Sublime

Thomas Boston and his friends believed that “the gospel-doctrine” had been attacked in the Marrow Controversy.

Schaeffer’s own Reformed theology undercuts classical apologetics insofar as it is committed to the “noetic effects of sin”—that is, the effects of sin on the mind, distorting both what counts as true and what can be recognized as true for the unbeliever (Rom. 1:18–22; 1 Cor. 2).

Christ himself ceases to be central and becomes a means to an end.

Since the rule of Christ and God’s law has been restricted to individual commitment and (if anywhere) private conscience, man has seen himself as free to generate or reject, as his own ethical authority, moral ideals and obligation. Individualism and liberty become the only absolutes which govern interpersonal relations.16 To “be yourself ” and do

Nowhere in Scripture do I see a “balanced life with a little bit of God added in” as an ideal for us to emulate. Yet when I look at our churches, this is exactly what I see: a lot of people who have added Jesus to their lives.

In other words, in much popular modern Christian thought we have made a three-layered mistake. We have Platonized our eschatology (substituting “souls going to heaven” for the promised new creation) and have therefore moralized our anthropology (substituting a qualifying examination of moral performance for the biblical notion of the human vocation

If I am opposed to the epistemology, or theory of knowledge, that plagues modern Christianity, then I am also opposed to the ecclesiology (or lack thereof ) that accompanies this modernist version of the faith.