Renewal and Sanctification

From David Peterson's Possessed by God: A New Testament Theology of Sanctification and Holiness:

"What makes me a new person in Christ is essentially faith in God and his promises.  The Spirit's ongoing task is to renew my 'mind' through the gospel and give me a new 'heart' to serve God in faith and obedience.  Renewal of mind and heart transforms character and behaviour because of the central place that the mind has in the orientation, attitudes and beliefs of the human personality.  Renewal is not simply at the rational level, though this is foundational to the whole process of moral renewal and change that is effected by the Spirit.  In the final analysis, renewal is the present experience of glorification through the Spirit, anticipating the glorification that will come with the resurrection of our bodies.  It is being conformed to the likeness of Christ, who is himself the image of God." (p.133)

...

The Spirit's regenerative work brings us to faith in Jesus as Saviour and Lord.  This sanctifies us by consecrating us to God in a new and exclusive relationship of heart-obedience.  The Spirit's renewing work continues in us as we trust in what Christ has done for us and seek to reflect in our lives the practical consequences of our union with Christ in his death and resurrection.  Put another way, the Spirit moves us and enables us to express the holiness which is required of those who have been sanctified in Christ." (p.133)

Good Shepherds

What Makes for a Good Elder - by Jason Helopoulos:

A Summary of this wisdom for the Church:

• Theological, but Fiercely Practical
• Leader, but a Willing Follower
• Dignified, but Wonderfully Approachable
• Listener, but Wisely Vocal
• Courageous, but Pastorally Winsome
• Dogmatic, but Flexible
• Gifted, but Knowingly Humble
• Officer, but Servant First
• Churchly, but a Lover of Men
• Loyal, but a Thoughtful Exhorter

The Ultimate Criterion

"...How do we justify belief in the Bible as our presupposition?  Strange as it may sound, by the Bible itself, as I sought to do in chapters 23-28.  the Bible is our highest standard of truth, the ultimate criterion.  But an ultimate criterion must justify itself.  It would be contradictory to try to justify an ultimate by appealing to something supposedly higher.  But someone will object: isn't this a circular argument?  We prove Scripture on the basis of the presupposition of Scripture.  We appeal to Scripture to prove Scripture.

But if this is a problem for Christian thought, it is equally a problem for non-Christian thought.  All systems of thought are circular in a sense when they seek to defend their ultimate criterion of truth.  If I challenge a rationalist for accepting human reason as his highest principle, he can defend his view in only one way: by appealing to reason.  For him there is nothing higher than reason to which he may appeal in justifying reason."

-- John Frame Systematic Theology (p. 734)

Subscribing to a Statement of Faith ex animo

From Carl Trueman on Reformation 21:

There is all the difference in the world between the one who signs a confession because he passionately believes it to be an accurate summary of scriptural teaching and the one who signs it because, at a pinch, he can just about make it say what he believes the Bible to teach.   The former sees the confession as a place to stand from where he can address both church and world; the latter may at best consider the confession to be an unnecessary appendage and, in time, he might well come to see the confession as a problem, a kind of restrictive cage.  Indeed, he might end up asking himself, 'Well, sure, I can just about sign in good conscience - now, what can I get away with saying or doing?'   For such a person, the confession is (at best) a union card, merely a necessary prerequisite for working on the shop floor; it is not the lifeblood of his ministry.

[An example from] B. B. Warfield's inaugural lecture as Professor of New Testament at Western (now Pittsburgh) Theological Seminary on Tuesday, April 20, 1880:

I wish to declare that I sign these Standards not as a necessary form which must be submitted to, but gladly and willingly as the expression of a personal and cherished conviction and further that the system taught in these symbols is the system which will be drawn out of the Scriptures in the prosecution of the teaching to which you have called me. Not, indeed, because commencing with that system the Scriptures can be made to teach it, but because commencing with the Scriptures I cannot make them teach anything else.

Warfield's point is simple: he signs the Westminster Standards (and thereby vows to uphold and to teach them) because he sees them as simply summarizing what the Bible teaches.  That is true subscription.  To use the Latin phrase, Warfield subscribes ex animo.  We might translate that 'wholeheartedly' or 'from the depths of his heart.' 

The Unity of the Covenant of Grace

From A. W. Tozer  The Knowledge of the Holy (p. 102):

"...Grace made sainthood possible in the Old Testament days just as it does today.  No one was ever saved other than by grace, from Abel to the present moment.  Since mankind was banished from the eastward Garden, none has ever returned to the divine favor except through the sheer goodness of God.  And wherever grace found any man it was always by Jesus Christ.  Grace indeed came by Jesus Christ, but it did not wait for His birth in the manger or His death on the cross before it became operative. Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of world.  The first man in human history to be reinstated in the fellowship of God came through faith in Christ.  In olden times men looked forward to Christ's redeeming work; in later times they gaze back upon it, but always they came and come by grace, through faith."

Clarified by Michael Horton in his article "Who Saves Whom?"

"Thus, there is no true Israel apart from faith in Christ. Only those who cling to him in faith are chosen; the rest are judged along with the Gentiles (Ro.11:5-10). "Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham," Paul instructed the Galatians (Gal.3:7). There are no Jews who ever have been saved, are now saved, or who ever will be saved who were not chosen members of the church in both testaments--the ancient (Old Testament) church looking forward to Christ and the modern church looking back to Christ and forward to his return."

Certainty

So certainty comes ultimately through God’s word and Spirit. The Lord calls us to build our life and thought on the certainties of his word, that we ‘will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life’ (John 8:12). The process of building, furthermore, is not only academic, but ethical and spiritual. It is those who are willing to do God’s will that know the truth of Jesus’ words (John 7:17), and those that love their neighbors who are able to know as they ought to know (1 Cor. 8:1-3).

Secular philosophy rejects absolute certainty, then, because absolute certainty is essentially supernatural, and because the secularist is unwilling to accept a supernatural foundation for knowledge. But the Christian regards God’s word as the ultimate criterion of truth and falsity, right and wrong, and therefore as the standard of certainty. Insofar as we consistently hold the Bible as our standard of certainty, we may and must regard it as itself absolutely certain. So in God’s revelation, the Christian has a wonderful treasure, one that saves the soul from sin and the mind from skepticism.  

--John Frame, "Certainty," New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, IVP, 2006

Reading the Old Testament

Wisdom on reading the Old Testament - from a Biblical Theological perspective (from WRF):

It is this point of the entire truthfulness of the history of revelation and Scripture– involving “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” as Vos says, and critically essential for any doctrine of Scripture, like that set out in chapter 1 of the WCF, intent on doing justice to the unity and coherent harmony of the Bible as God’s own written word–it is just this crucially important point that is compromised or at best obscured by the Christotelic approach to Scripture.  This happens through its “first read-second read” treatment of the Old Testament that it adopts. The first read seeks to establish the original historical meaning or original human author meaning of an Old Testament passage on its own terms without any reference to the New Testament. The second read of the passage then seeks to show how in the light of the New Testament it is about Christ, to disclose its Christotelic content.

"This approach as a whole is ill-conceived and seriously flawed. Though it is motivated in part by the legitimate concern to avoid reading New Testament meanings back into Old Testament texts–no doubt a danger–there is a difference between reading the New Testament back into the Old and reading the Old Testament in light of the New. The former is wrong; the latter is not only legitimate but also requisite. As it is carried out, the first read tends towards highlighting the “messiness” of the Old Testament, as its proponents put it, towards finding unrelated or discordant trajectories of meaning in the Old Testament. It obscures both the organic connection between the meaning of the divine author and what the human authors wrote as well as the organic connection and unity between the Old Testament and New Testament.  

Multivalent, even contradictory trajectories will appear to be the case when the Old Testament documents are read “on their own terms” in the sense of bracketing out their fulfillment in Christ and the interpretive bearing of the New Testament.

"For new covenant readers submissive to both the Old and New Testaments as the word of God, such a disjunctive reading of the Old Testament is illegitimate, as well as redemptive-historically (and canonically) anachronistic. To seek to interpret the various Old Testament documents for themselves and apart from the vantage point of the New exposes one ultimately to misinterpreting them. The Old Testament is to be read in the light of the New not only because Jesus and the New Testament writers read it this way, but also because Jesus and the New Testament writers are clear about the continuity in intention and meaning that exists between themselves and the various Old Testament authors and what those authors wrote in their own time and place." --Dr. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr, Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology, Emeritus, Westminster Theological Seminary