Butch5
Member
The earliest of the early writers are probably the most accurate. They were taught by the apostles and their doctrines were, for the most part, correct. I think as we get further away from the apostles we need to look more for uniformity among them. Regarding Calvinism, there is nothing of it in the original faith. It has it's roots in Gnosticism. Augustine, who, as you pointed out, was the first to dabble in these ideas in the church was a Gnostic before becoming a Christian. Gnosticism is basically the blending of Christian ideas with Greek philosophy. It's where we get the doctrines of the "Heavenly Destiny" and the "Immortal Soul" neither of these are Biblical doctrines.Hello All,
I am looking for a response for early Church writings and why they taught so much on views today known as Arminianism and against what later became Calvinism; and why Augustine was the first to begin to teach as he did, in which nothing close to Calvinism is found anywhere other than in Gnostic teachings. I want to know what happened to the "truth" as Calvinists claim.
Now I know that Calvinists reject early Chruch writings, because they are not scripture. And I never asked that they be accepted as such But this still does not explain the dilemna for any Historical evidence for Calvinism. If it cannot be found, then it should be considered that the first Church never believed as Calvinist claim the Bible teaches.
I am not looking for a debate on this, but only for Calvinist explanations. I want to know if I may have missed something in the Calvinist view and understanding of history. Should we trust those who came out of Roman Catholicism 1500 years after the first Church; or would we be better to trust the view of the disciple of the Apostles amd all those who lived very close to the first Church, of which history shows absolutely no disagreement on the doctrines of salvation? I know that we must trust only the scriptures! Please do not avoid the questions here! Since Arminians and Calvinist use the same bibles but come to completely different views, this makes the idea of truthing the bible alone difficult and confusing for some. Church history is only a help in determinine what the Apostles were really saying in the Bible. So what about these writings? Must we assume they all fell from truth immediately after the death of the Apostles and wrote the oppostite as the Apostles taught them?
What I do is look at the early Christian writings and compare their arguments with the Scriptures to see if they line up.