Noah Lykins > Recent Status Updates

..perhaps the root cause of the decay of evangelicalism in America was the replacement of the old comprehensive concept of revival with the post-Finneyan machinery ofrevivalism. "Holding a revival" became synonymous with "using new methods to do mass evangelism…” this approach would never have satisfied the Puritans and Pietists.

309: NT writers’ common and robust theology of the covenants has hermeneutical implications for everything they say, that is essential to their exposition of the meaning and significance of the death of Christ, that is vital to their doctrine of assurance, that is necessary for their self-understanding as the people of God, and that is critical for their doctrine and practice of baptism and the Lord's Supper.

“By reason of merit, Christ is our Redeemer, not only of the soul but also of the body; therefore he ought to raise our bodies that with our souls they may receive the life purchased by Christ.” V3, p566. Happy Easter :)

268, G. Lanier, “Covenant theology is grounded in the gracious condescension of God to engage his people in covenant.”

R. W. L. Moberly rightly comments: "The experience of anguish and puzzlement in the life of faith is not a sign of deficient faith, something to be outgrown or put behind one, but is intrinsic to the very nature of faith."

“As he grew older, Kuyper tended to interpret every contradiction as insubordination towards the leadership given to him by God.” wooooof.

challenging the dispies - “Anthony Hoekema has shown that for the covenant theologian, the land promises are not merely spiritualized in some dualistic way but rather are realized in history in the most expansive possible way in the new heavens and new earth, a corporea, material existence in a redeemed, reconstituted, and consummated creation.”

Berkhof writes: "The Anabaptists virtually set aside the Word of God as a means of grace, and stressed what they called the internal word, the 'inner light’, and the illumination of the Holy Spirit. To them the external word was but the letter that killeth, while the internal word was spirit and life. External calling meant little or nothing in their scheme." ST 458-59

Kuyper remarked that his enemies "said of the banquet that those Reformed were not the sort to water down their wine. That is true. From the chocolate kettle and the milk-and-water bottle one does not breed a race of bold Calvinists."

In his farewell address Conservatism and Orthodoxy (31 July 1870), he warned the Utrecht congregation against burying "our wonderful orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of false conservatism."

Kuyper opposed secularism and defended a form of limited government and a free economy that was grounded in Christian anthropology and Reformed public theology. He denounced mechanistic socialism as incompatible with a Christian view of the organic relationship between the state, the market, and the people. Kuyper also denounced radical individualism and economic anarchism…

That Christian schooling demands the involvement of at least four partners: the church (is the faith correctly presented?), the government (are pupils introduced to a proper curriculum needed for taking part in national life?), parents (does the school help them in keeping their baptismal vows of training the child in the fear of the Lord?), and teachers (are they properly trained in sound teaching methods?).

“Kuyper’s involvement with the education question required his concentrating on the financial inequality of the Dutch school system which favoured the "religionless" government schools and left alternative schools heavily underfunded… setting forth the intricacies of the Dutch school struggle might distract from… the portrayal of Calvinism as a full-blown match for modern humanism.”

“The term, "full-time Christian ministry" applies to all Christians regardless of the area of life in which they work. All Christians are involved in full-time Christian ministry. There is no such thing as part-time Christians. It would go some way to help this if we never used the term "full-time Christian ministry" to describe only those with a role in the church or a church-related activity.”

“A Christian must do everything out of the obedience of faith, not because of prospective success. He must be guided neither by the question whether he will succeed nor the fear of ridicule, but only by the commandment of God.” Tract 56, 217

“after the household of faith is well cared for, it must extend its alms and compassionate care to those outside its gate who are in distress. Second, it must seek to win for the profession of Christ those who live in the same city or village but do not share in its glorious confession. And… it must send evangelists or missionaries to other countries and regions, to plant the church where it does not yet exist."

“The purpose of the sacraments is to seal the Word and strengthen faith. The seal must be public, so he maintains that there should be no separate baptism or communion services.”

182 - “God deserves our fervency in praise, wholeheartedness and enthusiasm, not formality; hence, the terminology of joy, rejoicing, and exultation is characteristic of these calls to praise.”

236 - In Ezekiel 45:17 LXX festivals, new moons,
Sabbaths appear together and in the same order. Preceding this list are burnt offerings, grain offerings, and drink offerings, and following are "all the appointed feasts of the house of Israel" (Ezek. 45:17). Paul has in mind, then, the entirety of the system of worship that God appointed for Israel under the Mosaic covenant… This system was eschatological.

Hebrew parallelism “aims to give complex information in a unified way so that the message is heard stereophonically.”

Steinbeck poking at biblicism, nice -

"What is there to understand? Just read it. There it is in black and white. Who wants you to understand it? If the Lord God wanted you to understand it He'd have given you to understand or He'd have set it down different."

"But, Mother-“

“In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush… he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.”

“And they brought conscience, or, rather, nudged the dozing conscience. They were not pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt.”

One of the more puzzling and overlooked features of the Barthian, neoevangelical, and federal visionist denial of the doctrine of the prelapsarian legal covenant is that it tends to deny, or at least downplay, the righteousness of God. It retells the entire story of Scripture by changing the plot. Denying the covenant of works (foedus operum), … tends to make God seem arbitrary.

Brakel on the pactum salutis - “covenant reveals a love which is unparalleled, exceeding all comprehension, How blessed and what a wonder it is... to have been the object of the eternal mutual delight of the Father and the Son to save you!" RS 1:263

“…from the beginning, Reformed theology was an international movement sattered across Europe. A growing body of confessed doctrines, shared ideas, and reorganized institutions connected these communities. Reformed works passed freely from one region to another.. In this sense, while early Dutch theology was clearly Dutch, it was the Dutch front of an international movement.”

“The modern age made the human will the arbiter of all things. In late modernity, following Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), we have reduced life to a struggle of the will. Modernity has consistently attempted to make God come to heel, as if it were possible, to make his will subservient to ours. This is an ancient impulse. It is the program of hell, of course, repackaged for every age.”

“Kuyper had an organic view of revelation—by this he meant that God's revelation of himself is as one whole. The Bible is not a disconnected set of anthologies — it is a whole. It is one.
This is an important point that is often ignored in fundamentalist proof texting.”