Theologians You Should Know: An Introduction: From the Apostolic Fathers to the 21st Century

by Michael Reeves

quite apart from spearheading the creation of a confessing church that would resist accepting Nazi theology, Barth got down to the task of theology with even greater fervor. What Barth saw was that, instead of its being a time to abandon deep theology for quick response, now was the time to do theology all the more intensely in order to recover and safeguard the gospel.

“The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable.”

God the Father is the revealer; God the Son is the revelation; God the Spirit is the “revealedness,” the one who enables us to perceive the revelation.

He sees and thinks and knows crookedly even in relation to his crookedness.

Barth’s preferred image here is of the light of life: Christ’s life-giving reconciliation is light-giving.

I would ask you to think of me as a Puritan: by which I mean, think of me as one who, like those great seventeenth-century leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, seeks to combine in himself the roles of scholar, preacher, and pastor, and speaks to you out of that purpose.

“Some would say Packer is a great theologian; it would probably be more accurate to say he is a great ‘theologizer’—someone who knows, loves and thinks about God, and is able to communicate that passion in his books.”

Packer’s freshness has always lain in the clarity of his communication, not his content. He is, essentially, a catechist—a teacher of Christian essentials—not a theological pioneer.

liberalism listens to men and women, but not to God; it discounts the authority of Christ, it denies the rule of the Creator over his world, and it refuses intellectual repentance. And since it is so captive to current prejudice, one has to say that it is liberalism, not evangelicalism, that narrows the mind.

the Puritans’ awareness that in the midst of life we are in death, just one step from eternity, gave them a deep seriousness, calm yet passionate, with regard to the business of living that Christians in today’s opulent, mollycoddled, earthbound Western world rarely manage to match.

[W]hen Scripture tells Christians to mortify sin, the meaning is not just that bad habits must be broken, but that sinful desires and urgings must have the life drained out of them.

“His blood is the great sovereign remedy for sin-sick souls. Live in this, and thou wilt die a conqueror; yea, thou wilt, through the good providence of God, live to see thy lust dead at thy feet.”

without good roots into the past, we will be blown around by the assumptions of our generation, overly sensitive to petty changes in our immediate environment, ever more pinched and puny, our gospel all puckered and sour.