The Church's Gathering Under the Whole Counsel of God

"The church's liturgy should be Bible-saturated. There should be readings from Scripture, generous readings, not a few snippets from a lectionary or a few lines as a sermon text. The readings shouldn't skip the difficult or embarrassing parts—the tent pegs through the brains, the details about the impurity of menstruation, the severe things Jesus and Paul have to say about first-century Jews" (Leithart, The Theopolitan Vision, 29–30).

How Theology Differs from the Other Sciences

"Although theology treats of the same things with metaphysics, physics and ethics, yet the mode of considering is far different. It treats of God not like metaphysics as a being or as he can be known from the light of nature, but as that Creator and Redeemer made known by revelation. It treats of creatures not as things of nature, but of God (i.e., as holding a relation and order to God as their Creator, preserver and Redeemer) and that too according to the revelation made by him. This mode of considering, the other sciences do not know or do not assume" (Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 1:17).

The Word Made Flesh: God's Self-Revelation

D. A. Carson:

The emphasis of the Prologue, then, is on the revelation of the Word as the ultimate disclosure of God himself. That theme is dramatically reinforced by the remarkable parallels between v. 1 and v. 18, constituting an inclusio, a kind of literary envelope that subtly clasps all of 1:1-18 in its embrace. Thus ‘in the bosom of the Father’ is parallel to ‘with God’; ‘the unique one, [himself] God’, is parallel to ‘was God’; and to say that this unique and beloved Person has made God known is to say that he is ‘the Word’, God’s Self-expression.

—The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids, MI: 1991), 135.