Editor’s Introduction -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 03:1 (Winter 1994)
Article: Editor’s Introduction
Author: Anonymous


Editor’s Introduction

Editor

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

Some of the most familiar words in all the language. Too familiar? Perhaps. But what is grace? And how does it affect the life of the church and that of our pastors to affirm and believe in the grace of God? And we use a host of adjectives to explain the various shades of meaning assigned to grace. We speak of efficacious grace, free grace, irresistible grace, and prevenient grace. We refer to grace with words like sanctifying, special and sufficient. And we come across ideas like the covenant of grace and common grace in historical theology. And since the days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the martyred German pastor-theologian of the Nazi era, we have a new adjective, which has given us a new usage of our word, “cheap grace.”

Grace has been variously defined. Contemporary theologian Millard J. Erickson, in his helpful little book, A Concise Dictionary of Christian Theology, writes that grace is “God’s dealing with man in undeserved ways; it is simply an outflow of God’s goodness and generosity.”

Grace is a kind of key that unlocks the whole of God’s revelation to us in Scripture. It has been said that the theme of the Bible is salvation, and various theologies have stressed this in several ways. But if this is true then it would be perhaps more accurate to say that the salvation which the Bible presents is a display of grace from first to last. Biblical salvation is all of grace (Eph. 2:5, 8); grace brings it to sinful mankind (Titus 2:11); and the end of all that God does in salvation is doxological, with the focus of our praise for all eternity upon His glorious grace (Eph. 1:6). J. I. Packer observes, therefore, that “...this one word ‘grace’ contains within itself the whole of New Testament theology. The New

Testament message is just the announcement that grace has come to men in and through Jesus Christ, plus a summons from God to receive this grace (Rom. 5:17; 2 Cor. 6:1)....Grace is the sum and substance of New Testament faith.” 1

We can not make sense of the Bible, especially the New Testament, unless we begin with grace. Multitudes (even within what we call evan...

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