Not a Moral Discovery

[O]nly serious ignorance of Jewish and Pagan culture would lead anyone to the conclusion that it is a radically new thing. Essentially, Christianity is not the promulgation of a moral discovery. It is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law.

--C. S. Lewis, 'On Ethics,' in Christian Reflections (Eerdmans 1967), 46-47

HT: Jack Collins, Covenant Seminary

Machen: God Himself

We are subject to many pressing needs, and we are too much inclined to value God, not for His own sake, but only because He can satisfy those needs. . . .

[Food, clothing, companionship, and inspiring work] are lofty desires. But there is one desire that is loftier still. It is the desire for God Himself. That desire, too often, we forget. We value God solely for the things He can do; we make of Him a mere means to an ulterior end. And God refuses to be treated so; such a religion always fails in the hour of need. If we have regarded religion merely as a means of getting things--even lofty and unselfish things--then when the things that have been gotten are destroyed, our faith will fail. When loved ones are taken away, when disappointment comes and failure, when noble ambitions are set at naught, then we turn away from God. We have tried religion, we say, we have tried prayer, and it has failed. Of course it has failed! God is not content to be an instrument in our hand or a servant at our beck and call. . . .

[I]f we possess God, then we can meet with equanimity the loss of all besides. Has it never dawned upon us that God is valuable for His own sake, that just as personal communion is the highest thing that we know on earth, so personal communion with God is the sublimest height of all? If we value God for His own sake, then the loss of other things will draw us all the closer to Him; we shall have recourse to Him in time of trouble as to the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

--J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? pp. 73-74

John 9: You say, 'We See'

Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, 'Are we also blind?' Jesus said to them, 'If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, "We see," your guilt remains.' --John 9:40-41

The Pharisees' blindness was not their error. 'If you were blind, you would have no guilt'--i.e. if you were merely blind, or, if you knew yourselves to be blind. The Pharisees' problem was not that they were blind but that they thought they weren't--'you say, "We see."'

The mystery of the gospel, so deeply counterintuitive: guilt is taken away not in claiming sight but in acknowledging blindness. All because the one Person who ever came into this world truly seeing allowed himself, on a little hill, to be made blind, so that you and I, blind, can see, for free.

Luther: The Bible

The number of books on theology must be reduced and only the best ones published. It is not many books that make men learned, nor even reading. But it is a good book frequently read, no matter how small it is, that makes a man learned in the Scriptures and godly. Indeed, the writings of all the holy fathers should be read only for a time so that through them we may be led into the Scriptures. As it is, however, we only read them these days to avoid going any further and getting into the Bible. We are like men who read the sign posts and never travel the road they indicate. . . . [T]he Scripture alone is our vineyard in which we must all labor and toil.

--LW, 44:205

Like No Other Teacher

'What are we to make of Christ?' There is no question of what we can make of him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept ot reject the story.

The things He says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, 'This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,' but He says, 'I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.' He says, 'No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.' He says, 'If you are ashamed of Me, if, when you hear this call, you turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you from God and from Me, whatever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first you will be last. Come to Me everyone who is carrying a heavy load, I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out, I can do that. I am Re-birth, I am life. Eat Me, drink Me, I am your Food. And finally, do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole universe.' That is the issue.

--C. S. Lewis, 'What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?' in God in the Dock (1950), 160

God's Surprising Hostility

No indeed, my dear man. If you want to be cured of sin, you must not withdraw from God, but run to him and pray to him with much more confidence than if some physical distress had overtaken you. God is not hostile to sinners, only to unbelievers.

--Martin Luther, Treatise on Good Works, LW 44:64

A Gospel Paradox of Leadership

We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. --The Apostle Paul (1 Cor 4:10)

"I have been hurt too deeply, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger; some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them." --Frodo Baggins (The Return of the King, p. 1006)

Dodd: 'Fulfillment'

One of the key figures this past year in helping me put the whole Bible together is C. H. Dodd. Dodd had a profound and penetrating understanding of the way the NT fulfilled the Old - but it is a 'thick,' not a 'thin,' kind of fulfillment. Most evangelicals read the OT as a massive, convoluted, mysterious narrative that has occasional nuggets of prophecy that can be culled from the indecipherable mines and which point to Christ; maybe one percent of the OT speaks of Christ? Dodd has shown me that 100% of the OT speaks of Christ, though in greater or lesser, more direct or less direct, ways. Listen to how he describes 'fulfillment.'

The early church believed that with the coming of Christ, his death and resurrection, the Day of the Lord had dawned. To elucidate and justify this belief they appealed to prophetic descriptions, not only of the Day itself, but of the essential elements in the process which led up to it. Here all the various prophetic descriptions are relevant; for the Day of the Lord is fulfillment, not merely in the sense that it is the end of a process whose stages may now be put out of mind. It is fulfillment in the sense that the true meaning of all the strange and often tragic experiences of God's people in via is now at last made clear and those experiences in turn give depth and richness to the Christian understanding of the consummation that Christ has brought.

--C. H. Dodd, The Old Testament in the New (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963), 23; emphasis original

Brokenness

Sometimes I interact with Christians who speak of the value and goal of remaining 'broken' as a believer. Some brothers I respect deeply from my seminary days spoke this way.

I reject it. My response is: if by 'broken' you mean 'not triumphalistic or arrogant,' then, of course, amen and amen. But if by 'broken' you mean (as I think is often what is meant) remaining in a perpetual state of spiritual pursed lips, emotional languishing over sin, calling to mind one's failures, dwelling on one's shortcomings, this is not spiritual health but a victory for the enemy, the Accuser. That is not what Christ came to win for us. It is a hollow maturity that appears humble but in fact spits on the cross. It is actually a form of self-parading, a subtle way of drawing attention not to the Savior but to our own mock spirituality.

Here's Bavinck:

[T]o this day one encounters in the church a great many Christians who year after year complain about their sins but almost never enjoy the heartfelt joy in God through Christ nor ever arrive at a peaceful and quiet life of gratitude. . . . Those who encourage grieving over one's sins . . . are abandoning the gospel, which is the message of joy and gladness in God, and fail to do justice to God's grace and the perfect sacrifice of Christ.

[Real Christianity is] faith in the reconciliation accomplished in the blood of Christ, a quiet and childlike resting in the grace of the Lord, knowing oneself secure in the wounds of the Lamb, and a joyful and lively feeling of the love of the heavenly Bridegroom.

--Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:158, 159-60

In ______ We Trust

The remarkable emphasis [in the NT] on the need for a transformed life does not cancel out the priority of faith. Instead, it helps readers discern the authenticity of faith so that genuine faith can be distinguished from mere notional faith--faith that resides in the intellect but has not penetrated the heart and life. All good works flow from faith and thus do not become an occasion for human boasting. The changed lives of believers simply reveal the object of their trust. (Tom Schreiner, New Testament Theology [Baker 2008], 616).

That last sentence has a world of wisdom in it, and is something I've just been coming alive to in recent months.