“However you examine it, the Protestant Reformation in the English-speaking world was the location, the context, and the setting, of a literary supernova.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 125
Enough to Take the Breath Away
“Why . . . just the other day I was listening in my pick-up truck to a tape by a gentleman named Dr. Scott Clark, and he said that we Federal Vision types did not believe that Jesus lived a life of perfect, sinless obedience! I was so flummoxed by this that I pulled my truck over to the side of the road, and had to lay myself down on the highway with my feet on the bumper just to get the blood back into my head. Then when the state patrolman asked me what I thought I was doing, I explained it to him, and he couldn’t believe it either. Actually, I made this last little bit up—just a little fib—but that’s okay. We’re all under grace.”
A Rock Pile of Rules
“What is commonly caricatured as the ‘puritanical’ mentality is actually a mentality that can be found in the church of all ages. You can find this mindset in some of the early fathers, you can find it with Syrian ascetics, you can find it in medieval monasteries, and you can find it (after the first generation) among the Puritans. This religious type of person translates every serious call to holiness into terms it can understand, which is that of being introspective, stuffy, priggish, thin-lipped, censorious, prim, prudish, and more. Not only does it translate every serious call to holiness into this legalistic straitjacket, but it is attracted to every serious call to holiness—with the intention of burying it under a rock pile of rules.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 121
Maybe I Need to Enunciate
“He rejects the idea that we ‘get in’ by grace, and ‘stay in’ by works. As do I, with enthusiasm. We get in by grace, we remain in by grace, we walk by grace, we talk by grace, we persevere by grace, we eat dinner by grace, we go to church by grace. We get in by grace. We stay in by grace. We finish by grace. Sola gratia. Tota gratia. Tota et sola gratia. Grace, grace, grace. But you know me. Mr. Ambiguous.”
Treatment He Merits
“Whenever I see congruent merit on the street, I never fail to help opprobrium on his pointy little head.”
The Source of Nature is Supernature
“When Jesus turned the water into wine at Cana, the resultant wine was true wine. It was a supernatural act that brought it into being suddenly, but the wine itself was as natural as the wine that had already been drunk. And because it was better wine, we cannot say it was unnatural in any way.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 97
Living Faith from the Get Go
“I thought faith was the instrument of justification in the ordo salutis, and therefore preceded it. In other words, faith is what it is before justification gets to it, because justification doesn’t happen without the instrumentality of faith, which has to be what it is in order for justification to happen at all.”
What She Would Not Say
“God made Adam out of dirt, and He made Eve out of Adam’s rib. And when God presented the woman to the man, and he asked where she came from, her reply was not ‘from my pre-Adamite hominoid ancestors.’”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 96
The Blammo School of Thought
“The other view, the one that I am stoutly comfortable with, might be called the blammo view of creation. About ten thousand years ago, as the crow flies, there was nothing, and absolutely nothing underneath, above, or around that nothing. And then about four thousand years after that, also as the crow flies, God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and blammo, there it was.”
Chestertonian Calvinism, p. 96
Not by Works, Friend
“Saving faith obeys the gospel, and only the gospel. Saving obedience believes in Jesus Christ, and saving obedience does nothing but believe in Jesus Christ.”