God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
Without theological vision, a vision that wrestles with what it means to be God’s people, in God’s world, under God’s rule, the church inevitably loses both its identity as God’s possession and its purpose as the people and place where God’s glory is displayed in the gospel and God’s praise is declared.
Of course, you are not such wiseacres as to think or say that you can expound Scripture without assistance from the works of divines and learned men who have labored before you… It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others… A respectable acquaintance with the opinions of the giants of the past, might have saved many an erratic thinker from the wild interpretations and outrageous inferences.