“There is a pitfall that some have fallen into, the mistake of trying to have faith in their own faith. Sure, and so let’s not do that. Blind men healed should look to Jesus, and then at the world. They should spend very little time trying to look at their own eyeballs. You look with …
A Sublime Disrespect
“The Wind blows where He wishes and is not bottled up by anything whatever that we can do — whether we are talking about decision cards or baptismal fonts. Understanding this is a function of basic piety, and we have countless passages in Scripture that reinforce this reality by talking about things like sacrifices, sacraments, …
A Very Great Miracle
“When we are born again, a dramatic miracle happens. When we are born again, we are being turned into people” (Against the Church, p. 133).
Where He Writes What He Wills
“If God can quicken and glorify stone by writing on it with His own finger, then how much more will human hearts be glorified, quickened, made alive, and regenerated when the finger of God, the Holy Spirit Himself, writes on them? What is it to be born again? It is to become the Holy Spirit’s …
Knowing When to Say When
“He has backslidden badly, and is utterly miserable, but still in that frame of mind where he is trying to shout down his regenerate misery in a flurry of cocaine and floozies. Cocaine is in there because ‘flurry of floozies’ would be way too much, even for a writer like me” (Against the Church, p. …
Read Carefully, But Read
[Matt. 7:15-20] “This is Jesus telling us what to do. He is telling us that — without access to the decrees or the examined prophet’s heart laid out before us on a dissecting table — we have the authority to conclude that someone is inwardly a ravening wolf. This is not reading hearts, or reading …
Dealing With Brother Zed
“Corrupt fruit means corrupt tree, and good fruit means a good tree. Some false teachers have to be examined closely because they come in sheep’s clothing. But your reading of the story tells you something is ‘off’ — ‘my, what long ears you have . . .’ Now when you have obediently applied this instruction …
Despite Everything
[John 8:39,41,43-44] “They were blue star covenant members, these men, and all their sacramental papers were in order. The only problem was that despite everything, they still had the wrong father. They were therefore, by definition, unregenerate” (Against the Church, p. 122).
A New Upstream
“No, regeneration occurs when someone receives a father transplant . . . All the questions of regeneration are foundationally questions of relationship — who’s your daddy?” (Against the Church, pp. 120, 122).
The One Who Relates
“There are two errors to avoid here. One is to assume that each individual as such is self-contained and is provided with a hard shell casing . . . The other error is to think that the self is nothing more than a ganglion of relationships, with no ‘hard atoms’ of individuals between whom such …