Theology That Bites Back
“The Westminster Confession of Faith does not need constant fixing; the hearts of Westminsterians do need constant fixing. The problem is not Moses’ seat, but rather the Pharisaical bums ensconced there. I have been regularly surprised at the defenders of the Confession who cannot answer simple questions about what is actually in it. Their loyalty to the confession is loyalty to the idea of having it, and not to what it actually says.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 656-657
“Thousands of hours of study without meeting with the principals face-to-face is thousands of hours of yelling up the wrong rain spout. Establishing committees that are as stacked as a WWII bomber’s nose is not the way to inspire my confidence. No, I haven’t gotten over the sheer brazenness of that study committee.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 653
“I agree that the fact that we baptize infants does not obligate us to allow them to vote in church elections, or drive the bus to the family retreat. But what we are talking about, with regard to the Table, is food. All children who come into our households should have the privilege of food.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 647
“All pastors and elders should want to protect the Table from corrupt use, but we should do so a posteriori. The approach to church purity taken here is that of hiring big, beefy security guards at the door to check everyone’s IDs three times. The approach taken to church purity by what I take to be a more consistent covenantal approach is to hire big, beefy bouncers.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 644
“Being prosecuted by sentimentalist pietists is like drowning in a cauldron of hot butterscotch”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 634
“The problem with this is that synergism is frequently used by people who want God to do 90 percent, and we do the remaining 10. He carries one end of the heavy object, and we carry the other end. This is not a Calvinistic understanding at all. In Calvinistic synergy, God does one hundred percent, and I do the other one hundred percent. Shakespeare writes one hundred percent of Hamlet’s lines, and Hamlet speaks one hundred percent of Hamlet’s lines. The wrong kind of synergy has Shakespeare writing the plot of Hamlet’s life, with Hamlet ad-libbing his way through it.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 625
“An adulterer is really married—that’s in part what makes him an adulterer. A faithful husband is really married too, but there is far more to the story than the two of them being ‘really married.’”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 620
“But those Reformed disputants who could have known better, and who had a duty to know better, and who have persisted in circulating falsehoods anyway, what can I say? It must be rough having a conscience that looks like a rainy Saturday in Pittsburgh.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 619
“If all things are mine, then how could it be possible for the obedience of Christ to not be mine? The fact that the New Testament goes out of its way to show the life of Christ as a recapitulation of the history of Israel, but with this time Israel doing it right, makes this, in my view, undeniable. In all that He is and does, Christ is Christ for us. He does not recapitulate the history of Israel got show off how much He knows. It is not literary doodling. It is clearly redemptive—His entire life is salvific. The fact of it in the Incarnation is salvific, the trajectory of it in His recapitulation of Israel’s history is also, and the culmination of it in His death and resurrection is the capstone of our salvation.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 614
“My position is that Scripture is senior to the Confessions, and that the Confessions are senior to (and quite different from) popular American bapterian readings of the Confessions . . . The system is fine. The Confessions are fine. The problem is that Reformed bapterians have as many problem passages in the Confessions as they do in the Scriptures.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 606
