“Loving the original ship does not mean loving the barnacles . . . In the grip of Enlightenment individualism, pietism, sentimentalism, and so forth, in our day the meaning of the solas has been turned aside from their original and more glorious meaning. Now they are solo Christus (just me and Jesus), solo gratia (narrow, sectarian grace), solo fide (when ‘I prayed the prayer’), solo Scriptura (just me and my Bible), and solo Deo gloria (God gets all the glory for saving me, and maybe somebody else. Now please realize that the word solo here constitutes a bad macaronic pun, and not a serious attempt to match gender, number, and case. No letters from the Latinists, please.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles, pp. 138-139

“In fact, one of the guys we lost to Rome wasted very little time in denouncing John Paul II as a heretic and discovering that the papal throne was empty. All such things remind me very little of classic Roman Catholic doctrine and remind me a great deal of bottle-rocket anabaptism.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles, p. 135

“A man who is married to a woman is obligated to be faithful to her. But if he is not faithful to her, this does not mean that he is not ‘really’ married to her—because that would mean, ironically, that he was not really being faithless to her. You have to be covenantally obligated to be covenantally faithless . . . If a cheating husband repented and came home to his wife after years of infidelity, and she forgave him, and said to him, ’Today, you have become my husband,’ we would all know what she meant. He had to have been a husband before his repentance in order to cheat, but when he repented of cheating, he ‘became a husband.’ A lot of faithless covenant members have ‘become Christians’ the same way.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles, pp. 128-129

“Not to put too fine a point on it, a man might be rejected by the current folks at Banner of Truth because he teaches things that he learned from a Banner of Truth book.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles, p. 123