Tag: Chrestomathy

“When something starts to happen, all kinds of people are attracted to it, for various reasons. Not surprisingly, they want to help steer the movement in a direction consistent with why they showed up in the first place. But people are coming from all directions, including from some good directions, and this is why it takes some time for the whole thing to sort out and set up. Complicating the set-up period is the arrival of pistol-fanning heresy hunters, acting like they were Annie Oakley doing trick shots. Unfortunately, buying a gun is not the same thing as learning how to aim it, and waving the Westminster Confession overhead is not the same thing as reading it.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 803

“Whenever you are dealing with a new movement, identification of what that movement is all about is a lot trickier than, say, analyzing some fossilized denomination. With the latter, all you have to do is read the little inscription next to the glass case, and you know exactly what they stand for. But when something new is happening, it can take a bit of time for the whole thing to ‘set up.’”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 802-803

“There is a vast hierarchy of instruments below that—many bricks come below the capstone. But there is only one capstone. But none of those lesser bricks, lesser instruments, result in salvation necessarily. True evangelical faith does.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 800

“Faith is the sole instrument by which a person may receive the blessing of Christ’s righteousness imputed to him. Now when we say ‘sole instrument’ we do not mean that no other instruments are involved, but that no other instruments are involved in the way that faith is . . . the only instrumental cause of justification that leaves no remainder is faith.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 799-800

“Those who hold that the covenant of works was not gracious must, of necessity, deny the imputation of the active obedience of Christ”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 795

“What do you do? You have a baptized man and woman, professing faith in Jesus and in the truth of the Christian religion, who are living sober and decent lives, and w ho could join any Calvinist church in Europe. They want to have their child baptized. What do you do? The Halfway Covenant said okay, all right already.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 791

“If it is true that not every member of the visible church will be in glory, and it is true, then there must be a demarcation between those covenant members who are going to Heaven and those who are not. That demarcation is called heart conversion, or regeneration. All genuinely Reformed believers acknowledge the reality of this The practical, pastoral issue concerns whether that true heart conversion is measurable by human beings. Can we detect it in a certain enough way to be confident that we are letting only the regenerate come to the Table (or, in baptistic churches, to baptism), and are successfully keeping the ‘not known to be regenerate’ away from the Table?”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 790

“I am bound confessionally to the Westminster Confession, and I think that is one of the coolest things in the world. My attitude is not slavish, for I have taken a few exceptions here and there, which proves that I did not drink the KoolAid. At the same time, I have been accused of ‘striking at the vitals’ of the Reformed faith. Wherefore and hownow? It is because I think there is life outside the confession. It is because I believe there is life in the Bible outside the confession. The fact that Westminster is an accurate summary of the doctrines of our holy faith does not make it an exhaustive summary of everything biblical, soup to nuts. And it doe not mean that the fine theologians behind that document ever thought about some of the modern heresies that rampage through the halls of our seminaries.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 788-789

“Culturally engaged Calvinism is a world-shaping force. It is potent. It has built more than one civilization and is going to do so again. There is more than one seminary professor who likes to write learned monographs about what this particular giant use to do before it went to sleep, but who is extremely wary about any attempts to wake the giant up. That might make a mess, and the secularists might then revoke our library privileges.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 786

“When the various controversies came raining down upon our heads eight years ago, along with a few dead cats, Nancy asked me, ‘What is this?’ What I said to her then has only been confirmed by repeated and numerous blessings that could not have come to us in any other way. The last eight years have been a time of unparalleled blessing. I told her that this was my big promotion, and it was.”

The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 786