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September 30 - November 22, 2023
I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
Therefore, it is not just a question of plagiarism: the Christ-centered nature of reality, Christ being the Logos, means that human philosophy and mythology must necessarily contain echoes of the truth of the gospel. Yet those echoes are always so garbled, weak, and self-contradictory that those who believe them are condemned out of their own mouths, for the echoes in themselves display their own futility.
the way Christians die is proof that Christianity has a truth that all the philosophies and superstitions of men do not have.
What is so important to notice here is that Justin restricts himself to arguing from the Hebrew Scriptures alone, knowing that the books that make up what we now call the New Testament will carry no weight with Trypho. In this, Trypho and Justin are agreed: the case for Christianity can be made or broken by the Hebrew Scriptures.
Would Christ have come if Adam had not sinned? Did Adam fall, or was he pushed? Irenaeus puts it like this: just as God appointed a monster to swallow Jonah for a time, so he ordained Satan to swallow up humanity in death for a time. But humanity was subjected to death in hope, so that God might have mercy, and the apparent victory of Satan gave way to the true and final victory of Christ.77 Death, then, was brought about as an act of judgment; but there was mercy in the judgment, for death prevented man from being immortal in his state of naked alienation from God. Through death, humanity
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That, according to Irenaeus, is the grand plan of creation: that man might be included in the glory of God.
Irenaeus concludes with a warning to avoid all heresies, of which, he says, there are three basic types: the first denies the Father and imagines another God; the second denies the Son and imagines there was no incarnation, and thus no love of God for humanity or our flesh; the third denies the Spirit and despises the true prophecy of Scripture. Instead of falling into such errors, Irenaeus bids the reader to hold to the oldest and truest preaching, that of the true God, the coming of his Son and the gift of his Spirit.
If the Word were some third party called into being to bridge a gap between the Father and the creation, then of course the Father would remain infinitely distant from us and ultimately unknowable. However, because of his relation to the Word and the Word’s relation to creation, the Father is “not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27).
Athanasius has already explained that being created in the image of God means being designed for personal knowledge of God, and this is something that only the Word of God can bring. The knowledge of God that the Word of God brings is precisely what humanity turned away from in sin, as they turned inward and so turned into nonbeing. But when the Word of God restores knowledge of God, he saves humankind from corruption and nonbeing, from all “this dehumanising of mankind.”94 Only the Word and Image of God could rehumanize us.
just as a fountain must pour forth water to be a fountain, and just as a sun must have a radiance, so the Father must “pour forth,” “radiate,” or beget the Son in order to be who he is—the Father. In contrast, Arius’s talk of a Father without a Son signified a barren God who was like a dry fountain or a sun that does not shine.
Their mistake was to long for the wrong city: instead, they should long for the heavenly Jerusalem, the City of God. The Christians, he explains, are the ones who understand this, as, like refugees in this world, they ever long for their true heavenly home. It is that heavenly vision that can put the fate of earthly empires like Rome into the correct perspective.
From his student days in Carthage, when he fell in love with the idea of being in love, through all his addiction to sex, his
love of friends and, of course, his love of wisdom, it is love that thrilled his heart and shaped his thinking.
In the eleventh century, friendship was viewed in quite businesslike terms, as an alliance entered into to achieve some common purpose; Anselm saw friendship as a union of souls, and so a foretaste of the harmony of heaven.
By “faith” Anselm did not mean a basic assent to the truth of Christianity, but an active love for God. It is this love of God that seeks to know God. That is faith seeking understanding. Moreover, this love for God is what enables us to reason purely, Anselm maintained, for without love for God we become irrational, foolish, and blind.
Anselm asks Boso if he would sin to preserve the whole creation. Boso nobly says he would not, which Anselm takes as proof that the cost of sin is worth more than all creation. Thus something more than all creation must be given to God in recompense for sin.
I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.
When the Devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus: “I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also.”
It was because he felt that the apostle James’s letter was not sufficiently clear in its proclamation of Christ that he wrote, “I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove”!
Luther died, excommunicated from the church he had hoped to reform. His last written words were “We are beggars. That is true.” They sum up so much of his thought: we are nothing but spiritual beggars who contribute nothing to our salvation or understanding of God; but there is, outside ourselves, God’s word of truth. On that we depend.
God creates life only out of nothing; he never looks to build on our foundations. “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.”
since we now know and love Christ, we become Christs to our neighbors, serving them as Christ serves us, and thus representing him. The Christian, therefore, “lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor.”
We freely choose to do the things we love, but we are unable to choose what to love; and since we do not love God, we cannot choose for him. The only solution is for God in his grace to change the heart and its desires; only then, finding that we love him, will we choose him.
Unease with capital punishment was simply not a feature of the times. Thus, if there was a fault, it can be seen only as a fault of the age, not the man.
Calvin wanted readers to feel the force of the truths under discussion so that their hearts might be won for Christ. He would speak repeatedly of God ravishing us with his love, wooing and inflaming our hearts with the knowledge of himself. This, he believed, was the point of doctrine: properly arranged and rightly taught, it is the most powerful force for real change deep in the hearts of real people.
when Judas sinned in handing over Jesus, why was the Father not considered equally guilty for handing over his Son? Because by it Judas meant evil and the Father good.
the guilt that held us liable for punishment has been transferred to the head of the Son of God. We must, above all, remember this substitution, lest we tremble and remain anxious throughout life—as if God’s righteous vengeance, which the Son of God has taken upon himself, still hung over us.
Ephesians 4:11 taught that there are five sorts of ministers: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. The first three he saw as temporary offices that had generally ceased (though he believed that God still uses them in extraordinary circumstances, Luther having been just such an extraordinary apostle).
when on earth, Owen notes, Christ seemed to affect the hearts of his disciples so little, but when the Spirit came, their hearts were all aflame for him. “And this is his work to the end of the world,—to bring the promises of Christ to our minds and hearts, to give us the comfort of them, the joy and sweetness of them.”
Twenty years after publishing Communion with God, Owen responded to his critics with The Doctrine of Justification by Faith. It was more than a response, though; it was a massive exegetical, doctrinal, and historical argument for the fact that, since Christ is one person, he has one righteousness, and since believers are part of the body of Christ, that righteousness is theirs.
“the great end of the description given of the person of Christ, is that we may love him, and thereby be transformed into his image.”
“Affections are in the soul as the helm in the ship; if it be laid hold on by a skilful hand, he turneth the whole vessel which way he pleaseth.”
Loving the Son, we become like the Father. Also, in trusting the Son we become like the Son, for we always become like what we trust. So, when we trust Christ, we become like what the Father loves. We are conformed into the image of God.
Then, through the Bible, God changed his heart with all its desires; and with his affections now won to Christ, he was able for the first time to choose freely for the good. The lesson is clear: there were no raptures or ecstasies, but without that change in his heart Augustine would have remained a slave to his old ways.
“holiness is nothing but the implanting, writing and realizing of the gospel in our souls.”301 Thus true holiness is all about relating to Christ; it is not about giving something back to God as if to fulfill our end of some bargain.
Sanctification is a work of complete healing, making believers beautiful and whole, a work that will be perfected in our resurrection. Thus holiness, Owen stresses, is an eternal thing, the beginning of the indestructible new creation.
Many Puritans wrestled with the extent to which it is right to rest our assurance of salvation on our works, and whether true holiness can be motivated thus.
And if they had been taught aright, Small children carried bedwards Would shudder lest they meet that night The God of Mr. Edwards. Abraham’s God, the Wrathful One, Intolerant of error— Not God the Father or the Son But God the Holy Terror.
It shows what an impact Brainerd made that, almost as soon as he had died, Edwards began work on a biography, The Life of David Brainerd, which turned out to be one of the most influential accounts of missions ever.
Interestingly, he was also eager to teach them to sing, for music, he believed, “has a powerful efficacy to soften the heart into tenderness, to harmonize the affections, and to give the mind a relish for objects of a superior character.”318
With complete freedom I choose to drink this cup of tea. But what I want is shaped entirely by what I love. I choose to drink tea and not sewage because I like tea and am less partial to sewage. Just so, we cannot ever choose God, for we do not naturally love him, and we only choose what we love.
So strong was he in his bid to annihilate any self-determination in the creature that he came up with the following: “God’s upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing, at each moment.”319 Now, making God re-create all things out of nothing each new moment certainly stops the creature from having any self-determination, but at what cost? God is now (and at each moment) the Creator of a fallen world.
It is when we are brought to love Christ that other Christian affections follow: we begin to be filled with joy and gratitude; we begin to hate sin; and so on.
it is not merely that I understand that God is sweet; it is that I now have a sense of and appreciation for that sweetness. I have tasted and seen.
“Thus the lights of the Old Testament go out on the approach of the glorious sun of righteousness.”
we moderns instinctively find it incredible that “real” secular history should ever be connected to, let alone be driven by, God’s cosmic plan of redemption. Edwards, on the other hand, rejected such dualism. He, at least, had a robustly Christian understanding of all history.
When I would form in my mind an idea of a society in the highest degree happy, I think of them as expressing their love, their joy, and the inward concord and harmony and spiritual beauty of their souls by sweetly singing to each other.
reading Edwards’s major works on a computer screen would be as harsh as licking caviar off an old sock.
Schleiermacher came to write his first book, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. In it he argued that true religion (of which Christianity is the highest form) is not about the dead letter of doctrine and the sort of historical events that Enlightenment skepticism pooh-poohed; it is about a living experience of the divine.
in 1914, war broke out, and Barth was shocked to find his liberal teachers supporting it. All his confidence in them and their theology was rocked as he saw their total accommodation of the gospel to the culture. And so, “I gradually turned back to the Bible,” and found a “strange new world” there.
