Quote of the Day

As long as we treat sin as a minor category, we will always question the atoning death of the God-man to solve our problem.  Show me a person who questions the incarnation and you have shown me a person who takes the categories of sin and God's holiness rather lightly…..The second step is to belittle God.  The biblical picture of God banishing Adam and Eve from Eden for eating a piece of forbidden fruit is replaced with a God who will basically put up with anything.  He is a God more interested in sincerity than holiness, content to tolerate anything we do because he has a love affair with human free will.

….Once we have neutered God of the attribute of his holy wrath and toned down talk of sin by minimizing its dastardly effects - fashioning ourselves as good people who occasionally err - we have effectively removed the requirement for atonement.  It is then a short step to questioning the incarnation.  Why insist on God becoming human and solving a problem we are quite capable of solving ourselves?  The modern propensity to  downplay the divinity of Jesus is tied to a watered-down version of what constitutes sin, and a wishy-washy portrayal of a God too tolerant and friendly to worry about it.  

Victor Kuligin

Quote from his book:

The Language of Salvation:  Discovering the Riches of What it Means to Be Saved

Quote of the Day

…the doctrine of the Trinity says something that does not go beyond the first point but that underlines and clarifies it.  For it adds the claim that as God has revealed himself in Christ, so he is in himself.  What he does through his Son on earth reveals what he is like from eternity to eternity.  His revelation in the gospel tells us the ultimate truth about God's being and nature, or else it is not authentic revelation at all.  The love of the Father sending, empowering, guiding, and finally vindicating his Son, the love of the Son, coming, obeying, suffering, dying, are particular historical expressions of the love that eternally flows between Father and Son at the heart of the life of God.  The complex of relationships between Father, Son and Spirit are not just the means by which God communicates with us, they are an essential part of the content of that communication.  They are not just how he speaks, but part of what he says.  If these relationships are not of eternal significance, then the gospel itself is not of eternal significance.  That God not only acts in history as Father, Son and Spirit, but that he is in himself Father, Son and Spirit is the doctrine of the immanent or essential Trinity.

Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

 In the new Testament, as understood in the mainstream of Christian tradition, we meet the same God three times.  First of all we meet him in the Father, whom Jesus prayed to and obeyed, at whose bidding he came, lived, suffered and died, by whose hand he was raised from the dead.  But in Jesus Christ himself, we encounter the same divine love and power appearing personally among us as our fellowman.  God is now not only exalted in heaven but made man on earth.  The acts of Jesus are the acts of God, the words of Jesus are the words of God, the suffering of Jesus is the self-sacrifice of God, the person of Jesus is the person of God, so that the confession of the Church echoes the confession of Thomas (John 20:28) and addresses not the Father in heaven but the risen human Jesus, "My Lord and my God".  But with Jesus ascended there comes according to his promise allos Parakletos, "Another of the same kind of Advocate Counselor."  The Holy Spirit who keeps on relating Christians to Christ and the Father, and then to one another, is himself God, God at work in and among men.  He does not hand us over to another, but in this other he keeps on coming to us himself.

 

Thomas Smail