Showing posts with label pragmatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pragmatism. Show all posts

Friday, June 12, 2015

Quote of the Day


Modern liberal critics leave behind them a world of jumbled confusion.  They tell us that God has revealed Himself but refuse to pin themselves down as to exactly what that revelation is.  In fact, upon occasion, we find them glorifying the uncertainty of their preaching, because this offers them an opportunity for the exercise of 'the leap of faith.'  The basic thesis of their dialectical theology is that the acts of God in history cannot be detected apart from 'a leap of faith' and the revealed Words of God can never be identified with any words.  The avow that divine acts are beyond history and divine words are beyond language.  There is a segment of neoorthodoxy that distinguishes between God's Word and the human expression of that word.  The so-called word of God can be recognized only in the area of experience.  This would mean that not even the words of Jesus are a valid external authority.  Only those words of Jesus are valid which one feels to be appropriate to Jesus according to the judgment of one' sown mind, which seems to mean that one's own mind becomes one's own Jesus…….Thus, the entire Bible becomes a Book from which one may pick and choose what appeals to one's mind.  Experience becomes the supreme authority.  Bible teaching becomes secondary….Religious experience thus becomes an object of one's own interpretation fo truth and as such  it can prove anything….Cutting theology off from the control of the biblical text cannot do aught but lead to its death.
 
 
- W. A. Criswell

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Quote of the Day


They (Disciples/Christians) are simply the servants and instruments of the Word; they have no wish to be strong where the Word chooses to be weak.  To try and force the Word on the world by hook or by crook is to make the living Word of God into a mere idea…..Where the Word is, there shall the disciple be.  Therein lies his true wisdom and his true simplicity.  If it is obvious that the Word is being rejected, if it is forced to yield its ground, the disciple must yield with it.  But if the Word carries on the battle, the disciple must also stand his ground.
  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Quote of the Day


In 1891 the last year of his (Spurgeon’s) life, there was another sermon from the book of Daniel, this time on the resolution of Daniel’s three companions who were thrown into the furnace for their refusal to submit to Nebuchadnezzar. In the first division of the sermon he lists the kind of excuses the three men might have used to justify a compliance which might have used to justify a compliance which would have kept them out of the furnace. They might have said, ‘We can do more good by living,’ dying would ‘cut short our opportunities for usefulness.’ Upon which Spurgeon enlarges:

“Ah, my dear brethren! There are many that are deceived by this method of reasoning. They remain where their conscience tells them they ought not to be, because, they say, they are more useful than they would be if they went “without the camp”. This is doing evil that good may come, and can never be tolerated by an enlightened conscience. If an act of sin would increase my usefulness tenfold, I have no right to do it; and if an act of righteousness would appear likely to destroy all my apparent usefulness, I am yet to do it. It is yours and mine to do the right though the heavens fall, and follow the command of Christ whatever the consequences may be. “That is strong meat,” do you say? Be strong men, then, and feed thereon…

For right is right, since God is God,
And right the day must win;
To doubt would be disloyalty,
To falter would be sin.

Excerpt from The Forgotten Spurgeon - by Iain Murray

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Quote of the Day


 One of the great evils of the time is that of deliberating about a plain command of
Christ, and asking, “What will be the result of it?” What have you to do with results?
“But if I follow Christ in all things, I may lose my position.” What have you to do with
that? When a soldier is bidden to go up to the cannon’s mouth, he is very likely to lose
his “position,” and something else; but he is bound to do it. “Oh, but I might lose my
opportunities of usefulness!” What do you mean? That you are going to do evil that
good may come? That is what it comes to.

 Charles Spurgeon