Caleb Batchelor > Recent Status Updates

"Our four Gospels are like stained-glass windows, which capture and refract the sun into different shapes and hues and images.... Our four Gospels all open onto the same inner sanctum and altar, but with different and complementary angles of light." 70-71

"Our canonical Gospels are the theological, historical, and aretological (virtue-forming) biographical narratives that retell the story and proclaim the significance of Jesus Christ, who through the power of the Spirit is the Restorer of God's reign." 35

"The freedom of religion and the human conscience, of the church and theology, stands and falls with the perspicuity of Scripture." 479

"Although his finger may be more clearly observable to us in one event than in another, the pure in heart see God in all his works." 370

"What comes to us from the pagan world are not just cries of despair but also expressions of confidence, hope, resignation, peace, submission, patience, etc." Bavinck on General Revelation, 319

The world is "a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God" (art. 2, Belgic Confession). 233

"The different dogmas are not isolated propositions but constitute a unity. Actually there is only one dogma, one that is rooted in Scripture and that has branched out and divided in a wide range of particular dogmas." 94

"Dogmatics is the knowledge that God has revealed in his Word to the church concerning himself and all creatures as they stand in relation to him." 38

"There is much truth in the belief that creation everywhere displays to us vestiges of the Trinity." 333

"God knows things not by observation, but from and of himself. Our knowledge is posterior: it presupposes their existence and is derived from it. Exactly the opposite is true of God's knowledge: he knows everything before it exists." 196

"God is so abundantly rich that we can gain some idea of his richness only by the availability of many names. Every name refers to the same full divine being, but each time from a particular angle, the angle from which it reveals itself to us in his works. God is therefore simple in his multiplicity and manifold in his simplicity (Augustine)." 177

"There is not an atom of the universe in which his everlasting power and deity are not clearly seen." 90

"the fundamental assertion of the early church was that the one person who is Jesus Christ is God the Son. It was God the Son as a person (not just the divine nature) who came down from heaven. It was God the Son as a person who united humanity to himself (not two natures united to make a new person)." Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity

[Jesus] lived not in sublime detachment or in ascetic isolation, but "with us", as "the fellow-man of all men", crowded, busy, harassed, stressed and molested. No large estate gave him space, no financial capital guaranteed his daily bread, no personal staff protected him from interruptions and no power or influence protected him from injustice. He saved us from alongside us. Macleod, Person of Christ, 180