Is the requirement of the perfect obedience lessened under the New Testament?

Jonathan Edwards insists that the requirement of perfect obedience is only heightened by Christ’s advent:
The gospel revelation and dispensation is so far from abating or destroying the perfection of the law, and bringing in an imperfect law instead of it, that it vastly increases our obligation to perfect obedience, and that a great many ways: [...]

Read Full Post »

Receiving Christ in all his offices

Jonathan Edwards believed that, while justification was through faith alone, a necessary fruit of faith was holiness, and therefore “the compliance of the whole soul with God’s authority and his holy nature and will in all things is implied in the very nature, spirit and act of true justifying faith.” He continues,
It will appear to [...]

Read Full Post »

Delighted in by true saints

Jonathan Edwards, in his “Controversies” notebook on justification:
This grace of God manifested to his church is beheld, admired and delighted in by true saints, not merely from self-love or as it concerns their interest, but primarily as glorious in itself and as that wherein does marvelously appear the beauty and glory of the divine nature: [...]

Read Full Post »

Jonathan Edwards with an urgent message to bloggers

Actually, Edwards issued this complaint in response to Isaac Watts’s understanding of the Mosaic Law in the latter’s Faith and Practice. Jonathan Edwards was not too keen publishing only half-baked ideas in books (or blogs?):
“It were to be wished that persons that light on new notions of this nature, before they vent ‘em and [...]

Read Full Post »

Faith, the expression of our receiving Christ

Is faith virtuous in itself? Is faith a work that whereby we gain or earn an interest in Christ? Jonathan Edwards says no:
Not that something we do, or some act or work of ours, properly interests us or is the proper condition of interest in Christ; but it is the manner of its interesting us, [...]

Read Full Post »

Music as Torture

This article by Terry Teachout speaks to the power of music. Evidently the U. S. Government used various musical selections to torture the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Teachout concludes,
I nevertheless find it significant — and not a little comforting — that the titles on Reprieve’s list of Music to Confess By include “Hell’s Bells” and Nine [...]

Read Full Post »

Secularized fundamentalism is a horrible thing, a very horrible thing, much worse in my opinion than honest modernism or outright atheism.

So says A. W. Tozer. More:
The test is, Whom do these Christians want to be like? Who excites them and makes their eyes shine with pleasure? Whom go they forth to see? Whose techniques do they borrow? Never the meek soul, never the godly saint, never the self-effacing, cross-carrying follower of Jesus. Always the big [...]

Read Full Post »

Indifferentism

If you spend any time around Central Baptist Theological Seminary, you are bound to hear the word “indifferentism” come up (for a past post on this, see this). “Indifferentism” is a term Kevin Bauder got from J. Gresham Machen, and one he applies to those who are orthodox in their theology, but who themselves tolerate [...]

Read Full Post »