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The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
Word and sacrament define the task of the pastoral office in simple, beautiful, and powerful terms.
God loves all in some ways, and God loves some in all ways.
The theology of the cross is not a cerebral thing; it profoundly affects our Christian experience and existence, making demands upon our whole lives and turning theology into something which controls not just our thoughts, but the very way in which we experience the world around and taste the blessing and fellowship of God himself.
To know that God knows everything about me and yet loves me is indeed my ultimate consolation.
Theology masters the man; the man is never to master the theology.
Luther's doctrine of justification depends upon two things: the constant preaching of the wrath of God in the face of sin; and the realization that every Christian is at once righteous and a sinner, thus needing the hammer of the law to terrify and break the sinful conscience.
There is tremendous relief in knowing his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion him about me.
A world, and a church, which is hooked on novelty like some cultural equivalent of crack cocaine needs the cold, cynical eye of the historian to stand as a prophetic witness against it.
If the church as a whole is losing its ability to be "salt and light" in the culture, it is not because its members have no opinion of the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, no appreciation for the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and no regular slot on The Charlie Rose Show. More likely, it is because they do not have a solid grasp of the basic elements of the faith, as taught in Scripture and affirmed by the confessions and catechisms of the church.
It is the love of Christ, i. e. his love to us which passes knowledge. It is infinite; not only because it inheres in an infinite subject, but because the condescension and sufferings to which it led, and the blessings which it secures for its objects, are beyond our comprehension. This love of Christ, though it surpasses the power of our understanding to comprehend, is still a subject of experimental knowledge. We may know how excellent, how wonderful, how free, how disinterested, how long-suffering, how manifold and constant, it is, and that it is infinite. And this is the highest and most sanctifying of all knowledge. Those who thus know the love of Christ towards them, purify themselves even as he is pure.
The task of the preacher, therefore, is to take the Bible and to do two things in every sermon: destroy self-righteousness and point hearers toward the alien, external righteousness of Christ.Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom
The collapse in evangelical doctrinal consensus is intimately related to the collapse in the understanding of, and role assigned to, Scripture as God's Word spoken within the church.Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
A threefold love of God is commonly held; or rather there are three degrees of one and the same love. First, there is the love of ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ท๐ฐ๐ญ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ค๐ฆ by which God willed good to the creature from eternity; second, the love of ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ง๐ช๐ค๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ค๐ฆ by which he does good to the creature in time according to his good will; third, the love of ๐ค๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ญ๐ข๐ค๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ค๐บ by which he delights himself in the creature on account of the rays of his image seen in them. By the love of ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ท๐ฐ๐ญ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ค๐ฆ, he loved us before we were; by the love of ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ง๐ช๐ค๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ค๐ฆ, he loves us as we are; and by the love of ๐ค๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ญ๐ข๐ค๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ค๐บ, he loves us when we are (viz., renewed after his image). By the first he elects us; by the second, he redeems and sanctifies us; but by the third he gratuitously rewards us as holy and just. Institutes of Elenctic Theology, III.8,5
God loves us more than father, mother, friend, or anyone else could love, and even more than we are able to love ourselves.
None walk so evenly with God as they who are assured of the love of God.
In the past, music was always a live, and often a communal, activity. Somebody had to be playing music for it to be heard; and somebody had to be present in order to appreciate it. Now we can listen to whatever music we choose, whenever we want, and, perhaps most significant of all, we can do so in privacy. Music has been transformed from something with a primarily live and communal focus (live concerts notwithstanding) and has become most commonly an item of consumption for the individual. If expressive individualism has come to focus on personal satisfaction as the meaning of life, technology has served that cause well.
To respond to our times we must first understand our times.
In biblical times or in ancient Greece, sex was regarded as something that human beings did; today it is considered to be something vital to who human beings are.
Nietzsche's notion that morality is really about taste is very helpful in thinking about our current moral climate. So often the language we use confirms that Nietzsche's perspective is now a cultural intuition. So often we will speak of morality in terms of taste or aesthetics: "That remark was hurtful;" "That idea is offensive;" "That viewpoint makes me feel unsafe." Notice that such expressions do not make a statement about whether the matters in hand are right or wrong. In fact, the underlying assumption is that the offensiveness or hurtfulness of them is identical with the moral content. The subjective response has become the ethical criterion for judgment.
To use a distinction deployed by philosopher Roger Scruton, pornography is about bodies, not faces. If sex is just about my pleasure, any body will do as a partner. But in a marriage, the specific identity of the sexual partners is critical. The purpose of sex is not to have sex but to make love, to reinforce a relationship with a particular personโor, to use Scruton's terminology, with a face, not just with a body.
If the expressive individual sees personal satisfaction or happiness as central to the fulfilled human life, then pornography allows for the realization of that in sexual terms. It presents the sexual act as something whose significance is found simply in the pleasure of the observer or consumer.
Of course, that a sentence is utterly fallacious has never prevented it from being believed by large numbers of people and, on occasion, used as a foundational principle for a comprehensive philosophy of life.
obsession with method is one of the baleful aspects of modern literary theory, and it has not served society well in promoting the reading or writing of literature.
Indifference, the plague of modern Western culture in general and evangelicalism in particular, is at best the result of intellectual laziness, at worst a sign of moral abdication.
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2. Thomas Watson (121)
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