"Fundamentalism" and the Word of God Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Those who disagree as to the principle of authority and, in consequence, as to the right method in theology, can reach no significant agreement on anything else.”
― J.I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God

“the antidote for bad reasoning is not no reasoning, but better reasoning.”
― J.I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God