Theology That Bites Back
“Think for a moment. Would it have improved The Lord of the Rings if Tolkien had left out Sauron? Or Saruman? Or the Nazgul? Or Gollum? With the disappearance of each villain or antagonist, is the story getting progressively better? Or worse?”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 144
“‘Is Wilson suggesting that because parents are Christians, their baptized children also are Christians?’ No, not at all. Baptism is not necessary. The unbaptized children of Christians are Christians. That’s why we baptize them. But I do wonder why John Robbins thinks we should baptize them. I also wonder why he thinks I am out of conformity with the Westminster position, and he is not, for which see below: ‘Before baptism, the minister is to use some words of instruction, touching the institution, nature, use, and ends of this sacrament, shewing . . . that they [children] are Christians, and federally holy before baptism, and therefore are they baptized’ (Westminster Directory for the Publick Worship of God, emphasis mine).”
“However you examine it, the Protestant Reformation in the English-speaking world was the location, the context, and the setting, of a literary supernova.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 125
“Why . . . just the other day I was listening in my pick-up truck to a tape by a gentleman named Dr. Scott Clark, and he said that we Federal Vision types did not believe that Jesus lived a life of perfect, sinless obedience! I was so flummoxed by this that I pulled my truck over to the side of the road, and had to lay myself down on the highway with my feet on the bumper just to get the blood back into my head. Then when the state patrolman asked me what I thought I was doing, I explained it to him, and he couldn’t believe it either. Actually, I made this last little bit up—just a little fib—but that’s okay. We’re all under grace.”
“What is commonly caricatured as the ‘puritanical’ mentality is actually a mentality that can be found in the church of all ages. You can find this mindset in some of the early fathers, you can find it with Syrian ascetics, you can find it in medieval monasteries, and you can find it (after the first generation) among the Puritans. This religious type of person translates every serious call to holiness into terms it can understand, which is that of being introspective, stuffy, priggish, thin-lipped, censorious, prim, prudish, and more. Not only does it translate every serious call to holiness into this legalistic straitjacket, but it is attracted to every serious call to holiness—with the intention of burying it under a rock pile of rules.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 121
“He rejects the idea that we ‘get in’ by grace, and ‘stay in’ by works. As do I, with enthusiasm. We get in by grace, we remain in by grace, we walk by grace, we talk by grace, we persevere by grace, we eat dinner by grace, we go to church by grace. We get in by grace. We stay in by grace. We finish by grace. Sola gratia. Tota gratia. Tota et sola gratia. Grace, grace, grace. But you know me. Mr. Ambiguous.”
“Whenever I see congruent merit on the street, I never fail to help opprobrium on his pointy little head.”
“When Jesus turned the water into wine at Cana, the resultant wine was true wine. It was a supernatural act that brought it into being suddenly, but the wine itself was as natural as the wine that had already been drunk. And because it was better wine, we cannot say it was unnatural in any way.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 97
“I thought faith was the instrument of justification in the ordo salutis, and therefore preceded it. In other words, faith is what it is before justification gets to it, because justification doesn’t happen without the instrumentality of faith, which has to be what it is in order for justification to happen at all.”
“God made Adam out of dirt, and He made Eve out of Adam’s rib. And when God presented the woman to the man, and he asked where she came from, her reply was not ‘from my pre-Adamite hominoid ancestors.’”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 96
