The ultimate test of whether we have grasped theological truth is thus not so much whether we have comprehended it rationally, but whether it has transformed us experientially. In an important sense, we are not called on to master theology, but to allow it to master us.
Alister McGrath, J.I. Packer: His Life and Thought, 84.
One of the things [the students at Tyndale] particularly treasured about Packer was his willingness to talk theology over the college breakfast table.
The students would ask him about the great theological questions of the day—the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom, to give one obvious example. Packer did not give them pre-packaged answers; instead, he showed his theological working. In effect, Packer taught them how to theologise—how to do theology, rather than simply presenting them with the outcomes of that process. It was a rare gift, and one that Packer would consolidate over his long career as a teacher.
Alister McGrath, J.I. Packer: His Life and Thought, 51.
Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity….
Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, The German Reformation, 350.
The German Bible of Luther was saluted with the greatest enthusiasm, and became the most powerful help to the Reformation.
This inner life that God lives, in the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is a livelier life than any other life. We know about it because we have overheard Father, Son, and Holy Spirit talking amongst themselves with the intent that we overhear them and be brought into the conversation. Simply knowing that the life of God in itself is the liveliest of all lives is a medicinal correction to our sick, self-centered thinking….
The crucial thing is that we should rejoice in it. The knowledge that God enjoys perfect blessedness is a great thing. Even if it stays a kind of secret at the back of our minds, as something that we cannot say much about, it nevertheless exerts a tremendous gravitational pull on the rest of our thoughts and affections. Thomas Traherne said, “I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the centre of the earth unseen violently attract it.”
Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 81–82.
Is it too bold of us to declare what God was like, or what he was doing, before creation? It requires boldness, to be sure, but only the boldness of the New Testament.
One of the characteristic differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the New Testament is bold to make such statements. Look, for instance, at the way the New Testament takes a step further back with its declaration of salvation: where God declares in the old covenant, “I have chosen you,” the new covenant announces that “he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.”
The prophets do not make declarations about what happened “before the foundation of the world,” but the apostles do.
Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 63.
…When we lose our ability to see the Trinity as directly connected to the gospel, we tend to reduce it to an issue of authority and mental obedience. No wonder, then, that the doctrine of the Trinity has been treated as something of a burden by many evangelicals.
But this dysfunction of the doctrine is only one side of the story of evangelical Trinitarianism. The other side of the story is that the life of every healthy church and every true Christian is a manifestation of the work of the Trinity. Evangelicalism, even when it is handling the doctrine of the Trinity as a foreign artifact difficult to deal with, is nevertheless always already immersed in the rich, Trinitarian reality of the gospel.
We are often in the strange position of being Trinitarian without knowing it, or of living in an encounter with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that we then give very weak and inadequate explanations of. We have the thing itself but act as if we do not know we have it.
Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 44.