"As Christians, we can live on one of three levels. We can return evil for good, which is the satanic level. We can return good for good and evil for evil, which is the human level. Or, we can return good for evil, which is the divine level.”
Warren Weirsbe
"Have you been reading your Bibles for so long and not yet learned that God loves to take His children to the brink? God takes the Israelites down to the edge of the water before He divides the sea. God takes Abraham to the point of an upraised sacrificial knife so that we might all learn to say on the mount of the Lord it will be provided. God takes the disciples to the point where their boat was foundering before Christ acted on their behalf.
We would like for God to deliver us while we are all still in bed. We would like to avoid the long trek to Moriah. We would like to meditate on what Christ could do if He wanted, and have our meditations take place while tied up to the dock. But that, alas for our comforts, is not the lesson that God in engaged in teaching us."
- Doug Wilson
"As I matured, I realised that not everything in the depths of my heart and mind should be expressed in the presence of the the Almighty."
- Leslie Hardin. The Spirituality of Jesus
Traditional justice assumes a fallen, and permanently imperfect world where law is needed in order to encourage virtue and limit vice. For this reason, traditional justice relies on moral structures: family, civil force, church, constitution—in order to maintain just order. Since man is fallen, it recognizes that mere abstractions and ideals cannot govern man; but personal relationships, social duties, and civil authority, informed by Scripture and the Holy Spirit, must restrain his evil. Traditional justice is an unending process and is profoundly anti-Utopian. There will never be a point on this side of eternity when law will not be needed. The best world that the traditional justice view can create is a world where human beings are safe and free to conduct themselves together in an orderly fashion, pursuing their God-given gifts, and restraining their sinful tendencies. It is not a perfect world—it is a world with warts. But it is a world where one can be happy, productive, free, and content. Even if it is a world where one must inevitably suffer and die.
The social justice view is a new and radical view of the nature of justice. It is the common view of all left-of-center ideological positions. It is “end centered”—what Sobran, and others, call teleocratic. What matters in such a justice worldview is the end; the ideal, the vision of the future world. It is in this emerging world order where the social justice advocate sees true justice. Our task, he believes, is to bring about a new order of things. We are to judge all current systems by the end desired. Our duty is not to “revealed law” or even “natural” laws, but to revolutionary goals and to the vehicles that bring those goals about. The vehicles are usually a party, or a bureaucracy, or an army—but always statist. The old definitions of order and justice are made obsolete by the new vision: property rights give ground to “just
“I have met no people who fully disbelieved in hell and also had a living and life-giving belief in Heaven”
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer).
"but yet our solemn conviction is that things are much worse in many churches than they seem to be, and are rapidly tending downward."
Read those newspapers which represent the Broad School of Dissent, and ask yourself, How much farther could they go? What doctrine remains to be abandoned? What other truth to be the object of contempt? A new religion has been initiated, which is no more Christianity than chalk is cheese; and this religion, being destitute of moral honesty, palms itself off as the old faith with slight improvements, and on this plea usurps pulpits which were erected for gospel preaching. The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture is derided, the Holy Spirit is degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin is turned into fiction, and the resurrection into a myth, and yet these enemies of our faith expect us to call them brethren, and maintain a confederacy with them!
The case is mournful. Certain ministers are making infidels. Avowed atheists are not a tenth as dangerous as those preachers who scatter doubt and stab at faith… Germany was made unbelieving by her preachers, and England is following in her tracks.
For decades the press had attacked Spurgeon, but now he would be savaged by his own Baptist Union. Prior to the Downgrade Controversy, if the Baptist Union had a papacy, Spurgeon would have been the unquestioned pope. But now, his erstwhile brethren brutalized him. They charged him with pugilism, and being a schismatic. They even questioned his sanity with a whisper campaign that his physical maladies had made him mad. Graduates of Spurgeon’s College turned on him, and the leaders of the Baptist Union pilloried him.
Three months later, in January 1888, the Baptist Union Council voted to accept his withdrawal, and then, the Council of nearly 100 members voted to censure Spurgeon, with only a meager five men supporting the Prince of Preachers.
The Baptist Union adopted a compromise doctrinal statement, which was altogether too weak, neither clear nor comprehensive enough. Though outside the Union, Spurgeon opposed the statement for its obvious deficiencies. Nonetheless, it passed overwhelmingly, by a vote of 2000–7, and can appropriately be interpreted as a second vote against Spurgeon. Most tragically, Spurgeon’s brother, James, seconded the motion to pass the compromise doctrinal statement.
"If there is a God - a faith statement for sure - we don't get to make him up. A real God should not and cannot merely be a
reflection of my imagination. A God who is real and alive must exist beyond my own puny understanding, bigger than any box in which I try to contain him or her or whatever pronoun we use for this Being."
- Bradley Jersak -
(A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel)
- David Bentley Hart -
The experience of God.
