“If we learn to scatter more fragments of grace, a second glance might reveal them all to have become diamonds the moment they left our hands” (Against the Church, p. 204).
When the Heart is Gone
“So let us try to forget the word evangelical as a demographic description. Let us try to forget the word liturgical as a description of the boring church you grew up in. Let us try to forget the word doctrine as it was handled by that great nineteenth-century divine, the Rev. Dr. Snodgood, in three …
Floating Lazily Away from the Pulpit
“But the Spirit will fall. The thunderhead will roll in. And when it happens, the work of regeneration will be a gully washer, and lots of ecclesiastics will be pretty upset. But many more of them will be soaked through, and it will become increasingly harder to preach our little floating dust cloud sermons” (Against …
Not Going to Mess Around
“The Spirit, when He moves, will not be like a little zephyr, stirring the gauzy curtains of our theological library. His moving will be more like a massive thunderhead, silver on the top and utterly black on the bottom, coming in from the west, and looking to soak absolutely everybody” (Against the Church, p. 202).
Intention Unmediated
“The distinction between the two was the love of God for Jacob and the hatred of God for Esau — the distinction was in God’s intention, and God’s intention is not mediated. The intention drives the mediation, not the other way around . . . The fact that the gift of faith is not inexorably …
When God Gives the Increase
“The Spirit’s work does not come through the means (the sermon, the sacrament) like water through a garden hose. Rather, the Spirit’s anointing is given on account of the means . . . He meets us where He promised He would, in the Word and in the sacrament” (Against the Church, p. 193).
Lots of Potential
“When the surgeon is gone from the hospital, his instruments are lined up in the drawer, full of potential” (Against the Church, p. 192).
A Real Guarantee
“One of the things we should not want to find ourselves doing is to affirm that God is like that manufacturer who issues a ‘lifetime guarantee’ for His products, and then when it breaks and you take it in, you discover that the guarantee was for the lifetime of the product, which apparently ended at …
The Crown of Grace
“To think that having ‘all grace’ except for persevering grace is somehow reassuring is to have a wildly skewed sense of priorities. ‘Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?’ How is God’s withholding of perseverance not a refusal of grace? If we say that the grace was forfeited by those who subjectively resisted …
Whose Interpretation Is Being Gored
“A hermeneutical rule of thumb (and quite a good one, I might add) is that unclear verses should be interpreted in the light of the clear ones. But however wise this is — and it is wise — we also have to distinguish between verses which are unclear, and verses that are excruciatingly clear but …