Category: Books and Culture

“So the language of true heart conversion is the language of Scripture, not primarily the language of systematics. It ought to be a routine part of our language also.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 827

“The new life I am talking about consists of a Father transplant . . . Certain covenant members have God for their father in one senses (John 8:37), and the devil for their father in another (John 8:44). Other covenant members have only God for their Father (John 8:42). If God is your Father, in this sense, then you love Jesus, pure and simple, and the devil is not your father in any sense.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 826

“The reason for stating it this way is that a theological dilemma is created if we postulate that every baptized Christian is given all of Christ, in the same ways and in the same respect, and that some of them ‘commit suicide.’ If this is the case, and if some covenant members can in fact commit that spiritual suicide, then this has to mean that Christ is not our perseverance, and that it has to come to us (if it comes to us) in some other fashion. If it comes from within ourselves, then this pushes us in an Arminian direction. If it comes from God, then God is doing something salvific for the elect apart from Christ, which would create a separate cluster of problems. The only way I can see that extricates us from this dilemma is to opt for the classic Reformation understanding of the new birth—that there must be a qualitative distinction in those who are saved, a distinction separating them from unsaved covenant members. They are not all Israel that are of Israel (Rom. 9:6).”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 825-826

“This, in my view, confused the difference between the early creeds of the Church—which distinguished Christian from non-Christian—and the confessions of the Reformation era—which distinguished Reformed from Lutheran, and so on. There is no such thing as an ‘in-house’ heretic. Heretics ought to be rejected by every Christian communion, and not just by one or two of them.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 824-825

[In response to Scott Clark’s claim he doesn’t need to meet with me because he “can read English”]
“The blunt answer, which cannot really be softened, is ‘no, he cannot read English.’ Let me take one example that Clark likes to use. He says that FV teaches that baptism puts everyone in a state of grace, which is then maintained by the believer through his own covenantal faithfulness. Is that not a fair summary of what Clark says I teach? Well, here is some English for Clark to read. I think that such doctrine is bad juju. I believe that it would be what theologians of another era might call a lie from the pit of Hell. I hope that one day I might be privileged to soak this doctrine in lighter fluid and set a match to it. If I ever found this doctrine on a sheet of paper in my office somewhere, I would run it through the shredder. Prior to my weekly dump run, I search my house for any traces of this doctrine so that I might throw it in the back of my pickup truck in order to take it out to the landfill along with all the bottles, empty ice cream cartons, grapefruit rinds, and coffee grounds. So the next time you read Scott Clark saying that I teach some form of this, you should probably say to yourself, ‘Hmmm. No speakee.’”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 821