“And this is why Abraham when he saw the day of Christ, rejoiced to see it and was glad. He did not look forward to the first coming of Christ as the final fulfillment of the promise, but rather as the groundbreaking for the fulfillment of the promise. The cornerstone was laid, and this indicated that the construction on the city had commenced.”
Refusing to Take That Test Is Passing It
“If our justification were to be lost if we scored less than 100 percent on the justification test (administered by St. Peter at the Pearlies), every last one of us, yours truly included, would be headed for the bad place. We don’t take the justification test for our justification. Jesus took that test. And no, this should not make us want to sin that grace may abound.”
What Justified Eyes Are Seeing
“When we say that something or other is ‘necessary to justification’ . . . we have to be absolutely clear what we are meaning. Do we mean ‘that which is revealed in the Bible concerning justification,’ or do we mean ‘that which a sinner has to understand to be justified’? If we affirm the latter, then we are denying the Pauline doctrine of justification apart from works of the law.”
No Raw Merit
“Despite all the intramural differences in how we put things, it is distinct from a strict merit system which sees Adam as the first failed Pelagian.”
High in the Rockies
“I am a high Calvinist. For almost twenty years, I have been standing here well past the tree line, up amongst the boulders. I am prepared to be rebuked for lots of things but living in a semi-Pelagian swamp is not one of them. Try something else. Try something plausible.”
Dikai-Decimals
“For some that naïveté is a function of having decided thirty years ago to translate all discussions of theology into the metric system, just to keep life simple. If ten won’t divide into it, then it can’t be part of the dikai-word group. For others the reason for the naïveté is more obvious—graduate school is still a fresh memory. They are just out of the egg with bits of shell on their heads.”
Like Annie Oakley
“Shooting reformational solas into the air is not the same thing as defending the faith.”
Works as Grace After Reverse Engineering
“The non-elect reject God’s grace. That is the distinguishing mark of the non-elect; they cannot live by grace through faith. But they are surrounded with the apparatus of grace—Word, sacraments, promises, fellowship, and so on. Grace is everywhere—except in their hearts. So what they do (and they always do it) is construct a covenant of works out of the materials around them. This is the high rebellion of reverse engineering. This is why people can come to the Lord’s Table as though they were doing a good work, or they sign a card at the revival, or the memorize the Shorter Catechism. They can take pride in a confession of unworthiness. Who among us has not known a Calvinist who was proud of his knowledge that creatures cannot take pride in anything?”
I Usually Don’t Come Close
“The current plan is to review [By Faith Alone, Johnson/Waters] thoroughly in this space. By ‘review it’ I mean that I intend to take it apart brick by brick, and if the past is any indicator of the future, I intend to snap any flawed brick in two, and throw at least one half of that brick at the moon.”
Christ and Moses
“A man under conviction of sin can be just as worked over by the Sermon on the Mount as by the Ten Commandments. That doesn’t make it appropriate to state as a hermeneutical principle that Christ now has to be Moses. This is why I prefer to speak of use, rather than hermeneutic.”