Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a 'popular piety' claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.
J. I. PackerMany humanists in the West are stirred by a sense of outrage at what professed Christians, past and present, have done; and this makes them see their humanism as a kind of crusade, with the killing of Christianity as its prime goal.
J. I. PackerThe Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.
J. I. PackerHow can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each Truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.
J. I. PackerThe biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, andy more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages.
J. I. PackerOptimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come.
J. I. Packer