‘If errors must be tolerated, say some, then men may do what they please, without control. No means, it seems, must be used to reclaim them. But is gospel conviction no means? Hath the sword of discipline no edge? Is there no means of instruction in the New Testament established, but a prison and a halter?’ – John Owen, Of Toleration.
Month: December 2006
God was in Christ reconciling
– ‘The Christ that we trust all to is not one who died to witness for God, but one in whom God died for His own witness, and His own work on us. God was in Christ reconciling. The prime doer in Christ’s cross was God. Christ was God reconciling. He was God doing the very best for man, and
not man doing his very best before God. The former is evangelical Christianity, the latter is humanist Christianity. Christ’s history, His person, can only be understood by His work, and by a work that we apprehend in our moral experience even when we cannot comprehend it by our intelligence.’ – PT Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 27.
Core
‘[The] cross will appear and remain the central issue of Christian doctrine only if it can be shown to be central to the ethic of the soul and of the race. It is only central to faith because’ it is central to conscience, and to the dramatic conscience of the race, nay, of God. What’ is the Atonement but the satisfaction of the conscience—God’s and man’s—the adjustment, ‘the pacification, of conscience, find especially God’s? It is the core of our religion, because it is the crisis of man’s moral drama and the solution of that moral tragedy which ‘is his collision with the holy.’ – PT Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 116.
Living in the midst of your enemies
‘The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing, who would ever have been spared?’ – Martin Luther