James Rickenbaker > James's Quotes

“The pastor must ever be on guard against moralism, legalism, and pietism that would attempt to renovate or fix his hearers by use of the Law. The Law always accuses (lex semper accusat), and it accuses in all of its functions and uses. The purpose of the Law is not to provide a template for moral improvement, but to silence every self-justifying argument before God and amplify sin.”
― Albert Collver III, The Necessary Distinction: A Continuing Conversation on Law and Gospel

“By its very nature, mainline Protestantism undermines the evangelistic thrust of the church since the goal is not to win people for Christ but instead to use the church at the national level to pressure governmental agencies to conform to its version of peace and justice.”
― Albert Collver III, The Necessary Distinction: A Continuing Conversation on Law and Gospel

“The way of the Gospel is not by coercion. The Gospel does not demand; it bestows His gifts freely. The Gospel bids us (iubet nos) hold out our hands and receive what is being offered.103 Jesus gives. We only receive. We don’t even permit Him to work in us and toward us. Faith passively suffers (patimur) His gracious work in us and for us.104 In this way, the baptized get to live in the fellowship of the Church,105 where Jesus’ ongoing ministry of delivering His gifts takes place.106”
― Albert Collver III, The Necessary Distinction: A Continuing Conversation on Law and Gospel

“We are to think of the Spirit’s inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term) concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers’ own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God’s work.”
― J.I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God

“Infallible’ denotes the quality of never deceiving or misleading, and so means ‘wholly trustworthy and reliable’; ‘inerrant’ means ‘wholly true’. Scripture is termed infallible and inerrant to express the conviction that all its teaching is the utterance of God ‘who cannot lie’,3 whose word, once spoken, abides for ever,4 and that therefore it may be trusted implicitly.”
― J.I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God

“He will not be so self-willed as, on the one hand, to build a speculative theological system which will say more about God than God has said about Himself, or, on the other, to ignore or tone down what Scripture does say because he finds it hard to fit in with the rest of what he knows.”
― J.I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God

“Not that we may alter or revise the gospel in order to make it more palatable to the modern mind. That would be treachery to Christ. Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms. Our business is to interpret and criticize modern thought by the gospel, not vice versa. Confusion here is fatal. The formula ‘of course, nowadays we don’t believe …’ should find no place in modern re-statements of the gospel; its appearance (a common thing, unfortunately) is usually a sign that what is being stated is, to that extent, not the gospel, but a denial of the gospel; and such statements come under Paul’s curse, to which we referred before.”
― J.I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God