Tag: Selected Quotes

“You should see obedient faith as the only kind of faith that God gives. It is obedient because it is breathing, just like it was told to . . . I do not have any problem saying that ‘a man is justified by obedience [doing what God says to do, the way He says to do it, and what He says to do is believe on Jesus Christ completely] apart from works of the law [disobediently twisting God’s words into a rabbinical pretzel that allows me to feel quite pleased with myself]’ That is not contradictory at all.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 897

“As I use it, obedient faith is a phrase that describes the quality of the faith, not the particular actions of that faith after the fact. For example, I can refer to an obedient child in two ways. The phrase can refer to the disposition of the child, which will result in actions in line with that disposition. But it could also mean a child was obedient because of an action or a series of actions he had performed.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 896-897

“But I have been clear on all these things for lo, these many years. I have had a significant pile of things attributed to me which I hotly deny, and then, when my denials start to get through, somebody says, ‘well, why didn’t you say so?’ Or they say that they are glad that I have finally started to repudiate my errors.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 887

“It is pernicious and false to say that at baptism each member of the covenant has been given all that he needs in order to persevere. If a covenant member is unregenerate he has nothing of what he needs to persevere.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 886

“But what is the qualitative nature of the faith that justifies? It is a gift of God, lest any should boast, and this means that the faith involved is the kind of faith that God only ever gives. When a man is justified by faith alone, it is never by a faith that is alone—it is ‘ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but works by love’ (WCF 11.2). In short, justifying faith, a saving gifts from the living God, is by definition not dead. Dead faith gets nothing in the stocking but coal. But that ought not to worry us, because God never tried to save any man by giving him dead faith” ().

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 882

“Nor does it mean the kind of confessionalism intended by some, where they don’t believe you can possibly understand the Heidelberg unless you can read it in the original Arabic.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 880

“It is difficult, in the middle of a saloon brawl, to distinguish the motives of loyalty, manly principle, stubbornness, and cussedness. That is correct. It is difficult, but I still should have done a better job. I am responsible for not having done so, and I thought I needed to say so publicly.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 877

“I have come to believe that there were also a number of critics of the federal Vision who were truly insightful and saw the implications and trajectories of certain ideas better than I did at the time. I was wrong to treat all critics as though they were all more or less in the same boat. There were insightful critics and there were bigoted ones, and I should have given the insightful critics more of a fair hearing than I did, and I should have used the behavior of the ignorant critics as less representative than I frequently did. I believe I was wrong in this also.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 876

“So the views I hold to are a different kind of thing from what is represented in the common understanding of the Federal Vision, and the differences involved are connected to everything. They are a different kind of thing, not a lesser amount of the same thing. Thus when I speak of the objectivity of the covenant—which I will continue to do—this is not a lite version of what someone else might mean by it. Now I do not say this because I am angry or upset with anybody. I say it because I think I have learned something.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 875-876

“Everybody knew (or thought they knew) what that phrase [Federal Vision] represented. Since I certainly owned the phrase, albeit with modifiers, and lots of energetic typing, what happened was that I was thought to be owning what people knew as this. But the more I typed that, the more it made people’s heads hurt. So one of the few things I have been successful at doing is persuading a number of people that I am a sly fellow, and one who bears close watching. Heretics are slippery with words, and since I have spent a lot of time trying to grease this particular piglet, I must be a heretic. So I have finally become convinced that the phrase Federal Vision is a hurdle that I cannot get over, under or around.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 874-875