Blog of A Plodding Visionary
Posts tagged quotes
Informational Preaching?
03 years ago
by admin
in Miscellaneous
“The ‘informational’ view of preaching conceives of preaching as changing people’s lives after the sermon. They listen to the sermon, take notes, and then apply the Biblical principles during the week. But this assumes that our main problem is a lack of compliance to Biblical principles, when … all our problems are actually due to a lack of joy and belief in the gospel. Our real problem is that Jesus’ salvation is not as real to our hearts as the significance and security our idols promise us. If that’s our real problem, then the purpose of preaching is to make Christ so real to the heart that in the sermon people have an experience of his grace, and the false saviors that drive us lose their power and grip on us on the spot. That’s the ‘experiential’ view of preaching (Jonathan Edwards).”
Calvin quote
03 years ago
“A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.” ~ John Calvin
Grace quotes
04 years ago
by admin
in Grace-Based Theology
There are more great articles in the newest issue of Modern Reformation!
Here’s one… “Grace: How Strange the Sound” by Michael Horton
Some quotes:
- We work very hard to make God user-friendly. That’s why the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai, terrified by God’s voice, decided to make a golden calf that they could manage more safely. Instead of trembling in God’s presence, they “sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play” (Exod. 32:6). We hear people talk today about their personal relationship with God as if he were a locker-room pal or even a romantic interest. However, when people were actually confronted with God’s presence, they always came apart at the seams.
- Sharing a common heritage in the revivalism of Charles Finney, mainline and evangelical Protestants have trouble being recipients of grace. The church becomes an army of activists-social engineers, moral reformers, event planners, life coaches-rather than a theater of grace where God has the lead role. As a result, the focus is not on how God gets to us (the logic of grace) but on “inducements sufficient to convert sinners with,” as Finney put it, following his basically Pelagian view of the moral ability of fallen people. Finney’s Systematic Theology explicitly denies original sin and insists that the power of regeneration lies in the sinner’s own hands; rejects any substitutionary notion of Christ’s atonement in favor of the moral influence and moral government theories, and regards the doctrine of justification by an alien righteousness as “impossible and absurd,” an offense to our sense of morality. (3) Nevertheless, Finney is celebrated as America’s greatest revivalist by Jerry Falwell on the right and Jim Wallis on the left.
- Concerning the complex doctrines that he associated with Calvinism (including original sin, vicarious atonement, justification and the supernatural character of the new birth), Finney concluded, “No doctrine is more dangerous than this to the prosperity of the Church, and nothing more absurd.” In fact, “There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature. It consists in the right exercise of the powers of nature. It is just that, and nothing else…. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means-as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means.” (4) Find the most useful methods, “excitements sufficient to induce conversion,” and there will be conversion. “God Has Established No Particular Measures” is the subheading of one of his chapters in his Systematic Theology. “A revival will decline and cease,” he warned, “unless Christians are frequently re-converted.”
- As long as the church keeps muting the strange sound of grace, as if salvation were the result of human decision rather than God’s electing grace before time began, our imitation of Christ rather than Christ’s unique and vicarious death for sinners, as if we are good people who could be better rather than the damned who need to be redeemed, the sort of genuine Christian experience that John Newton proclaimed in “Amazing Grace” will be increasingly rare.
Irresistible grace!
04 years ago
by admin
in Grace-Based Theology
“Love has its own exigencies. It weighs and counts nothing but expects everything. Perhaps that explains our reluctance to risk. We know only too well that the gospel of grace is an irresistible call to love the same way. No wonder so many of us elect to surrender our souls to rules rather than to living in union with Love.
“No greater sinners exist than those so-called Christians who disfigure the face of God, mutilate the gospel of grace, and intimidate others through fear. They corrupt the essential nature of Christianity. In Eugene Peterson’s forceful phrase, ‘They are telling lies about God, and let them be cursed.’
“The North American church is at a critical juncture. The gospel of grace is being confused and compromised by silence, seduction, and outright subversion. The vitality of faith is jeopardized. The lying slogans of the fixers who carry religion like a sword of judgment pile up with impunity.”
“The gospel of grace continues to scandalize.
“The legalists, puritans, prophets of doom, and moral crusaders are having a hissy fit over the Pauline teaching of justification by grace through faith. They take umbrage at the freedom of the children of God and dismiss it as licentiousness. They do not want Christianity to help us become whole but to feel wretched under its burden. They seek to intimidate us, make us afraid, file through their exclusive pathway of righteousness, and control rather than liberate our lives. Their perverted spirit of legalism would cripple the human spirit and send us sagging under great spools of rules and regulations. The thrilling quality of their dedication — zealotry is always impressive — obscures the fact that they accept the gospel in theory and deny it in practice.”
-Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, pp. 209-10; 212, 213
We all know of individuals and organizations like this. Finding it too hard to handle the “responsibilities” of living under grace, they would seek to be imprisoned once again by a law free from choices. Having built and taken up residence in the prison of laws and principles, they must then redefine grace as merited favor so as to prevent grace from washing away all that they have built. If favor is merited, then it only stands to reason that trying harder (and following proven methods) is a way to ensure God’s favor. This gives way to books and teachings on the steps to obtain the blessing of God. Once this procedure is established, then by necessity any who do not follow the same principles are not to be deserving of the same blessings. Before long, we are left with individuals who have made themselves up to be the moral meter-stick by which all other individuals are judged. They become the police of the fellowship, measuring who is fit to enter into fellowship and who falls short.
For those who are freed from this system, it is easy to harbor ill will toward those who remain under its control (especially the creators and propagators). But judgment is not negated by judgment. The one who demonstrates freedom from legalism by demonstrating resentment, licentiousness, or superiority has not found freedom at all, but is simply caught in a different arm of the same beast.
True freedom comes not from following principles nor from putting liberties on display but rather by acknowledging God’s grace, finding that He alone can set captives free, and by realizing that we are no different from the worst sinner on the earth except by the grace of God.
To those who set themselves up as the representative of God, passing laws, establishing principles, and admitting/denying entrance into fellowship, we should not resent them but instead pray for them. Although they commit a very serious sin by disfiguring and mutilating God’s Truth to those in their care, they are not beyond the grip of the very grace that they try to suppress. They may wound people viciously with the sword of judgment, but this is no match for the sword of Truth. There is hope for us… there is certainly hope for them.
Two kinds of people
04 years ago
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those that who knock it is opened.” ~ C.S. Lewis
The Ragamuffin Gospel
04 years ago
“On a blustery October night in a church outside Minneapolis, several hundred believers had gathered for a three-day seminar. I began with a one-hour presentation on the gospel of grace and the reality of salvation. Using Scripture, story, symbolism, and personal experience, I focused on the total sufficiency of the redeeming work of Jesus Christ on Calvary. The service ended with a song and a prayer.
“Leaving the church by a side door, the pastor turned to his associate and fumed, ‘Humph, that airhead didn’t say one thing about what we have to do to earn our salvation!’
“Something is radically wrong.
“The bending of the mind by the powers of this world has twisted the gospel of grace into religious bondage and distorted the image of God into an eternal, small-minded bookkeeper. The Christian community resembles a Wall Street exchange of works wherein the elite are honored and the ordinary ignred. Love is stifled, freedom shackled, and self-righteousness fastened. The institutional church has become a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded.”
–Brennan Manning, in The Ragamuffin Gospel
