Concise Theology Quotes

“It is certain that Scripture nowhere contradicts Scripture; rather, one passage explains another. This sound principle of interpreting Scripture by Scripture is sometimes called the analogy of Scripture or the analogy of faith.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“theology is for doxology and devotion—that is, the praise of God and the practice of godliness. It should therefore be presented in a way that brings awareness of the divine presence.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“I dare to hope that my compressed material, Packer packed as it is, might expand in readers minds to lift their hearts Godward in the way that a different form of hot airlifts balloons and their passengers skyward.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology

“Children sometimes ask, “Who made God?” The clearest answer is that God never needed to be made, because he was always there. He exists in a different way from us: we, his creatures, exist in a dependent, derived, finite, fragile way, but our Maker exists in an eternal, self-sustaining, necessary way—necessary, that is, in the sense that God does not have it in him to go out of existence, just as we do not have it in us to live forever.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“Godliness starts here, with God the sovereign Creator as the first focus of our thoughts.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“They reclassified Jesus as a supernatural teacher who had looked human, though he was not; the Incarnation and the Atonement they denied, and replaced Christ’s call to a life of holy love with either prescriptions for asceticism or permission for licentiousness. Paul’s letters to Timothy (1 Tim. 1:3-4; 4:1-7; 6:20-21; 2 Tim. 3:1-9); Jude 4, 8-19; 2 Peter 2; and John’s first two letters (1 John 1:5-10; 2:9-11, 18-29; 3:7-10; 4:1-6, 5:1-12; 2 John 7-11) are explicitly opposing beliefs and practices that would later emerge as Gnosticism.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“The result of this witness is a state of mind in which both the Savior and the Scriptures have evidenced themselves to us as divine—Jesus, a divine person; Scripture, a divine product—in a way as direct, immediate, and arresting as that in which tastes and colors evidence themselves by forcing themselves on our senses. In consequence, we no longer find it possible to doubt the divinity of either Christ or the Bible.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“all human beings remain aware of God, guiltily, with uncomfortable inklings of coming judgment that they wish they did not have. Only the gospel of Christ can speak peace to this distressful aspect of the human condition.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“a conscience that at some points directs them and from time to time condemns them, telling them that they ought to suffer for wrongs they have done (Rom. 2:14ff.); and when conscience speaks in these terms it is in truth the voice of God.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“Scripture explains this state of affairs by telling us that sinful egoism and aversion to our Creator’s claims drive humankind into idolatry, which means transferring worship and homage to some power or object other than God the Creator (Isa. 44:9-20; Rom. 1:21-23; Col. 3:5).”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“Scripture assumes, and experience confirms, that human beings are naturally inclined to some form of religion, yet they fail to worship their Creator, whose general revelation of himself makes him universally known.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“Spiritual understanding—that is, the discernment of the reality of God, his ways with humankind, his present will, and one’s own relationship to him now and for the future—will not however reach us from the text until the veil is removed from our hearts and we are able to share the writer’s own passion to know and please and honor God (2 Cor. 3:16; 1 Cor. 2:14).”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“Christians should be grateful to God for the gift of his written Word, and conscientious in basing their faith and life entirely and exclusively upon it. Otherwise, we cannot ever honor or please him as he calls us to do.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“What Scripture says, God says; for, in a manner comparable only to the deeper mystery of the Incarnation, the Bible is both fully human and fully divine.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“The principle that all must be governed by the Scriptures, that is, by the Old and New Testaments taken together, is equally basic to Christianity.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs

“Nowadays in the West people idolize and, in effect, worship secular objects such as the firm, the family, football, and pleasant feelings of various kinds. But moral decline still results, just as it did when pagans worshipped literal idols in Bible times.”
― J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs