What is Reformed Theology? Quotes

“It is a profound political reality that Christ now occupies the supreme seat of cosmic authority. The kings of this world and all secular governments may ignore this reality, but they cannot undo it. The universe is no democracy. It is a monarchy. God himself has appointed his beloved Son as the preeminent King. Jesus does not rule by referendum, but by divine right. In the future every knee will bow before him, either willingly or unwillingly. Those who refuse to do so will have their knees broken with a rod of iron.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“When we engage in the quest to understand God, it is theology. When our quest is limited to understanding how people react to theology, it is religion.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“To be dead in sin is to be in a state of moral and spiritual bondage. By nature we are slaves to sin. This does not mean that the fall has destroyed or eradicated the human will. Fallen man still has all the faculties to make choices. We still have a mind and a will. The problem is not that we cannot make choices. Natural men make choices all the time. The problem is that, in our fallen condition, we make sinful choices. We make these choices freely. We sin precisely because we want to sin, and we are capable of choosing exactly what we want to choose.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“If to secure our redemption Christ only needed to make an atonement for us, he could have come down from heaven and gone directly to the cross. But he also had to fulfill all righteousness by submitting at every point to the law of God. By his sinless life he achieved positive merit, which merit is imputed to all who put their faith in him. Christ not only died for us but he lived for us as well.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“We do not “find” God as a result of our search for him. We are found by him. The search for God does not end in conversion; it begins at conversion. It is the converted person who genuinely and sincerely seeks after God. Jonathan Edwards remarked that seeking after God is the main business of the Christian life.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“The Apostle Paul frequently admonishes and instructs Christians not to be quarrelsome, divisive, or combative. He extols the virtues of patience, charity, and tolerance. Yet when it came to the gospel itself, this same apostle was uncompromising.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Our freedom is always and everywhere limited by God’s sovereignty. God is free and we are free. But God is more free than we are. When our freedom bumps up against God’s sovereignty, our freedom must yield.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“By making their own bull-idol, Israel conformed their religion to the world around them. Their new religion was now relevant. They had a god that they could control. They made it and they could discard or destroy it. The cow gave no law and demanded no obedience. It had no wrath or justice or holiness to be feared. It was deaf, dumb, and impotent. But at least it could not intrude on their”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“The sin of mankind is in refusing to acknowledge the knowledge they have. They act against the truth that God reveals and they clearly receive.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“If God is not sovereign, then he is not God.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“The Reformers held to a high view of the Bible’s inspiration. The Bible is the Word of God, the verbum Dei, or the voice of God, the vox Dei. For example, John Calvin writes: When that which professes to be the Word of God is acknowledged to be so, no person, unless devoid of common sense and the feelings of a man, will have the desperate hardihood to refuse credit to the speaker. But since no daily responses are given from heaven, and the Scriptures are the only records in which God has been pleased to consign his truth to perpetual remembrance, the full authority which they ought to possess with the faithful is not recognized, unless they are believed to have come from heaven, as directly as if God had been heard giving utterance to them.1 “As if” does not mean Calvin believed that the Bible had dropped down from heaven directly or that God himself wrote the words on the pages of Scripture. Rather “as if” refers to the weight of divine authority that attends the Scriptures.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Unless I am convinced by Sacred Scripture or by evident reason, I will not recant. My conscience is held captive by the Word of God and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe.” These immortal words were uttered by Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Running through the works of the great theologians—like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Owen, and Jonathan Edwards—is the grand theme of the majesty of God. These men stood in awe before his holiness. This posture of reverence and adoration is found throughout the pages of Scripture itself. Calvin writes: Hence that dread and amazement with which, as Scripture uniformly relates, holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God. When we see those who previously stood firm and secure so quaking with terror, that the fear of death takes hold of them, nay, they are, in a manner, swallowed up and annihilated, the inference to be drawn is, that men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God. Frequent examples of this consternation occur both in the Book of Judges and the Prophetical Writings [Judg. 13:22; Isa. 6:5; Ezek. 1:28; 3:14; Job 9:4; Gen. 18:27; 1 Kings 19:18]; so much so, that it was a common expression among the people of God, “We shall die, for we have seen the Lord.”7”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“God’s holiness refers to two distinct but related ideas. First the term holy calls attention to God’s “otherness,” the sense in which he is different from and higher than we are. It calls attention to his greatness and his transcendent glory. The second meaning of holiness has to do with God’s purity. The perfection of his righteousness is displayed in his holiness.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Our language about God takes into account both the similarities between him and us and the dissimilarities. The incomprehensibility of God seeks to respect that sense in which God is known by us and the sense in which he remains unknown to us.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Our glorification does not mean deification.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Hence that dread and amazement with which, as Scripture uniformly relates, holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God. When we see those who previously stood firm and secure so quaking with terror, that the fear of death takes hold of them, nay, they are, in a manner, swallowed up and annihilated, the inference to be drawn is, that men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“To say that God’s sovereignty is limited by man’s freedom is to make man sovereign.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Special revelation is special because it provides specific information about God that cannot be found in nature. Nature does not teach us God’s plan for salvation; Scripture does. We learn many more specifics about the character and activity of God from Scripture than we can ever glean from creation. The Bible is also called special revelation because the information contained in it is unknown by people who have never read the Bible or had it proclaimed to them. General revelation is general because it reveals general truths about God and because its audience is universal. Every person is exposed to some degree to God’s revelation in creation.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“This acrostic (which we shall examine more closely in part 2) stands for total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“The Roman Catholic church believes that grace, faith, and Christ are all necessary for the sinner’s justification. They are necessary conditions, but not sufficient conditions. While grace is necessary for justification, it is not enough. Merit (at least congruous merit) must be added to grace. Rome declares that faith is necessary for justification. Faith is called the foundation (fundamentum) and the root (radix) of justification. Works must be added to faith, however, for justification to occur. Likewise the righteousness of Christ is necessary for justification. This righteousness must be infused into the soul sacramentally. The sinner must cooperate with and assent to this infused righteousness so that real righteousness becomes inherent in the person before he can be justified.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Reformed theology, if God is not sovereign over the entire created order, then he is not sovereign at all.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Reformed theology applies the doctrine of God relentlessly to all other doctrines, making it the chief control factor in all theology.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Reformed theology indeed insists that a real measure of freedom has been assigned to man by the Creator. But that freedom is not absolute and man is not autonomous. Our freedom is always and everywhere limited by God’s sovereignty.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today but, oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world—in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift from God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.2”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“To state it more simply, the study of religion is chiefly the study of a certain kind of human behavior, be it under the rubric of anthropology, sociology, or psychology. The study of theology, on the other hand, is the study of God. Religion is anthropocentric; theology is theocentric. The difference between religion and theology is ultimately the difference between God and man—hardly a small difference.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“Reformed theology is committed to Christianity as a revealed faith, a faith that rests not on human insight but on information that comes to us from God himself.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“The church is called to be semper reformanda, “always reforming.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“It is not the Word of God because the church says so; but that the Word of God might be spoken, therefore the church comes into being. The church does not make the Word, but it is made by the Word.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

“To say the Bible is the Word of God that errs is clearly to indulge in impious doublespeak. If it is the Word of God, it does not err. If it errs, it is not the Word of God. Surely we can have a word about God that errs, but we cannot have a word from God that errs.”
― R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics