"Free will was no academic question for Luther. The whole gospel of the grace of God, he held, was bound up with it, and stood or fell according to the way one decided it."
"The gospel of God is in jeopardy. The springs of Luther's religion are touched. The man is moved. The volcano erupts. Argument pours out from him white hot."
"Historically, it is a simple matter of fact that Martin Luther and John Calvin, and for that matter Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, and all the leading theologians of the first epoch of the Reformation stood on precisely the same ground here...to them all these doctrines were the very lifeblood of the Christian faith."
"Spiritual warfare made the Puritans what they were. They accepted conflict as their calling...not expecting to advance a single step without opposition of one sort or another."
"The pitiable Savior and the pathetic God of modern pulpits are unknown to the old gospel. The old gospel tells men that they need God, but not that God needs them."
"To the question, 'should one preach doctrine?' the Puritan answer would have been, 'Why? What else is there to preach?' Puritan preachers were not afraid to bring the profoundest theology into the pulpit if it bore on their hearers salvation...doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrite; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ's sheep. The preacher's job is to proclaim the faith, not to provide entertainment for unbelievers. In other words, to feed the sheep and not amuse the goats."
"Yet we in our day, much as we love to sing Amazing Grace (I suppose because we like the tune), are not inwardly amazed by grace as the Puritans were; it does not startle us that the holy Creator should receive sinners into his company; rather, we take it for granted! 'God will forgive. That's his job!' was the final scoff with which the French cynic went to meet his maker. "
"...there was no such movement [charismatic movement] in Puritan times. Seventeenth century England did not to my knowledge produce anyone who claimed the gift of tongues. "
"The typical Puritans were not wild men, fierce and freaky, religious fanatics and social extremists, but sober, conscientious, and cultured citizens; persons of principle, devoted, determined and disciplined, excelling in the domestic virtues, and with no obvious shortcomings save a tendency to run to words when saying anything important, whether to God or to man. At last the record has been set straight. "
"The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don't. We are spiritual dwarfs. A much traveled leader, a native American (be it said) has declared that he finds North American Protestantism man centered, manipulative, success oriented, self indulgent, and sentimental, as it blatantly is, to be 3000 miles wide and an inch deep. The Puritans, by contrast, as a body were giants. They were great souls serving a great God. "
"The Puritans lost, more or less, every public battle they fought."
"The Puritan ethic of marriage was to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment, but rather for one you can love steadily as your best friend for life, and then to proceed with Gods help to do just that. "
""The Puritans would have criticized the modern evangelistic appeal, with its wheedling for decisions, as an unfortunate attempt to intrude into the Holy Spirit's province. It is for God, not man, to fix the time of our conversion. "
"Whereas the chief aim of the old (gospel) was to teach people to worship God, the concern of the new (gospel) seams limited to making them feel better."
"But wait a minute,' says someone, 'It's all very well to talk like this about the gospel, but surely what (john) Owen is doing is defending limited atonement, one of the five points of Calvin? When you speak of recovering the gospel don't you mean that you just want us all to become Calvinists?' Defending limited atonement...- as if Reformed theologians had no interest beyond recruiting for their party, and as if becoming a Calvinist was the last stage of theological depravity and had nothing to do with the gospel at all."
"There are signs today of new upsurge of interest in the theology of the Bible."
