Quotes About Thomas Talbott

That God's grace is utterly irresistible over the long run now seems to me the best interpretation of Pauline theology, as a majority of theologians in the West have always insisted.

In his commentary on 1 John, however, Calvin saw more clearly than Packer did exactly where the issue must be joined. The issue is not, as Packer caricatured it, whether the proposition God is love expresses the complete truth about God. The issue is whether it expresses a truth about the very nature or essence of God—whether, in other words, it ascribes (what a philosopher would call) an essential property to the very being of God.

Had it not been for an obsessive fear of heresy, grounded in the traditional understanding of hell, most of the atrocities committed in the name of the Christian religion would never have occurred.

Even the Augustinians, I would note, seem prepared to acknowledge this much: because God has forgiven us and has commanded us to forgive others, we have an obligation to forgive; we have no right, that is, not to forgive. But why , I would ask of them, has God commanded us to forgive others? Is it not precisely because, given the Christian view of the world, forgiveness is the just and proper response to sin? Is it not because the sinner, who yet retains the image of God, deserves forgiveness?