The Life that Wins — Prolegomena
Epistemology
Core claim: “The life which God gives and you receive at the time you believe in His Son Jesus Christ is such a life.” (b8)
- Knowledge of God’s will: not via self-examination or moral improvement, but via revelation of Christ through faith
- Childlike faith: condition for experiencing the victorious life
- God’s judgment of man: “the cross expresses God’s despair of men! It announces His hopelessness towards men!” — total human inability
- Romans 6 (objective truth) vs. Romans 7 (subjective experience) — distinction between fact and experience
View of Scripture
- Scripture quotations from American Standard Version (1901) — recognizes canonical authority
- Special revelation: Christ Himself as life, not book knowledge
Anthropology (in prolegomena context)
- “You and I are worthy of death” — God’s judgment of man
- “Apart from our being crucified, there is really neither any use nor hope” — radical sinfulness
- “We were absolutely useless and hopeless: that we were beyond repair or improvement” — total depravity
Connections
- b1 (The Spiritual Man): intuition as knowledge-organ, spirit as receiver of revelation
- b2 (Economy of God): church as body, Christ as life
- b8 confirms: life is Christ in us, not self-improvement