QUOTES - SALVATION
Conversion entails the promise of sanctification just as it reveals the gift of justification (Evangelical Dictionary of Theology).
“Salvation” is the most widely used term in Christian theology to express the provision of God for our human plight (New Dictionary of Theology).
In exercising and cultivating our gratitude for the blessings of salvation, we must distinctly recognize that they come from God, and that they are intentionally bestowed (J. L. Dagg, Manual of Theology).
What he [Christ] did not assume he could not redeem (Gregory of Nyssa, Against the Eunomians).
The blessing of forgiveness, and the exercise of repentance, are connected with each other, at the beginning of the divine life; and their connection remains throughout its progress (J. L. Dagg, Manual of Theology).
Logically the enabling act of God must, in a creature, precede the act of the creature thus enabled (James P. Boyce, Abstract).
Men will never believe with a saving and real faith, unless God inclines the heart; and they will believe as soon as He inclines it (Blaise Pascal, Pensees).
Just as faith is the fruit of regeneration on the side of the mind, so repentance is the expression of the new life on the side of the will (H. Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith).
But God’s part is always first, and man’s part is always the fruit of the operation of God. Soteriology is theology in the deepest sense of the word (H. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics).
The knowledge of saving faith is spiritual. It is experiential. It is not a theoretical knowledge about God in Christ, but it is the knowledge of Him. There is a wide difference between knowing all about a thing or person and knowing that thing or person (H. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics).
Soteriology deals with the communication of the blessings of salvation to the sinner and his restoration to divine favor and to a life in intimate communion with God (L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology).
Justification is a judicial act of God, in which He declares, on the basis of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, that all the claims of the law are satisfied with respect to the sinner (L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology).
Election is that eternal act of God, by which in his sovereign pleasure, and on account of no foreseen merit in them, he chooses certain out of the number of sinful men to be the recipients of the special grace of his Spirit, and so to be made voluntary partakers of Christ’s salvation (A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology).
We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each person. For all are not created in equal conditions; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others. Therefore, as any man has been created to one or the other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life or to death (John Calvin, Institutes).
He does more than justify faith, He creates it. It is His more than ours. We believe because He makes us believe—with a moral compulsion, an invasion and capture of us (P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God).
The primary issue in the Protestant Reformation was a dispute with the Roman Catholic Church over justification (W. Grudem, Systematic Theology).
Conversion to Christ is not a real possibility with the Constantinian church situation, since there everyone is a baptized Christian. This is why conversion is hardly mentioned there. This at once becomes clear when comparison is made with the Free Churches of America. Here the concept of conversion is central. It is . . . the historical reality which has kept the concept of conversion true to its Biblical sense (E. Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation).
God preserves us so that we may persevere (Robert Duncan Culver, Systematic Theology).
So just as conception and birth bring new physical life, so the work of regeneration brings new spiritual life (John Frame, Systematic Theology).
All those whom God hath predestinated unto life, and those only, He is pleased, in His appointed and accepted time, effectually to call, by His Word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death, in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation, by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God, taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and, by His almighty power, determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ: yet so, as they come most freely, being made willing by His grace (Robert Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith).
Our will can choose only that in which our nature delights (Michael Horton, The Christian Faith).
Christianity’s demand is this: your life, exerted to the limit, should express works. One thing more is demanded, that you humble yourself and confess: “But for all that I am saved by grace” (Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination).
We conclude that the atonement is unlimited in the sense that it is available for all; it is limited in that it is effective only for those who believe. It is available for all, but efficient only for the elect (Henry Thiessen, Lectures in Systematic Theology).
The denial of this dependence of God in the name of freedom, this protest of freedom against the divine constraint, is the very essence of what faith calls sin (E. Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation).
The apprehension of Christ is the other side of being apprehended by Him (E. Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation).
Thus faith is the “righteousness” of our being as God created it in place of the righteousness we strained after and claimed through our own action (Brunner, Christian Doctrine of Church, Faith, and Consummation).
If anyone shall say, that justice received is not preserved and also not increased in the sight of God through good works but that those same works are only the fruits and signs of justification received, but not a cause of its increase let him be anathema (Council of Trent, Canon 24).
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