J. I. Packer Quotes
Today, on our own turf, we face pagan ignorance about God every bit as deep as that which the early church faced in the Roman Empire.
Packer, J. I. Hot Tub Religion: Christian Living in a Materialistic World. Tyndale House Publishers, 1987, p. 25.
In the midst of the Argentine Dirty War where the right wing government was murdering and torturing their political enemies of the left, most of the Catholic Church Priests and other Church Authorities had sided with the government and morally overlooked their atrocities and crimes against humanity. Others were fearful as Bishop Enrique Angelelli had been murdered by the military death squads in 1976. Bishop Hesayne was one of the few members of the Church hierarchy who criticized church officials for their silence.
Note that Madison’s criticism of Christianity is not theological, but humanistic and political. See {620779} for his view on religion in general.
This Sura of the Koran warns the faithful that the non-Muslims of the world have as a major objective the Conversion of Muslims. While this was and has been the case in times past starting even before the Crusades, many Christians felt it as an obligation to either convert the Muslims or to kill them. In modern times there have been Christian missionaries who have had an objective of converting Muslims, but no Christian government has had that as a policy for a long time now. But most Muslims are told this is so today and the Koran warned of this. The result is that many Muslims—particularly those who have not had much contact with other religions—believe that because of this, they will be forever fighting heretics like Christians. For this reason, Islam’s future is under attack.
When the Turks defeated the Christians, the only explanation many Christians could conceive of was that God was on the side of the Turks.
The Confession was a statement of doctrine to which the Swiss Anabaptists adopted.
While the Visigoths had some very advanced legal principles, this law, quoted in its entirety is typical of the nations that were part of the Catholic world. The church and its doctrines were immune from any possible criticism, explicit or implicit. This is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.
The Papacy was at one of it’s lowest points. Two men, Clement and Urban, both claimed the Papacy and each had raised an army to fight the other. Each was promising indulgences to those who would fight, and in a modality similar to the Muslim terrorists of the 21st century, the soldiers were promised ascendancy to Heaven if they fell in battle for such a holy cause. The armies of the popes marched under the cross as their banner, and Wycliffe found that obscene and actually wrote a treatise saying so. See {618087}.
Shahin’s empire which he conquered for Khosrow II comprised all of the Middle East into parts of India. The Byzantine Roman Empire controlled everything from Constantinople to the West. They were the two “superpowers” of the day. Shahin was attacking various Byzantine holdings outside of the city of Constantinople. Even before Islam, religion was a major conflict between East and West.
Blacks in America are generally more religious than whites and almost all religious Blacks are Christian. As such, they tend to be very forgiving, non-violent, and more tolerant of sin and wrong than whites are. Foreman and others believe if Blacks had not been so Christianized, they would have been more rebellious, more violent and more vengeful than there were and are. This may well have been better for them in terms of American History and in getting more of the “pie” of contemporary society.”
Constantine the Great. This is one of Constantine’s major defenses of his decision to adopt Christianity. Scholars today still argue as to what part practical politics played in Constantine’s conversion and what part was his personal religious conversion.
James Innell Packer was an English-born Canadian evangelical theologian, cleric and writer in the low-church Anglican and Calvinist traditions. He was considered one of the most influential evangelicals in North America, known for his best-selling book, Knowing God, written in 1973, as well as his work as an editor for the English Standard Version of the Bible. He was one of the high-profile signers on the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a member on the advisory board of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and also was involved in the ecumenical book Evangelicals and Catholics Together in 1994. His last teaching position was as the board of governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, in which he served from 1996 until his retirement in 2016 due to failing eyesight.
