Theology That Bites Back
“Now if it is possible for covenant members in good standing to continue to have the devil for their father, and Scripture is plain that it is, then what this means is that there has to be some substratum reality going on that is distinct from (not independent of) the sacraments. There is no way to tie this reality to the sacraments without tying yourself up in knots.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 835
“When God changes the ‘nature’ of a human being, what he is doing is providing a father transplant. When God changes me in regeneration, what He is doing is turning me into a human being. Prior to that moment, I was not a static, spatially bound human being, sitting there like a triangle with three sides. Rather, I was a disintegrating human being. I was created in the image of God, but parts were falling off. This is because of the temporal aspect of who I was. I was by nature an object of wrath, which means that I was in the process of circling the drain of damnation. I was headed somewhere bad, and I was headed there because the devil was my father. So was Cain. So was Belial. That whole bad business was temporal and relational. In effectual call regeneration, that fundamental identity (who my father is) is transformed. This transformation is entirely relational. So I am talking about who’s-your-daddy nature, not triangles-have-three-sides nature.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 834
“I am fine with the Reformed world having edges and am fine with people living there. But it should follow from this that I am also fine with the Reformed world having a center. And on this issue of regeneration that center is summarized very nicely by our confessions—and if the historic Reformed view of regeneration is Kansas, then I live in Topeka. I don’t live on an island off the state of Maine, but if I did, I would still be an American. But as an American, there on my island, I wouldn’t be saying things like, ‘That’s the way it is, here in the heartland . . .”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 833
“God comes to us in three books—nature, law, and gospel. Read plainly, we read ‘God above us, God against us, and God with us’ . . . this thought is actually a reworking of something I read from Matthew Henry, and shows how, once again, I am sitting on the edge of the fountain in the central square of Reformedville, just swinging my legs.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 829-830
“Outside he is a whited sepulcher . . . full of bones and every unclean thing. He is baptized, and his membership papers are all in order. He is the chairman of the pastoral search committee, ...
“Internal heart conversion is the sine qua non of historic evangelicalism, and this historic evangelicalism is clearly represented in and by our confessions. This is what I mean by classic evangelicalism, and, speaking frankly, a horse doctor dose of it is the need of the hour.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 828
“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
