A BIBLICAL FOUNDATION

“The sum of Your word is truth, and every one of Your righteous rules endures forever.”  (Psalm 119:160)

William Henry Seward was born in 1801.  Secretary of State under Lincoln during the Civil War, he would arrange the purchase of Alaska in 1867.  As vice-president of the American Bible Society, he declared in 1836:

"I know not how long a republican government can flourish among a great people who have not the Bible… But this I do know: that the existing government of this country never could have had existence but for the Bible.  And, further, I do in my conscience believe that if at every decade of years a copy of the Bible could be found in every family in the land, its republican institutions would be perpetuated." 

-- Stephen Abbot Northrop in “A Cloud of Witnesses”

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BECAUSE GOD IS GRACIOUS

“The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”  (Psalm 145:8 ESV)

The two great features of Protestant theology are its doctrines of justification by faith and the law as the rule of life.  This is a synthesis of New Testament grace and Old Testament ethics.  With this synthesis, Protestants have solved the problem of finding a gracious God, but they have not solved the problem of finding gracious neighbors.  They can fellowship with God because He is gracious; but they find it difficult to fellowship with one another, because they are not so gracious.

-- Robert D. Brinsmead in “Justification by Faith” 


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