Theology That Bites Back
“When tares are being addressed as tares, and in that condition their relationship to Christ is described as having a certain reality to it that they are in the process of losing, that cannot be explained as a judgment of charity.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 519
“True Kuyperian practice is not to go out into the world and do pretty much what everybody else is doing, only with a Jesus label attached. This is not the lordship of Christ—rather it is Christians getting into the manufacture of knock-offs. If something gets popular in the world, the Christians are right there with a competing model made with cheap labor in a Third World factory and using a lot more plastic.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 515
“Churches that have had their lampstand removed are apostate. Churches that are being seriously warned about that possibility are corrupt. Branches that have been cut out of the olive tree are apostate. Branches that are still on the tree but have started to think that they support the root are corrupt. The short answer is that apostasy does not occur with no warning at all—the run up to that apostasy is the period of corruption. God dealt with the Israelites even though they worshipped him in the high places. They were corrupt, but not yet rejected. The prophets were ticked about it, as they should have been, but God nevertheless still owned them as His people. That was corruption, not apostasy. The severance of Israel from the olive tree after 70 AD was apostasy, the culmination of corruption.
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 510.
“Some won’t accept the explanations we offer because they flat don’t believe us. In other words, when it sounds orthodox, it must be a trick. Heretics often manage to sound orthodox. Yeah, but orthodox people often sound orthodox too.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 501
“When you believe God, the whole world comes alive, and this is especially true with instruments that God has appointed, like the Word . . . and like baptism. But without evangelical faith, man, your situation is worse than it was before. You gotta have Jesus, and no Christian should have a problem with that.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 500
“New life in Christ is weightier than Calvinism. We can tell this because our gracious God has given that new life to all His true children, and He has not given Calvinism to all His true children. That will have to wait until heaven.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 499
“Fact is, in 1988 I moved to Geneva. Like it here. Bought a house. Plan to stay. But for certain American provincial ecclesiastics, when you glance at a spinning globe, Geneva is near Italy, kinda.
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 498
“C.S. Lewis comments on the nature of the early Puritans and Reformers in the 16th century—their chief characteristics being their exuberance, their liberation from motive-scratching, their joy, their relief, their delight in new life, their acceptance of something that was too good to be true. The gospel, when it breaks out in power, always has that effect. For those watching this particular controversy, trying to make out what it is all about, here is the basic question to ask. Which group is talking about the ordo as something that bursts all our chains—”my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose went forth and followed thee”—and which group has the ordo on an anvil, trying to forge it into a chain, one capable of shackling the wind, so that we can always tell where it is coming from and where it is going.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 487
“When God comes to us in grace and salvation, He brings life with Him, and nothing else. Everything He touches is made alive, and He touches everything. Everything He gives partakes of that life. It is new life from God, and it pervades the whole. Not only so, but it pervades the whole from the first moment of the effectual call, before we do a blessed thing. But one of the blessed things we do is believe, and it is living creatures, alive for the first time, who do this believing. Faith is not an inert substance, but rather an action performed by persons who are now alive.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 487
“I know you can’t put a stopwatch on these things. The ordo is simply making a critical theological point by placing regeneration first for illustrative purposes. So what is that point? It is that life pervades the whole shebang. And that life is sheer, unadulterated, exuberant, overflowing, monergistic grace of God. God speaks, and the dead bones live. The dead bones become a living man. The living man repents and believes, turning away from his old comfortable graveyard, and turning toward his everlasting home. He believes in Christ, and God imputes everything that Jesus did, said, has, or will have to that living man. He receives it all by faith. What faith? The only kind he has, the kind God gave him when He breathed into his nostrils the breath of eternal life. And you want to say this is not ‘really’ Reformed? Wake up, man! I put who whole fistfuls of the black beans of Calvinism into the grinder, and then put five extra tablespoons of the resultant black powder in the coffee filter. I then put a fork in the bottom of the coffee pot. When the fork floats, the coffee is ready. Don’t come around here saying the coffee isn’t strong enough!”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 484
