“If it is true that not every member of the visible church will be in glory, and it is true, then there must be a demarcation between those covenant members who are going to Heaven and those who are not. That demarcation is called heart conversion, or regeneration. All genuinely Reformed believers acknowledge the reality of this The practical, pastoral issue concerns whether that true heart conversion is measurable by human beings. Can we detect it in a certain enough way to be confident that we are letting only the regenerate come to the Table (or, in baptistic churches, to baptism), and are successfully keeping the ‘not known to be regenerate’ away from the Table?”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 790

“I am bound confessionally to the Westminster Confession, and I think that is one of the coolest things in the world. My attitude is not slavish, for I have taken a few exceptions here and there, which proves that I did not drink the KoolAid. At the same time, I have been accused of ‘striking at the vitals’ of the Reformed faith. Wherefore and hownow? It is because I think there is life outside the confession. It is because I believe there is life in the Bible outside the confession. The fact that Westminster is an accurate summary of the doctrines of our holy faith does not make it an exhaustive summary of everything biblical, soup to nuts. And it doe not mean that the fine theologians behind that document ever thought about some of the modern heresies that rampage through the halls of our seminaries.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 788-789

“Culturally engaged Calvinism is a world-shaping force. It is potent. It has built more than one civilization and is going to do so again. There is more than one seminary professor who likes to write learned monographs about what this particular giant use to do before it went to sleep, but who is extremely wary about any attempts to wake the giant up. That might make a mess, and the secularists might then revoke our library privileges.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 786

“When the various controversies came raining down upon our heads eight years ago, along with a few dead cats, Nancy asked me, ‘What is this?’ What I said to her then has only been confirmed by repeated and numerous blessings that could not have come to us in any other way. The last eight years have been a time of unparalleled blessing. I told her that this was my big promotion, and it was.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 786