Austin Farrer on religion Religion is not self-improvement, or decent conduct or emotional worship. Religion is fidelity. ‘Promise unto the Lord your God and keep it,’ says the psalm. But the fidelity which is the soul of religion is not our fidelity, it is God’s. We give ourselves to him in no reliance on our […]
Austin Farrer on discipleship We must abandon ourselves to the will of Christ if we are to be his disciples. The secret of it is, always to do cheerfully what the manifest will of God calls us to do. Let no one ask, Where is the will of God? Pray with your heart, and ask […]
Oliver O’Donovan on the modes of scripture’s moral teaching Moral teaching is given in exhortation, parables, lists of virtues, and so on. Narrative, command, prediction, and invocation (i.e., prayer and praise) all teach us how to direct our ways pleasingly to God. We can learn of the wrong of adultery from the story of David and […]
John Webster on scripture’s systematic horizons A ‘doctrine’ of Scripture cannot be extracted from the web of theological convictions of which it is part. Doctrines of Scripture are never freestanding—even in those modern neorationalist theological schemes in which bibliology undertakes the role of epistemological foundation for everything that follows. Rather, doctrines of Scripture are bound up with […]
Oliver O’Donovan: Six Theses on scripture 1. Scripture is set apart from every other literary corpus simply by its function in the saving purposes of God; it is a literary corpus that is, to use John Webster’s term, “sanctified” to its task. But that is of a piece with the saving purposes of God to […]
externalword.blog 