The Halfway Covenant

“What do you do? You have a baptized man and woman, professing faith in Jesus and in the truth of the Christian religion, who are living sober and decent lives, and w ho could join any Calvinist church in Europe. They want to have their child baptized. What do you do? The Halfway Covenant said okay, all right already.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 791

How Visible Is the Heart?

“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

The Limits of Confessional Goodness

“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