Any one who speaks of God as though He were a cousin, about whom, naturally, one knows everything, really knows nothing at all of God. The first and most important fact that we can know about God is ever this: we know nothing of Him, except what He himself has revealed to us.
Emil Brunner, Our Faith, Translated by John Rilling, (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1954), 11.
The biblical story does not simply illumine our existence: it throws our whole existence into turmoil. It does not merely answer our questions: it reveals the banality of our questions and gives us new questions that set us on a path to profound discovery. It is not supplemental, but subversive. Thus, the goal is not to relate the Bible to our experience (which is really to say, judge the Bible by experience), but vice versa. We must set out to make our lives relevant to the biblical story, not the biblical story to our lives.
Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Eschatology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 165.
Wes White answers here in the affirmative.
R. Scott Clark on the perspicuity of Scripture.
Great stuff from Paul Helm on NT Wright’s new book.
By convincing man of his sin and weakness, it forced him to seek a remedy in Christ by faith (as we have already said). Again, these two conditions are proposed because they are necessary to the salvation for the sinner: perfect obedience in Christ to fulfill the righteousness of the law, without which the justice of God did not permit life to be given to us; faith however in us that the perfect obedience and satisfaction of Christ might be applied to us and become ours by imputation. Thus what was demanded of us in the covenant of works is fulfilled by Christ in the covenant of grace. Nor is it absurd that in this way justification takes place by works and by faith – by works of Christ and by our faith. And thus in sweet harmony the law and the gospel meet together in this covenant. The law is not administered without the gospel, nor the gospel without the law. So that it is as it were a legal-gospel and an evangelical-law; a gospel full of obedience and a law full of faith. So the gospel does not destroy the law, but establishes it (Rom 3:31) by giving us Christ, who perfectly fulfilled it. And the law is not against the gospel, since it refers and leads us to it as its end.
Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Topic 12, Q. 12, XXII
It not only antecedently prepares the elect man for Christ, but consequently also directs him already renewed through Christ in ways of the Lord; serving him as a standard rule of the most perfect life, to which he knows he is called by Christ and which he ought diligently to pursue (I Tim 1:5). Before, it was an instrument of the spirit of bondage to throw down and bruise man, but afterwards it becomes the instrument of the Spirt of adoption to promote sanctification. Thus the law leads to Christ and Christ leads us back to the law; it leads to Christ as the redeemer and Christ leads to the law, as the leader and director of life. In this way, man in his integrity and as just was under the blessing of the law; corrupt, he comes under its curse; regenerated, he comes under its direction.
Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 11th Topic, 22nd Question, XI.
Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 11.2.16
Turretin on Publicly Teaching and Preaching Predestination
Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Fourth Topic/Sixth Question/V.
