Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, because He takes away sin; and you and I are workers for peace when we preach His Gospel, which is the Gospel of peace just because it is the Gospel of deliverance from sin. Sin means war, and where sin is, there will war be. Righteousness means peace, and
there can never be peace where righteousness has not first been
realized.Faith and Life
And here we have already exposed the reason why no Christian Church can take up the position recommended to it on the strength of a declaration attributed to Abraham Lincoln. This declaration is to the effect that a simple requirement of love to God and our neighbor constitutes a sufficient foundation for a church, and the churches would profit by making the profession of such love, or of the wish or purpose to cherish such love, their sole qualification for membership. The moment a church took up such a position, however, it would cease to be a Christian Church: the core of Christianity is its provision for salvation from sin.
For the Reformation is nothing other than Augustianianism come to its rights: the turning away from all that is human to rest on God alone for salvation.
A glass window stands before us. We raise our eyes and see the glass; we note its quality, and observe its defects; we speculate on its composition. Or we look straight through it on the great prospect of land and sea and sky beyond. So there are two ways of looking at the world. We may see the world and absorb ourselves in the wonder of nature. That is the scientific way. Or we may look right through the world and see God behind it . That is the religious way.Selected Shorter Writings - I
A beginning was made already in the eighth century of translating the Bible into the vernacular languages, and by the end of the Middle Ages it was accessible to Frenchmen and Germans, Englishmen and Bohemians, Spaniards and Italians and Poles in their own tongues.The Bible the Book of Mankind
It was no accident that the Christian Bible was a Greek Bible. Greek was at the time the lingua franca of the civilized world, and the universal gospel naturally clothed itself in this world-tongue.The Bible the Book of Mankind
[General and Special Revelation] The one is addressed generally to all intelligent creatures, and is therefore accessible to all men; the other is addressed to a special class of sinners, to whom God would make known His salvation. The one has in view to meet and supply the natural need of creatures for knowledge of their God; the other to rescue broken and deformed sinners from their sin and its consequencesRevelation and Inspiration p.6
It is its conviction that there is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ's sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. This is not true of us only 'when we believe.' It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in Christian behavior may be. It is always on His blood and righteousness alone that we can rest.Miserable-Sinner Christianity in the Hands of the Rationalists, chapter III in Perfectionism, Part One, vol. 7 of The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield (New York: Oxford University Press, repr., 2000), 113-114
during the (so-called) Dark Ages, the Bible had begun to prepare the ground for Europe's economic transformation. Monasteries began to develop the medieval mind, work ethic, technology, agriculture, double-entry bookkeeping, etc., that went on to create an unprecedented miracle in the later centuries.This Book Changed Everything, 23
The difficulties we feel with regard to Predestination are not derived from the Word. The Word is full of it, because it is full of God, and when we say God and mean God - God in all that God is - we have said Predestination.Selected Shorter Writings - I
The English word "God" is derived from a root meaning to call, and indicates simply the object of worship, one whom men call upon or invoke. The Greek word which it translates in the pages of the New Testament, however, describes this objection of worship as Spirit; and the Old Testament Hebrew word, which this word in turn represents, conveys, as its primary meaning, the idea of power. On Christian lips, therefore, the word "God" designates fundamentally the almighty Spirit who is worshiped and whose aid is invoked by men.
Men cheerfully abandon the whole substance of Christianity, but will hardly be persuaded to surrender the name. Thus, Rudolf Eucken asks, "Can we still be Christians?" and answers with emphasis, Of course we can; providing only that by Christianity we do not mean - Christianity.
It is because man is conscious of his dependance that he is a religious being. And it is because he is conscious of his obligation that he is a moral being.
Religion is not only the natural, but the necessary, product of man's sense of dependence, which always abides as the innermost essence of the whole crowd of emotions which we speak of as religious, the lowest and also the highest.
Agnosticism is a philologically objectionable and philosophically unnecessary but very convenient term, invented toward the end of the nineteenth century (1869) as a designation of the skeptical habit of mind then quite prevalent.
According to the Scriptures, therefore, special revelation is a historic process, an organic system, a continuous divine activity directed to destroying the power of sin, to the building up of the kingdom of God, to the restoration of the Cosmos, to the summing up of all things in Christ.
by its demand that the Bible should be read by all ranks and classes and sexes and ages, introduced the principle of universal education into the world and advanced far toward making it a realized fact.The Bible the Book of Mankind
Other books may belong to a people, an age, a stage of human development; this book belongs to all peoples, all ages and all stages of growth, whether of the individual or of the race - unifying them all and wielding them into one vitalized and vitalizing whole. The Bible is, by way of eminence, the book of humanity.
So far is it from being of no concern to theology, therefore, that it would be truer to say that the whole doctrinal structure of the Bible account of redemption is founded on its assumption that the race of man is one organic whole, and may be dealt with as such. It is because all are one in Adam that in the matter of sin there is no difference, but all have fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:22 f.), and as well that in the new man there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all and in all (Col. 3:11). The unity of the old man in Adam is the postulate of the unity of the new man in Christ.Warfield, Benjamin B. The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield: Studies in Theology. Vol. 9
The assertion of the unity of the human race is imbedded in the very structure of the Biblical narrative. The Biblical account of the origin of man (Gen. 1:26–28) is an account of his origination in a single pair, who constituted humanity in its germ, and from whose fruitfulness and multiplication all the earth has been replenished. Therefore the first man was called Adam, Man, and the first woman, Eve, "because she was the mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20); and all men are currently spoken of as the "sons of Adam" or "Man" (Deut. 32:8; Ps. 11:4; 1 Sam. 26:19; 1 Kings 8:39; Ps. 145:12; etc.). The absolute restriction of the human race within the descendants of this single pair is emphasized by the history of the Flood in which all flesh is destroyed, and the race given a new beginning in its second father, Noah, by whose descendants again "the whole earth was overspread" (Gen. 9:19), as is illustrated in detail by the table of nations recorded in Genesis 10
The Christians of the Middle Ages remembered three things that we have forgotten: Drugs used for spiritual purposes. Serpent Gods. And human sacrifice.Return of the Dragon, 110