Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
August 21, 2017
John H. Armstrong, founder and president of Reformation and Revival Ministries, edited a volume titled The Coming Evangelical Crisis.4 When I asked him whether he thought the crisis was still coming or is actually here, he admitted that in his judgment the crisis is already upon us. “And why is that?” I continued. He answered, “It is because evangelicals have forgotten their theology.”
The older churches were pursuing the world’s wisdom, embracing the world’s theology, following the world’s agenda, and employing the world’s methods.
The liberal denominations had been undermined by rationalism, and they were no longer able to receive the Bible as God’s Word to man, only as man’s word about God.
Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.5 He said it was because they knew what they believed. He was right. People are not attracted to churches that do not know where they stand theologically.
what Francis Schaeffer called the wisdom of the fifty-one percent vote.
But I also learned that if Christians throw out a transcendent authority, another authority will always come in to take the Bible’s place.
That had been the theme of the 1964 gathering of the World Council of Churches, and it meant that the church’s concerns should be the concerns of the world, even to the exclusion of the gospel. If the world’s main priority was world hunger,
The methods God has given for us to do his work are participation, persuasion, and prayer.
Evangelicals are not heretics, at least not consciously. If we ask whether the Bible is the authoritative and inerrant Word of God, most will answer affirmatively, at least if the question is asked in traditional ways. Is
is sufficient for winning people to Christ in this age, so they turn to felt-need sermons or entertainment or “signs and wonders” instead. They do not think the Bible is sufficient for achieving Christian growth, so they turn to therapy groups or Christian counseling. They do not think it is sufficient for making God’s will known, so they look for external signs or revelations. They do not think it is adequate for changing our society, so they establish evangelical lobby groups in Washington and work to elect “Christian” congressmen, senators, presidents, and other officials. They seek change
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We live in a therapeutic age now. So evangelicals have recast their theology in psychiatric terms. Sin has become dysfunctional behavior. Salvation is self-esteem or wholeness. Jesus is more of an example for right living than our Savior from sin and God’s wrath.
“Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Answer to Question 14), and our major problem is not a lack of wholeness or a lack of integration of personalities but the peril of God’s wrath toward us for our sin. What we need from God in Christ is not an example for living but an atonement.
Even preaching about happy marriages and raising nice children is wrong if it leads people to suppose that, if they succeed in these areas, every-thing is well with them whether or not they have repented of their sin, trusted Jesus Christ as their Savior, and are following him as their Lord.
read them in other translations, and Romans 12:2 is one such passage: “Do not con-form any longer to the pattern of this world.” This sentence has two key words: “world,” which is actually “age” (aion, meaning, “this present age” in contrast to “the age to come”); and “do not conform,” which is a compound having at its root the word “scheme.” So the verse means, “Do not let the age in which you live force you into its scheme of thinking and behaving.”
J. B. Phillips: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.”
For secularism, all life, every human value, every human activity must be understood in light of this present time. . . . What matters is now and only now. All access to the above and the beyond is blocked. There is no exit from the con-fines of this present world. The secular is all that we have. We must make our decisions,
our churches whenever we find ourselves aiming for immediate, visible success rather than trusting God while we do things in his way and await his invisible, spiritual blessings. This is an outlook to which we must not be conformed. Instead of being conformed to this world, as if this world is all there is, we are to see all things as relating to God and eternity.
HUMANISM: “YOU WILL BE LIKE GOD”
For if there is no God, the self must be worshiped in God’s place. In deifying self, humanism actually deifies nearly everything but God.
We also need to consider relativism. Relativism means that there is no God and therefore no absolutes in any area of life. Everything is up for grabs.
in this book is that, although we need to recapture the great theological truths that underlay and fueled the sixteenth-century Reformation, the form that recovery will have to take in our day must vary from the sixteenth-century because the battle lines have shifted and the specific issues have changed.
In Martin Luther’s day, sola Scriptura had to do with the Bible being the sole ultimate authority for Christians over against challenges to it from the traditions of the medieval church,
Rather, our problem is in deciding whether the Bible is sufficient for the church’s life and work. We confess its authority, but we dis-count its ability to do what is necessary to draw unbelievers to Christ, enable us to grow in godliness, provide direction for our lives, and transform and revitalize society. So we substitute such things as Madison Avenue methodology for biblical evangelism, special “religious” experiences rather than knowledge of the Word to promote and guarantee sanctification, special revelations for discerning the will of God for our lives, and a trust in the power of
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The battle lines have also shifted in regard to the doctrines of solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, and soli deo gloria, but we will come to them in later chapters.
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
We held three scholarly gatherings to hammer out three documents of “affirmation and denial.” The first, quite naturally, was on inerrancy (“The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy”).3The second was on sound principles of biblical interpretation (“The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics”).4The third dealt with Bible application (“The Chicago Statement on Biblical Application”).5We also held two large lay conferences, the first in San Diego in the spring of 1982 and the second in Washington in the fall of 1988.
The Bible is a historical book and Christianity is a historical religion.
The most serious issue, I believe, is the Bible’s sufficiency.
The Bible’s sufficiency is the point of what are perhaps its three most important passages about itself: Psalm 19; Matthew 4; and 2 Timothy 3. The first contrasts the written Word with God’s general revelation. The second shows how Jesus used the Bible to overcome temptation. The third is Paul’s advice to Timothy in view of the terrible times he saw coming. Each stresses that the Word of God alone is sufficient for these challenges.
means. The Good News is the gospel. Moreover, if we ask what this gospel is about, the answer is that it is about the kingdom of God. God’s kingdom has come near because Jesus is near. The gospel is about his kingdom. If we also ask, “What does that have to do with me?” or “How do I become a part of this kingdom?” the answer is, “Repent and believe the good news.” That is exactly what we tell people to do today. They must repent of their sin and believe the gospel of God’s salvation from sin in Jesus Christ.
We believe what we believe because we find it in the Bible.
An error about justification is dangerous, like a defect in a foundation.
It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God; and without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour.” He maintained that justification is “the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, and the judge over all kinds of doctrines.”
Redemption is one. It was discussed in the last chapter. It concerns buying and selling and emphasizes the price Jesus paid for our deliverance.
Propitiation (“a sacrifice of atonement,” NIV) is another key term.
What about justification? This
It is composed of the two Latin words justus, meaning “just” or “righteous,” and facio, meaning “to make.” So at first glance justification seems to mean “to make righteous.” But that is not the right idea. The word only indicates that the person involved has a right standing before the bar
Luther tried to do it. He had entered the monastery of the Augustinian order at Erfurt on August 17, 1505, as he said, “in order to save my soul,” and he became a model monk in his duties. He labored long in prayer. He fasted and even beat his body to sub-due the flesh. Above all, he was rigorous in doing penance, entering the confessional for hours at a time and so wearying his confessors that they would eventually tell him to return to his cell and not come back until he had committed a sin worth confessing.
Luther later said of himself in a letter to the Duke of Saxony, “I was indeed a pious monk and followed the rules of my order more strictly than I can express. If ever a monk could obtain heaven by his monkish works, I should certainly have been entitled to it. Of this all the friars who have known me can testify. If it had continued much longer, I should have carried my mortification even to death, by means of my watchings, prayers, reading and other labors.”6But Luther found no peace through these exercises. The wisdom of his order instructed him to satisfy God’s demand for righteousness by
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Justification is an act of God by which he declares sinners to be righteous by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone.
