they have a unique dignity of life as human beings. Human life then is filled with dignity, and the state and humanistically oriented law have no right and no authority to take human life arbitrarily in the way that it is being taken.
We must see then that indeed the cry has not been given. We must see that here, on such a central issue as abortion, the true nature of the problem was not understood: Christians failed to see that abortion was really a symptom of the much larger problem and not just one bit and piece. And beyond this as the material-energy-chance humanistic world view takes over increasingly in our country, the view concerning the intrinsic value of human life will grow less and less, and the concept of compassion for which the country is in some sense known will be further gone.
A girl who has been working with the Somalian refugees has just been in our home and told us their story and shown us their pictures. One million- and especially little children- in agony, pain, and suffering! Can we help but cry? But forget it! In the United States we now kill by painful methods one and a half times that many each year by abortion. In Somalia it is war. But we kill in cold blood. The compassion our country has been known somewhat for is being undermined. And it is not only the babies who are being killed; it is humanness which the humanist world view is beating to death.” -Francis Schaeffer
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“Either God is the Creator of the whole man, the whole universe, and all of reality and existence, or he is the Creator of none of it. If God is only the Creator of some divided platonic existence which leads to a tension between the body and the soul, the real world and the spiritual world, if God is only the Creator of some little experiential ‘praise the Lord’ reality, then he is not much of a God. Indeed, he is not I AM at all. If our Christian lives are allowed to become something spiritual and religious as opposed to something real, daily applicable, understandable, beautiful, verifiable, balanced, sensible, and above all united, whole, if indeed our Christianity is allowed to become this waffling spiritual goo, that nineteenth-century platonic Christianity became, then Christianity as truth disappears and instead we only have a system of vague experiential religious platitudes in its place.”
-Franky Schaeffer, Addicted to Mediocrity (Frank in his better years)
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“Let me take this a further step. If the child cannot understand what a parent is saying, is it rational for the parent to speak to him or her? Baptist parents as well as others speak to their infants, and do not expect the child to understand or to talk back for many months. They see nothing irrational in this. They speak to their children, that is, they employ symbols, not because they think the infant understands all that is being said or because they expect an immediate response. They speak to their children so that the child will learn to understand and talk back. So too, we baptize babies not because they can fully understand what is happening to them, nor because we expect them to undergo some kind of immediate moral transformation. We baptize them, and consistently remind them of their baptism and its implications, so that they will come to understanding and mature faith.
The sociologically consistent Baptist should, it seems to me, follow the Peekabo Street theory of child training. Peekaboo Street was the American Olympic skier, whose parents, as I recall the story, were so very trendy and liberal that they did not want to “impose” an identity on their little girl, so they allowed her to choose her own name, with obvious results. Karl Barth, who loudly protested the “violence” of imposing a Christian identity on a child through infant baptism, would undoubtedly be pleased. In fact, the Streets were not so liberal after all, for in spite of themselves they apparently did teach Peekaboo to speak English, rather than giving her the freedom to choose a language or make one up on her own. Baptist parents, so far as I know, are not consistent either; they do impose a language and a name on their children, a language and a name that cannot be religiously neutral; they do, in spite of themselves, often treat their children as Christians, teaching them to sing ‘Jesus loves me’ and to pray the Lord’s Prayer. And if they do all this, what reason remains for resisting the imposition of the covenant sign?” -Peter Leithart, The Baptized Body
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“Here certainly appears the extraordinary love of our God, in thatas soon as we are born, and just as we come from our mother, he hath commanded us to be solemnly brought from her bosom as it were into his own arms, that he should bestow upon us, in the very cradle, the tokens of our dignity and future kingdom; that he should put that song into our mouth, ‘Thou didst make me hope, when I was upon my mother’s breast: I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother’s belly,’ Ps. xxii. 9, 10, that, in a word, he should join us to himself in the most solemn covenant from our most tender years: the remembrance of which, as it is glorious and full of consolation to us, so in like manner it tends to promote Christian virtues, and the strictest holiness, through the whole course of our lives. Nothing ought to be dearer to us than to keep sacred and inviolable that covenant of our youth, that first and most solemn engagement, that was made to God in our name.”
-Herman Witsius
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“The doctrine of justification by faith- a biblical truth, and a blessed relief from sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort- has in our time fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such a manner as actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be ‘received’ without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is ’saved’, but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact, he is specifically taught to be satisfied and is encouraged to be content with little.”
-A.W. Tozer, Pursuit of God
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“From the first, therefore, I have always said to myself ‘if the battle is to be fought with honor and with a hope of victory, then principle must be arrayed against principe; then it must be felt that in Modernism the vast energy of an all-embracing life-system assails us, then also it must be understood that we have to take our stand in a life-system of equally comprehensive and far reaching power. When thus taken, I found and confessed and I still hold, that this manifestation of the Christian principle is given us in Calvinism. In Calvinism my heart has found rest. From Calvinism have I drawn the inspiration firmly and resolutely to take my stand in the thick of this great conflict of principles.”
-Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism
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“It is most definitely not the authority of the church that makes a dogma into dogma in a material sense, elevates it beyond all doubt, and enables it to function with authority. The dogmas of the church have, and may have, this status only if and to the degree they are the dogmas of God. The power of the church to lay down dogmas is not sovereign and legislative but ministerial and declarative. Still, this authority has been granted by God to his church, and it is this power that enables and authorizes her to confess the truth of God and to formulate it in speech and writing.”
-Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 1, p. 31
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It [modern culture] has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart
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“It is the old, true, undoubted Christian faith that the apostles confessed and preached. And this short confession of faith is a reliable guide for recogsizing and judging whether something is orthodox or not. For whatever is contrary to one or more of the Articles of faith must be false. If one simply sticks to the Articles of Faith, one cannot go wrong.”
-Caspar Olevianus, Firm Foundation
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