“To pummel the point (if I may), I have taught (in very clear and divers ways) that the grace given to the decretally elect at the point of the effectual call is grace that is qualitatively different than the common operations of the Spirit enjoyed (for a season) by the unregenerate covenant member. I have heaped this point up in a rumpled pile and have danced around it, gesticulating with enthusiasm. I have made a big building out of this point and put a blinking neon sign on top of it. If this point were an overpass, I have spray-painted my agreement with it in bright green letters at least eighteen inches high. With my white chef’s hat on, I have wheeled this point out of the kitchen on a cart, poured brandy all over it, and set it on fire. If the point were a pudding, I would have added three eggs beyond what the recipe called for. To summarize briefly, this is not something I have somehow neglected to say.”
Grace Can Give Different Things
“The fact that God is gracious is He makes a gracious covenant with unfilled Adam, which Adam broke, and then another gracious covenant with fallen men in the second Adam, which Christ kept, does not mean these two gracious covenants have to be the same thing.”
Tombs of the Prophets
“Is it okay to read what our Reformed fathers wrote and preached back in the day? And learn from them? Or must we simply invoke their names with pious looks on our faces?”
Dead Faith Accomplishes Nothing
“To include faithfulness in the very nature of living faith is not to intrude works. Faithful faith justifies. Faithless faith does not.”
Not the Barnacles
“Loving the original ship does not mean loving the barnacles . . . In the grip of Enlightenment individualism, pietism, sentimentalism, and so forth, in our day the meaning of the solas has been turned aside from their original and more glorious meaning. Now they are solo Christus (just me and Jesus), solo gratia (narrow, sectarian grace), solo fide (when ‘I prayed the prayer’), solo Scriptura (just me and my Bible), and solo Deo gloria (God gets all the glory for saving me, and maybe somebody else. Now please realize that the word solo here constitutes a bad macaronic pun, and not a serious attempt to match gender, number, and case. No letters from the Latinists, please.”
Bottle-Rocket Doctrine
“In fact, one of the guys we lost to Rome wasted very little time in denouncing John Paul II as a heretic and discovering that the papal throne was empty. All such things remind me very little of classic Roman Catholic doctrine and remind me a great deal of bottle-rocket anabaptism.”
Christians Becoming True Christians
“A man who is married to a woman is obligated to be faithful to her. But if he is not faithful to her, this does not mean that he is not ‘really’ married to her—because that would mean, ironically, that he was not really being faithless to her. You have to be covenantally obligated to be covenantally faithless . . . If a cheating husband repented and came home to his wife after years of infidelity, and she forgave him, and said to him, ’Today, you have become my husband,’ we would all know what she meant. He had to have been a husband before his repentance in order to cheat, but when he repented of cheating, he ‘became a husband.’ A lot of faithless covenant members have ‘become Christians’ the same way.”
But Enough About John Murray
“Not to put too fine a point on it, a man might be rejected by the current folks at Banner of Truth because he teaches things that he learned from a Banner of Truth book.”
Not a Univocal Cup
“When Paul tells us about the cup of blessing which was the cause of many Corinthians getting sick and dying, is he intending to tell us that it is a blessing to get sick and die under the judgment of God? Or is he speaking about blessing at one level, and then when we get to the specific problems at Corinth, he addresses the situation at another level?”
Faith Closes the Circle
“If I can only believe what is propositionally revealed in the Bible, and if my name is not propositionally revealed in the Bible as one who believes the promises of salvation rightly, then how can I believe the promise? How can I believe any promise there? Do I have direct warrant? No, not at all. I can, however, believe indirectly, but I must supply one of the missing ingredients (which I cannot do apart from grace) . . . The thing that closes the circle is always faith. This particular faith cannot be based on propositional warrant from Scripture, because Scripture says nothing about my prayers, nothing about my children, nothing about whether I am elect. I close the circle by faith. God gives the general enscripturated promise. He then works in me specifically through the person of the Holy Spirit to bring me to the conviction that these general promises are mine, and so that I may enter into rest. Not only do I have reason to believe the promises, I am commanded to believe them”