“If the Confession gives a detailed description of a sacramental union between water baptism and converting graces (which it plainly and unambiguously does) then what do you call it when guardians of the Confession just wave their hands over it, and pronounce (ex cathedra) that it doesn’t mean what it says? When this kind of inversion happens, then only one thing can follow it—accusations must be brought against those who still hold to the original meaning of the Confession at this point. And that is what is happening. The rabbis are cracking down lest the original sacramental Calvinism of the Confession break free from the talmudic layers of revivalism that have been imposed on it.”
And Not a Small Difference Either
“There is a difference between believing that the efficacy of baptism is not limited to the time of administration and believing the impotence of baptism is not tied to the moment of administration.”
Exhibited and Conferred
To Pummel the Point
“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.”