Category: Books and Culture

“I agree that the fact that we baptize infants does not obligate us to allow them to vote in church elections, or drive the bus to the family retreat. But what we are talking about, with regard to the Table, is food. All children who come into our households should have the privilege of food.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 647

“All pastors and elders should want to protect the Table from corrupt use, but we should do so a posteriori. The approach to church purity taken here is that of hiring big, beefy security guards at the door to check everyone’s IDs three times. The approach taken to church purity by what I take to be a more consistent covenantal approach is to hire big, beefy bouncers.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 644

“Being prosecuted by sentimentalist pietists is like drowning in a cauldron of hot butterscotch”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 634

“The problem with this is that synergism is frequently used by people who want God to do 90 percent, and we do the remaining 10. He carries one end of the heavy object, and we carry the other end. This is not a Calvinistic understanding at all. In Calvinistic synergy, God does one hundred percent, and I do the other one hundred percent. Shakespeare writes one hundred percent of Hamlet’s lines, and Hamlet speaks one hundred percent of Hamlet’s lines. The wrong kind of synergy has Shakespeare writing the plot of Hamlet’s life, with Hamlet ad-libbing his way through it.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 625

“An adulterer is really married—that’s in part what makes him an adulterer. A faithful husband is really married too, but there is far more to the story than the two of them being ‘really married.’”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 620