Saved by Grace Quotes

“it is highly doubtful that with the words, “washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,” Paul was referring to baptism.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“Where God’s Word is, there is God Himself, there God’s Spirit is at work, there God establishes His covenant, there He plants His church.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“Moreover, Synod in agreement with our Confession maintains that “the sacraments are not empty or meaningless signs, so as to deceive us, but visible signs and seals of an inward and invisible thing, by means of which God works in us by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Article XXXIII), and that more particularly baptism is called “the washing of regeneration” and “the washing away of sins” because God would “assure us by this divine pledge and sign that we are spiritually cleansed from our sins as really as we are outwardly washed with water”; wherefore our Church in the prayer after baptism “thanks and praises God that He has forgiven us and our children all our sins, through the blood of His beloved Son —Page 172— Jesus Christ, and received us through His Holy Spirit as members of His only begotten Son, and so adopted us to be His children, and sealed and confirmed the same unto us by holy baptism”; so that our Confessional Standards clearly teach that the sacrament of baptism signifies and seals the washing away of our sins by the blood and the Spirit of Jesus Christ, that is, the justification and the renewal by the Holy Spirit as benefits which God has bestowed upon our seed. Synod is of the opinion that the representation that every elect child is on that account already in fact regenerated even before baptism, can be proved neither on scriptural nor on confessional grounds, seeing that God fulfils His promise sovereignly in His own time, whether before, during, or after baptism. It is hence imperative to be circumspect in one’s utterances on this matter, so as not to desire to be wise beyond that which God has revealed.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“We must respect the catholicity of the church even to the extent that it has, according to God’s purpose, spread among the human race in corrupted forms. Christendom in its entirety is the people of God that in the days of the New Testament has taken the place of Israel. Thereby Scripture also directly opposes all those who, in over-emphasizing principles and craving for consistency, would rather see those who bear the name of Christ while denying the Christ of Scripture surrender the name Christian and return to paganism, purely in the interest of consistency. There are people who seem to take delight, with the broom of “necessary consequence,” in sweeping away the Ethicals into the company of the Modernists, and the Modernists into the company of the Socialists, and the Socialists into the company of the Nihilists —Page 126— and Anarchists. But the calling of the minister of the gospel is to rescue what can still be rescued, and to see people’s manifold inconsistencies as a blessing and a demonstration of God’s restraining grace.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“The church’s holiness must not be sacrificed for its catholicity, and the church’s catholicity may not be surrendered in favor of its holiness. For in denying either, we lose both. Both attributes by nature characterize the one Christian church.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“The condition in which the pagan world dwells outside of the special revelation is portrayed in Holy Scripture as darkness, ignorance, self-invented wisdom, and great unrighteousness. The preaching that addresses them is thus a calling to come out of darkness into the light; it is an invitation to be converted from idols and to serve the living and true God.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“Life often mocks every system; it is richer and fuller than the deepest thinker in all his wisdom can imagine.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“Therefore it is completely erroneous to place the church as organism and the church as institution in opposition to each other, to put the former high above the latter, and to play the former against the latter. The institution is particularly that organization, that one, necessary, indispensable organization undergirding the so-called church as organism. This latter has no other specific address than precisely that address of the institution. It comes to manifestation in no humanly invented society or corporation, but in its God-given institution.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“When God binds Himself to being our God, then at the same time He binds Himself to be the God of our seed. With His grace He follows the line of the generations. He executes election along the route and pathway of the covenant. As Father of all mercies He walks the path that He Himself, as Father of everything, has drawn.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“nature and grace stood over against each other like light and darkness, day and night, heaven and earth, like Creator and creature. For that reason, a radical separation had to emerge eventually between nature and grace, not only in doctrine but also in life, both in theory and in practice. By virtue of that opposition and separation, the Anabaptists taught that the first man Adam, because he was from the dust of the ground, could not yet have been the true image of God, could not have shared in true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness; the second Man, Christ, could not have received His human nature from the virgin Mary, but He must have brought it with Him from heaven; believers who had been born of God from above and had received a new, heavenly substance in that regeneration, were to be viewed not merely as renewed, but as new heavenly people in origin and essence, people whose position now was against the world, having nothing more to do with the world.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“God is so good that in His electing and in the dispensing of His grace, He follows the line of generations and receives into His covenant both parents and their seed together. So the children of believers are to be viewed as holy, not by nature but through the benefit of the covenant of grace, in which they together with their parents are included according to God’s arrangement. Given this position, therefore, baptism is not administered to children of the church in order to make them holy, in order to make them partakers of sanctifying grace, but because they are sanctified in Christ and therefore as members of His church ought to be baptized. Baptism is no conduit through which grace flows to the baptized person, but a sign and seal of received grace, of the covenant, in which the child is included together with his parents.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration

“The covenant is rooted in eternity. At that point it consisted not simply in the decree, like everything else can in that sense be said to have existed in eternity. Rather, the covenant existed at that point also in truth and in reality between the Father and the Son, and therefore immediately after the Fall the covenant could be made known to man and be established with man.”
― Herman Bavinck, Saved by Grace: The Holy Spirit's Work in Calling and Regeneration