"Christianity is Christ. The person and work of Christ are the rock upon which the Christian religion is built. If he is not who he said he was, and if he did not do what he said he would come to do, the foundation is undermined and the whole superstructure will collapse. Take Christ from Christianity, and you disembowel it; there is practically nothing left. Christ is the center of Christianity; all else is circumference."
--John Stott, Basic Christianity (1958 A.D.)
"Unfortunately, some have erroneously concluded that--because knowing God is more than intellectual familiarity with the facts about God--we may get along well enough without them. Thus, what for many passes as the knowledge of God is in fact a mindless, contentless, self-generated feeling of spiritual exultation. Indeed, on occasion I have actually heard it said that theological propositions concerning the nature of God are actually an obstacle to knowing him in any real and lasting way. One almost gets the impression that for such people theological ignorance is heavenly bliss! But we must guard against such careless extremism lest we think that because intellectual apprehension is not sufficient for a genuine knowledge of God, it is not necessary. It is, in fact, the foundation upon which all valid Christian experience and godly fervor are built. In the absence of biblical information concerning who God is and what he is like, we may find ourselves worshiping "foreign gods," if if not a "god" fabricated from our own self-absorbed imaginations. The point of this warning is simply to emphasize that knowing God is a 'both...and' endeavor. It is both thinking great thoughts about him and living in such a way that those thoughts spark loving, joyful, exhilarating obedience."
-Sam Storms, The Grandeur of God (1984 A.D.)
"When most Christians hear the word Trinity, their immediate mental response is to reach for an analogy: Is the Trinity kind of like a shamrock, or like the three states of matter (solid, liquid, gas), for instance, the one substance H20 being ice and water and steam? They do this, I think, because of a mental habit of associating the Trinity with a logical problem, the problem of reconciling three and one. But while there is a time and place for coming to terms with that problem, and while analogies can offer some limited help on that occasion, we have learned something different from the shape of the economy of salvation. We have learned to associate Trinity with the incarnate Son and the outpoured Spirit.
When we talk about Jesus, sent by the Father to work in the Spirit, we should know that we are talking about the Trinity. Our thoughts and affections should jump to the Gospels and the gospel, the story of Jesus and the present encounter with him, rather than to shamrocks and steaming icebergs. The whole point is that the presence of the Son and the Spirit themselves, sent by the father into the economy of salvation, is the Trinity. The eternal Trinity is the gospel Trinity. These person in the gospel story are not what the Trinity is like--they are the Trinity. We will see how this changes everything about how we look for the signs of the Trinity in the various elements of the church's life and work. For now, it is enough to underline the new mental associations...that we gain from attending to the economy [of salvation]. Away with tropical icebergs! Shamrocks begone! In the gospel we have God the Trinity."
-Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything
For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God...there is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers.They 'arose,' but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?
Charles Darwin himself once said, 'The horrid doubt always rises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?' In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my own origin is to be trusted.
Here is a curious case: If Darwin's naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin's own theory of origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or a set of propositions to be true.
C.S. Lewis puts the case this way:
'If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us--like the color of our hair. If Naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our convictions that Nature is uniform.'"
--James Sire, The Universe Next Door
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| C.S. Lewis |
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| James Sire |
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| Charles Darwin |
"(H)e is being itself, and as such must necessarily be infinitely happy in the glorious perfections of his nature from everlasting to everlasting; and as he did not create, so neither did he redeem because he needed us; but he loved us because he loved us."
-Susanna Wesley (1738 A.D.) quoted in Fred Sanders' The Deep Things of God
"These two problems, our forgetfulness of the Trinity and our feeling of shallowness, are directly related. The solutions to both problems converge in the gospel, the evangel which evangelicalism is named after, and which is always deeper than we can fathom. Our great need is to be led further in to what we already have. The gospel is so deep that it not only meets our deepest needs but comes from God's deepest self. The salvation proclaimed in the gospel is not some mechanical operation that God took on as a side project. It is a 'mystery that was kept secret for long ages' (Rom. 16:25), a mystery of salvation that goes back into the heart of God, decreed 'before the foundation of the world' (Eph. 1:4, 1 Pet. 1:20). When God undertook our salvation, he did it in a way that put divine resources into play, resources which involve him personally in the task. The more we explore and understand the depth of God's commitment to salvation, the more we have to come to grips with the triunity of the one God. The deeper we dig into the gospel, the deeper we go into the mystery of the Trinity. The puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin taught that the proclamation of the gospel was the 'bringing forth and publishing' of a mystery that God had treasured from all eternity and that 'the things of the gospel are depths--the things of the gospel...are the deep things of God.'"
-Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (2010 A.D.)
"Adams was leaving his wife, children, friends, his home, his livelihood, everything he loved. He was risking his life and that of his small son, risking capture and who knew what horrors and indignities as a prisoner, all to begin 'new business' for which he felt ill suited, knowing nothing of European politics or diplomacy and unable to speak French, the language of diplomacy. He had never in his life laid eyes on a King or Queen, or the Foreign Minister of a great power, never set foot in a city of more than 30,000 people. At age forty-two he was bound for an unimaginably distant world apart, with very little idea of what was in store and every cause to be extremely apprehensive.
But with an overriding sense of duty, his need to serve, his ambition, and as a patriot fiercely committed to the fight for independence, he could not have done otherwise. There was never really a doubt about his going.
If he was untrained and inexperienced in diplomacy, so was every American. If unable to speak French, he could learn. Fearsome as the winter seas might be, he was not lacking in courage, and besides, the voyage would provide opportunity to appraise the Continental Navy at first hand, a subject he believed of highest importance. And for all he might have strayed from the hidebound preachments of his forebears, Adams remained enough of a Puritan to believe anything worthy must carry a measure of pain."
-David McCullough, John Adams
