Humble Orthodoxy

I recently finished Collin Hansen's excellent book Young, Restless, Reformed. He quotes the following from Joshua Harris:

Behold the truth revealed in the Word of God. Commit to believe in it. Represent it with humility. This is what we call humble orthodoxy... In view of the fact that we were dead in our sins, the only reason we see anything in ourselves is because [God] chose to pour out his grace in our lives. That's why there's no place for [arrogance]... If your theology doesn't shape you, then you haven't understood it.

Though I read them several days ago, Harris' words have remained on my mind. As one of those young Reformed pastors Hansen was writing about, if my theology does not produce humility within me, then I have not really understood it. J. I. Packer writes this in his introduction to John Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (which is dense and rich enough that I'm only chipping away at it a few pages at a time):

Calvinism is something much broader than the "five points" [of the TULIP acrostic] indicate. Calvinism is a whole world-view, stemming from a clear vision of God as the whole world's Maker and King... a theocentric way of thinking about all of life under the direction and control of God's own Word.

And later he writes, "We are saved entirely by divine grace through a faith which is itself God's gift and flows to us from Calvary."

If Harris and Packer are right (and I think they are), then what room is there in my life for any degree of self-centeredness or arrogance? What room is there for boasting, unless it be in the cross of Christ? What room is there for being impatient or argumentative, when no degree of cleverness on my part contributed to my salvation?

So in the next few posts (which I hope will come more frequently now), I would like to spend some time thinking through some theological convictions and how they ought, if genuinely believed, to produce deeper humility, patience, holiness, and love. Maybe we can grow together in the kind of "humble orthodoxy" espoused by so many of the people Hansen writes about, even as it was displayed in the lives of so many of the Puritans they draw inspiration from.