Internal Evidence of Readings is of two kinds, which cannot be too sharply distinguished from each other; appealing respectively to Intrinsic Probability, having reference to the author, and what may be called Transcriptional Probability, having reference to the copyists. In appealing to the first, we ask what an author is likely to have written: in appealing to the second, we ask what copyists are likely to have made him seem to write. Both of these kinds of evidence are alike in the strictest sense internal, since they are alike derived exclusively from comparison of the testimony delivered, no account being taken of any relative antecedent credibility of the actual witnesses.

B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek with Notes on Selected Readings, 20.

Again, textual criticism is always negative, because its final aim is virtually nothing more than the detection and rejection of error. . . . and the primary work of textual criticism is merely to discriminate the erroneous variants from the true.

B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek with Notes on Select Readings, 3.

They [regarding visible/invisible church distinction] are not properly two churches, but one church, contemplated in two different aspects — an internal and an external. They do not occupy different spheres, but the same sphere. The visible church includes or contains the invisible, though, in its present imperfect condition, it has also mixed up with it some inferior elements, — some chaff, which will one day be separated from the wheat.

William Cunningham, Historical Theology, Vol. 1, 16.

The two most important questions that can call forth men’s interest, or exercise their faculties, are these two: first, Has God given to men a supernatural revelation of His will? and secondly, If so, what is the substance of the information which this revelation conveys to us? All subjects of investigation are subordinate to these.

William Cunningham, Historical Theology, Vol. 1, 4.

That man bears God’s image means much more than that he is spirit and possesses understanding, will, etc. It means above all that he is disposed for communion with God, that all the capacities of his soul can act in a way that corresponds to their destiny only if they rest in God. This is the nature of man. That is to say, there is no sphere of life that lies outside his relationship to God and in which religion would not be the ruling principle.

Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 270.

The argument that God does no creative work after the creation Sabbath leads to a deistic worldview. What, then, is regeneration?

Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 265.

Vos in reference to Traducianism … “We have no right to hang the millstone of our philosophy around the neck of God’s truth.”

GEERHARDUS VOS, REFORMED DOGMATICS, 263.

1:1 is unique among Paul’s salutations in two striking ways: (a) Elsewhere when Paul introduces himself as δοῦλος, he adds ἀπόστολος (Rom 1:1; Titus 1:1; often only ἀπόστολος [1–2 Cor; Gal; Eph; Col; 1–2 Tim]). (b) In no other greeting does Paul single out church leaders by the title (ἐπισκόποις καὶ διακόνοις). Commentators address the two anomalies separately. The absence of ἀπόστολος is explained by the “special bonds of affection” Paul shared with the Philippians (O’Brien 45; Silva 39; appropriate for the friendship genre [Fee 62]), or by a desire on Paul’s part not to draw any distinction between himself and Timothy in the greeting (K. Rengstorf, TDNT 2.277 n. 111). . . . The two anomalies in the salutation should, instead, be taken together since they interpret one another when read against the social background of Roman Philippi. By (1) deemphasizing his own status (δοῦλοςsans ἀπόστολος) and (2) honoring the congregation’s leaders with their titles (ἐπισκόποις καὶ διακόνοις), Paul intentionally subverts the honor culture of Philippi, where rank and titles were viewed as prizes to be competitively sought and publicly proclaimed, in order to enhance the holder’s social status. Paul thus begins, at the outset of the letter, to model a relational ethos he will later (1) commend to the Philippians (2:5) and (2) vividly portray in his remarkable narrative of the humiliation of Christ (2:6–8) (Hellerman 117–21).

Joseph Hellerman, Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament: Philippians, 11.

And indeed, this is the key point. We are apt to miss the lesson of the Old Testament’s many warnings against idolatry by chuckling at the benighted folly of those who needed some physical image with which to worship God. Indeed, some American evangelicals can be quite loud in their denunciation of more liturgical churches that use images or physical gestures in their services. Now is not the place to debate the merit of such denunciations. But what should be clear to us from the witness of Scripture is that what fundamentally concerns God is our tendency to worship the creature rather than the Creator—and this includes worshipping the Creator as a creature.

“INTRODUCTION” IN GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, LOC. 223.

In his bombshell recent book All That is in God, James Dolezal has identified these trends, comprising a new theology of “theistic mutualism,” as pervasive among leading Reformed and evangelical theologians and biblical commentators of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. “In an effort to portray God as more relatable,” Dolezal summarizes, “theistic mutualists insist that God is involved in a genuine give-and-take relationship with His creatures.”[3]

At the same time, a radical revision of Trinitarian theology has been underway for several decades, with the fierce traditional insistence on divine unity replaced by a “social trinitarianism” in which a community of three persons—redefined as no longer the mysterious Greek hypostases, but in the modern English sense of individual subjects characterized by personality—either flow in and out of one another in a radical egalitarian dance (if you are socially and politically liberal) or exist in carefully-regulated structures of authority and submission (if you are socially and politically conservative). Such formulations are simply inconceivable from the standpoint of historical Christian orthodoxy, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. Equally inconceivable is the fashionable modern talk of “the Father turning his back on the Son,” of the “Trinity being broken” at Christ’s crucifixion, language that originated in Jurgen Moltmann’s radical theological revisionism of the 1960s and 1970s and took only a couple of decades to become domesticated into conservative evangelical orthodoxy.

We could identify many causes for the current chaos—from widespread historical illiteracy, to the appearance of new philosophical challenges or at least intellectual fashions (often Kantian and Hegelian in origin), to methodological biblicism or Christocentricism. At the more popular level, though, I think that much of what drives our theological revisionism is what has always lain behind the human heart’s penchant for idolatry: a hunger for a God who is like me, a God who can relate to me, and meet me where I am, a God who is real enough to be there beside me in the midst of suffering. Whether it’s the anguished search by modern theologians for a God who could make sense out of Auschwitz or the infinitely superficial spirituality of the evangelical condolence card remembering that God will help us “mount up with wings as eagles,” the fundamental drive—emotivist and anthropocentric—is the same.

“Introduction” in GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, loc. 241.