Matthew Barrett > Quotes

“Anselm did not just affirm the faith but exhibited its coherence. Lady philosophy was summoned to serve theology.”
― Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church

“For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. C. S. LEWIS, “ON THE READING OF OLD BOOKS”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“Rather than confusing the biblical writers and their readers with modern scientific concepts, God accommodated.”
― Matthew Barrett, Four Views on the Historical Adam

“What is a firmament? And what is the water above it? Of course, my problem was that I was reading Scripture through my modern scientific mindset (eisegesis). If I would have respected the Bible and tried to view nature through ancient eyes and an ancient mindset (exegesis), then creation days two and four would have made perfect sense.”
― Matthew Barrett, Four Views on the Historical Adam

“God does not plan salvation and leave it up to us, hoping we will believe and persevere to the end. No, God’s grace gives us every assurance that what he planned he will accomplish in us. He is that sovereign.”
― Matthew Barrett, Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit

“The Bible became a jewel in the hands of the Reformers not because it was a “handbook for happy living” or a “primer of metaphysics about God,” but because in it the Christian possessed the “the swaddling clothes in which Christ lies.”85”
― Matthew Barrett, God's Word Alone---The Authority of Scripture: What the Reformers Taught...and Why It Still Matters

“I have had more advantage by private thoughts of Christ, than by any thing in this world; and I think, when a soul hath satisfying and exalting thoughts of Christ himself, his person, and his glory, it is the way whereby Christ dwells in such a soul. If I have observed any thing by experience, it is this, a man may take the measure of his growth, and decay in grace, according to his thoughts and meditations upon the person of Christ, and the glory of Christ’s kingdom, and of his love. A heart that is inclined to converse with Christ, as he is represented in the gospel, is a thriving heart; and if estranged from it, and backward to it, it is under deadness and decays.”
― Matthew Barrett, Owen on the Christian Life: Living for the Glory of God in Christ

“some believed they could determine who God is simply by means of using their reasoning powers alone. The Bible could be set aside for good; reason was enough. As time passed, it became evident that the Enlightenment experiment had failed. War, for example, exposed the fact that humanity is not morally neutral but corrupt. The ill use of reason demonstrated that humanity was desperately in need of special revelation after all. Autonomous reason was not so autonomous, as it turned out. In fact, it was idolatrous, attempting to remove God from his throne and replace the Creator’s authority with the creature’s intellect instead. The follies of the Enlightenment should forever remind us that attempting to scale the ladder of heaven to pull God down is the height of human hubris. It is the tower of Babel all over again. A much better approach couples the quest for knowledge with humility, a humility that looks to God’s revelation of himself for understanding. It is the approach of faith seeking understanding.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“No matter where you flee, he is there. You would flee from yourself, would you? Will you not follow yourself wherever you flee? But since there is One even more deeply inward than yourself, there is no place where you may flee from an angered God except to a God who is pacified. There is absolutely no place for you to flee to. Do you want to flee from him? Rather flee to”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“Jeremiah confessed, saying, There is none like you, O Lord; You are great, and your name is great in might. (Jer. 10:6) There is none greater than this God, not because he is merely a greater version of ourselves but because he is nothing like ourselves. Only a Creator not to be confused with the creature is capable of stooping down to redeem those who have marred his image.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“We are speaking of God. Is it any wonder if you do not comprehend? For if you comprehend, it is not God you comprehend. Let it be a pious confession of ignorance rather than a rash profession of knowledge. To attain some slight knowledge of God is a great blessing; to comprehend him, however, is totally impossible.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“I am going to him whom my soul hath loved, or rather who hath loved me with an everlasting love; which is the whole ground of all my consolation. . . . I am leaving the ship of the church in a storm, but whilst the great Pilot is in it the loss of a poor under-rower will be inconsiderable. Live and pray and hope and wait patiently and do not despair; the promise stands invincible that he will never leave thee nor forsake thee. JOHN OWEN, LETTER TO CHARLES FLEETWOOD, AUGUST 22, 1683”
― Matthew Barrett, Owen on the Christian Life: Living for the Glory of God in Christ

“If you’ve ever read John Bunyan’s famous allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, then you know that picking the right friends to travel with can be the difference between reaching the celestial city and not. Friends can corrupt us, or they can lead us home.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“It is one thing to say (as we have) that the economic reveals the immanent to a degree and in a specific way—the sending of the Son reflecting the eternal generation of the Son, for example. But it is an altogether different thing to say that the economic constitutes the immanent, or that anything and everything in the economic (suffering, submission) is to be projected back into the immanent, as if what distinguishes Father from Son from Spirit are his actions in the world…. While God’s acts in history may reveal something of his triune identity, he in no way depends on history for his triune identity, nor should all that occurs in history be projected onto the Trinity’s immanent, eternal identity.”
― Matthew Barrett, Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit

“For all our healthy focus on what God has done to save us, we might talk and talk and talk about our salvation and forget to talk about the gospel’s ultimate object of adoration: the triune God himself. The gospel is supposed to move us beyond ourselves to know God and who he is in and of himself. For all our focus on what God does for us, we sometimes forget who he is apart from us and why there is no gospel at all without the latter.”
― Matthew Barrett, Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit

“Christianity is not about coming to God so that he can direct us to something or someone better than himself, some other thing that will make us ultimately happy. No, God himself is the one in whom all our joy, pleasure, and happiness are found.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“In him [God] all that we are is possessed in a higher, fuller, purer, and limitless way.” God is the one who “donates everything that we are to us out of his infinite plenitude of being, consciousness, and bliss.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“Sin against an infinite God cannot be atoned for by a Savior who has emptied himself of his divine attributes. No, it is his divine attributes that qualify him to make atonement in the first place. Sin against an infinite God can be met only by a Savior who is himself deity—and all the perfections identical with that deity—in infinite measure.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“While stacks of books invite the scholarly student to pick up and read, the churchgoer has little opportunity to dive headfirst into the deep things of God. Sadly, they turn to popular devotional literature to feed a spiritual hunger that only theology can satisfy.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

“The thelologian bound by the pride of paralysis may mask his cognitive inactivity with humility, but he refuses to employ the gifts God has given to him in service of
the church. He thinks humility is antithetical to magnanimity, but such an assumption plays by the rules of Aristotle not Aquinas. “G.K. Chesterton compares
Aristotle’s magnanimous man ‘who is great and knows that he is great’ with
Aquinas’s view of the ‘miracle of the more magnanimous man, who is great and
knows that he is small.’ ” The theologian who façades his faintheartedness with
humility is just as contemptuous. In the words of Thomas, “A man clings too
much to his own opinion whereby he thinks himself incompetent for those things for which he is competent" (ST II-II 133)”
― Matthew Barrett

“What good news it is, then, that the gospel depends on a God who does not depend on us.”
― Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God