These are quotes taken from Thomas Boston’s, Human Nature In Its Fourfold State. The excerpt in full is found on the Providence Baptist Ministries website as provided by Monergism.com.
A man may bring as many buckets of water to a house that is on fire, as he is able to carry, and yet it may be consumed, and will be so, if he bring not as many as will quench the fire. Even so, although you should do what you are able, in keeping the commandments, if you fail in the least degree of obedience which the law enjoins, you are certainly ruined forever, unless you take hold of Christ, renouncing all your righteousness as filthy rags.
Objection 1: If we be under an utter inability to do any good, how can God require us to do it? Answer: God making man upright (Eccl. 7:29), gave him a power to do everything that He should require of him; this power man lost by his own fault…Now, we having, by our own fault, disabled ourselves, shall God lose His right of requiring our task, because we have thrown away the strength He gave us whereby to perform it? Has the creditor no right to require payment of his money because the debtor had squandered it away, and is not able to pay him?
But all this is needless, seeing we are utterly unable to help ourselves out of the state of sin and wrath. Answer: Give not place to that delusion, which puts asunder what God has joined, namely, the use of means and a sense of our own impotency. If ever the Spirit of God graciously influence your souls, you will become thoroughly sensible of your absolute inability, and yet enter upon a vigorous use of means. You will do for yourselves, as if you were to do all, and yet overlook all you do, as if you had done nothing. Will you do nothing for yourselves because you cannot do all? Lay down no such impious conclusion against your own souls. Do what you can; and, it may be, while you are doing what you can for yourselves, God will do for you what you cannot.
“But if a robust Christian faith could handle non-Christian learning without compromising, it was all too easy for Greek and Roman thought forms to creep into the cracks and chinks of a faith which was less and less founded on the Bible and more and more resting on the authority of church pronouncements.” — Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?
Schaeffer is speaking here about the changes taking place during the Middle Ages in which human reason began to be as important to the church as revelation. You can trace much of the destructive influence of this situation by doing even a cursory study on the history of the Catholic church. However, note the first sentence. The inference is that if we approach human reason (philosophy, science, etc.) while standing on the firm foundation of what Schaeffer calls a “robust” Christian faith we gain something. This begs the question , “What does a robust Christian faith look like?” (It also begs the question, “What is non-Christian learning?”, but we will defer that to another time.)
Paul gives us pictures of this robust faith throughout the New Testament. The robust faith is one in which the glory of God is the ultimate goal. The robust faith is concerned not with blind obedience to a set of rules (can you say Pharisee?), but with a transformation of the self as Paul speaks of in Romans, and again, this transformation is not for our ultimate good, but for the glory of God.
Indeed, if we take Paul’s example it could be said that the robust faith must embrace non-Christian learning in order to follow the directive that we are to always be “ready to give a defense”. Of course, by embrace we do not necessarily mean agreement. Paul was familiar with the non-Christian philosophy of the first century, and it could be argued that it is even more critical for the Christian apologist (that is all of us right?) today to have a clear understanding of the non-Christian philosophy surrounding us in order to combat ideas that are simply false. However, it is also important to remember that all truth is God’s truth, and God has not chosen to give a comprehensive revelation in the Scriptures. For instance, the Bible does not teach us the science of mathematics, yet we know that two plus two does indeed equal four.
In the end we we must constantly ask ourselves two questions as we interact with non-Christian ideas: “Is my faith a robust transformational faith with the glory of God as its highest goal?”, and “Is the non-Christian philosophy I am studying, and the way I am interacting with it helping to fulfill that goal?”
When preparing a sermon based on one of the apostle Paul’s letters, I often reference John B. Polhill’s, Paul and his Letters. I find it an invaluable resource for such study, but today when researching the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians I ran across the following statement concluding Polhill’s comments on Colossians 1:15-20.
Finally, it is significant that Paul’s great Christological statement is set in the form of a hymn, a confession of faith. It is often in our worship and our praise that we are brought closest to a full awareness of God and his greatness, something that the purely rational exercise of our theological endeavors could never do. Polhill, Paul and His Letters, 342 (endnote referencing E. Schweizer, The Letter to the Colossians, 82-88)
I just couldn’t disagree more with this statement. The simple truth of the matter is that for many of us, the deepest form of worship we experience is “the purely rational exercise of our theological endeavors.” Certainly I understand the significance of Paul using a hymn to clarify theological concerns. This certainly is one of the easiest, and perhaps best, ways of getting theology into the minds of the body of Christ. However, everyone does not share this “full awareness of God” brought about during what is considered the “ordinary” method of worship. For those of us trapped in an almost completely “rational” awareness of God, theological study brings us closer to His glory than any poetic hymn could do.
