Bally's For The Mind

Two of my faves from Calvinism In The Las Vegas Airport:

"...I [do not] want to impose "Christian culture" on everyone. God desires that people freely acknowledge His rule and that they freely offer their lives of obedience to Him. Nothing is gained when we impose specifically Christian standards on people who do not acknowledge God as the ruler over all things. The Mennonites have a nice phrase. They say we are presently living 'in the time of God's patience.' That's right. Someday every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. Unbelievers will be forced to acknowlege where the true authority resided all along. But that Day -- the Day of Judgement -- has not yet come. So we are in a time of waiting, of longing for the day when the rule of God will be made obvious to all creatures. The Christian community is called here and now by God to be a witness to the larger world of what it is like to live out lives in open acknowledgment of God's sovereign rule over all things."
pp. 69


And:


"Although heaven can only be entered by the holy, yet such, we are assured, is the infinite provision made for human salvation, and such the intense love for human sinners therein exhibited, that the multitude of the redeemed will be incomparably greater than the number of the lost. My father [Charles Hodge], at the close fo his long life spent in the defense of Calvinism, wrote on one of his conference papers, in trembling characters, a little while before he died, 'I am fully persuaded that the vast majority of the human race will share in the beatitudes and glories of our Lord's redemption.' Remember that all who die before complete moral agency have been given to Christ. Remember that the vast populations of the coming millenniums are given to Christ. Then shall the promises of Christ to the great 'father of the faithful' be fulfilled to the letter: 'Thy seed shall be like the sands of the sea-shore'." Quoted from A.A. Hodge
pp. 89