SALVATION

[Vic C.]

The arguement against eternal salvation is form the pit of hell, satanic. (but that doesn't mean I am saying you are one of satans minions) It is not christian and this is a christian forum, and if you dont like it, leave. You and francis, shad and Cornball, have had your time to breath heresy. Enough is enough.

First to clear the air so you know where I stand, I do believe in Perseverance of the Saints but I am not here to debate it. Anyone can do the research on that belief and see how it has been systematically laid out... many times over.

But, I also respect those who don't see this "perseverance" doctrine as being all that clear and I wouldn't go as far as saying it's from the pits of hell. The other belief also has laid this out as systematically as the scriptures allow them.

As vj has left for a while it is now 4 against one with this crap. If moderators do feel the need to take action, I am hopeful they will do it as Christian Moderators in a Christian forum.

My appologies in advance to the moderators, however, I cannot contain myself any longer over this issue. I feel very strongly about it.

Apology accepted, but please keep in mind is is respectful to call members out by their chosen user name. Calling Cornelius cornball is disrespectful. The Staff doesn't want to see this anymore. It just isn't "Christian-like"

ANd remember; Francis is a teacher in an organisation that believes people should be dammed to hell for believing eternal security. Another FACT.

Whaile that may or may not be true, what I'd like to see is where in their catechism it says that. I think it's only fair as the accuser to back up such statements with fact(s).

Glory, there is a thread where Drew, myself and others were discussing Romans 2. I bowed out eventually one weekend, due to other obligations that weekend, admittedly getting caught up in football season was one reason, if I remember correctly.

I'd be happy to look for the thread and bump it up if you'd like to continue the Romans 2 discussion.

Peace,
Vic

 

[glorydaz]

1. Paul says in Romans 2 that people will get eternal life based on persistence in doing good;

2. Nowhere in Romans 2 does Paul assert that he is talking about a purely hypothetical path to attaining salvation that zero persons will achieve;

As can be seen, there really is no “argument†left for those who deny that, as per Romans 2, and 2 Corinthians 5, final salvation will be based on the entirety of the life led, that is “good worksâ€. The only “out†– the only reason to deny salvation by “good works†is to make the case that the Romans 2 statements are “hypothetical†statements – statements of what would be the case if were possible to be saved by good works. Well, there is no such case, as per point 4.

There is another option, Drew.

5. Paul is letting them know all men sin, and they will both be held accountable under the law in which each lives. Both...not just the Jews with the Torah. He tells them they are all without excuse. The Gentiles are saying to themselves...gee, I have done some bad things. And the Jews are saying to themselves....I follow the law. :nag

To the Gentiles..natural law written in their hearts.

19Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

14For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: 15Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)

To the Jews...Torah

17Behold, thou art called a Jew, and restest in the law, and makest thy boast of God, 18And knowest his will, and approvest the things that are more excellent, being instructed out of the law; 19And art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them which are in darkness, 20An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form of knowledge and of the truth in the law. 21Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? 22Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege? 23Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God? 24For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written. 25For circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keep the law: but if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision.

They're told they are building treasures for the coming wrath, but they will each be judged on whether they do rather than just say. It's the doers that will not perish under the law...both the natural law and the stone law. Both are spoken to here...not just the Jews.

They can do good work and obtain eternal life if they are able to keep the whole law.
He's telling them they can build a mountain of treasure, but if they fail in one point, they will not obtain what they seek. You keep saying he says they'll be given eternal life. He doesn't. He says they seek eternal life.....but there's a catch. You want to ignore the catch. As if it weren't there at all. It is there...the letter goes on....according to my Gospel. He is about to give them the Gospel message.

16In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.

 

[jasoncran]

i think this thing is dead.

 

[glorydaz]

Glory, there is a thread where Drew, myself and others were discussing Romans 2. I bowed out eventually one weekend, due to other obligations that weekend, admittedly getting caught up in football season was one reason, if I remember correctly.

I'd be happy to look for the thread and bump it up if you'd like to continue the Romans 2 discussion.

Peace,
Vic

That would be cool, Vic. Thanks.
I find it facinating.

 

[Vic C.]

i think this thing is dead.

Yeah, maybe if I can find that thread, at least we can keep the Romans 2 portion of this thread alive.

 

[jasoncran]

i meant this thread, not the subject itself.

 

[Vic C.]

i meant this thread, not the subject itself.

I know. :D




Glory, I found it.

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=30673&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=romans+2

It actually started out as a Romans 4 discussion, but quickly landed in Romans2 and pretty much stayed there. If you have some time, read through the pages and see if it's worth reopening.

Vic is out for the weekend pretty much. I will be checking in to activate accounts and check who's being good and who's being bad, just like Santa, LOL. I won't have much time to respond to this or much this weekend. Plus, my Giants are playing for Superbowl rights. :D

Yeah, I thought so. LOL

 

[Panin]

The arguement against eternal salvation is form the pit of hell, satanic. (but that doesn't mean I am saying you are one of satans minions) It is not christian and this is a christian forum, and if you dont like it, leave. You and francis, shad and Cornball, have had your time to breath heresy. Enough is enough.

First to clear the air so you know where I stand, I do believe in Perseverance of the Saints but I am not here to debate it. Anyone can do the research on that belief and see how it has been systematically laid out... many times over.

But, I also respect those who don't see this "perseverance" doctrine as being all that clear and I wouldn't go as far as saying it's from the pits of hell. The other belief also has laid this out as systematically as the scriptures allow them.

[quote:151o4xer]As vj has left for a while it is now 4 against one with this crap. If moderators do feel the need to take action, I am hopeful they will do it as Christian Moderators in a Christian forum.

My appologies in advance to the moderators, however, I cannot contain myself any longer over this issue. I feel very strongly about it.

Apology accepted, but please keep in mind is is respectful to call members out by their chosen user name. Calling Cornelius cornball is disrespectful. The Staff doesn't want to see this anymore. It just isn't "Christian-like"

ANd remember; Francis is a teacher in an organisation that believes people should be dammed to hell for believing eternal security. Another FACT.

Whaile that may or may not be true, what I'd like to see is where in their catechism it says that. I think it's only fair as the accuser to back up such statements with fact(s).

Glory, there is a thread where Drew, myself and others were discussing Romans 2. I bowed out eventually one weekend, due to other obligations that weekend, admittedly getting caught up in football season was one reason, if I remember correctly.

I'd be happy to look for the thread and bump it up if you'd like to continue the Romans 2 discussion.

Peace,
Vic[/quote:151o4xer]


The "perseverance of the saints is what you call it. RIGHT.

Thats not Christian. Can you tell me is if this is the stance of the people that run this forum please, I would like to know.

Thanks

PS - Sorry Cornelius.

 

[Panin]

i think this thing is dead.

me too.

 

[Panin]

Whaile that may or may not be true, what I'd like to see is where in their catechism it says that. I think it's only fair as the accuser to back up such statements with fact(s).

Well here ya go then.

In fact, its Council of Trent in the 16th century produced a document that pronounces “anathema“ or a curse on anyone who says that receiving eternal salvation is by grace through faith in Christ apart from works. To this day, the Roman Catholic Church upholds and affirms this same curse on all those such as myself who teach that our works have no part in becoming eternally saved.

http://www.eternalsecurityproved.com/

 

[glorydaz]

The "perseverance of the saints is what you call it. RIGHT.

Thats not Christian. Can you tell me is if this is the stance of the people that run this forum please, I would like to know.

Thanks

PS - Sorry Cornelius.

Perserverance of the saints is Once Saved Always Saved.
Sounds right to me.

 

[Cornelius]

PS - Sorry Cornelius.

LOL No problem brother. No offense taken. I have been called unsaved, from the devil, false prophet, false teacher, teacher of doctrines of devils and some other things I cannot repeat. I never take offense.

blessings
C

 

[Cornelius]

The "perseverance of the saints is what you call it. RIGHT.

Thats not Christian. Can you tell me is if this is the stance of the people that run this forum please, I would like to know.

Thanks

PS - Sorry Cornelius.

Perserverance of the saints is Once Saved Always Saved.
Sounds right to me.

and if they '..............UN-preservere ? LOL

 

[glorydaz]

The "perseverance of the saints is what you call it. RIGHT.

Thats not Christian. Can you tell me is if this is the stance of the people that run this forum please, I would like to know.

Thanks

PS - Sorry Cornelius.

Perserverance of the saints is Once Saved Always Saved.
Sounds right to me.

and if they '..............UN-preservere ? LOL

Those who are santified have it covered.

For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

 

[Panin]

The "perseverance of the saints is what you call it. RIGHT.

Thats not Christian. Can you tell me is if this is the stance of the people that run this forum please, I would like to know.

Thanks

PS - Sorry Cornelius.

Perserverance of the saints is Once Saved Always Saved.
Sounds right to me.

Does It? Okay, it sounded like the saints have to perservere to be saved.

 

[shad]

Does It? Okay, it sounded like the saints have to perservere to be saved.

Of course everyone has to persevere to be saved. God does not play game of favoritism. God is Just and Fair.

Jesus was not sent to give anyone free pass to sin, friend.

.

 

[Drew]

Lest people think that I am advocating "fringe" ideas, I now post (in 2 parts) some material written by NT Wright, generally acknowledged to be one of the most qualified Biblical scholars around. It is taken from a paper so he will refer to some other things that you will not be able to make sense of. But that's beside the point. Note what he says about the subject of final justification by good works.

The third point is remarkably controversial, seeing how well founded it is at several points in Paul. Indeed, listening to yesterday’s papers, it seems that there has been a massive conspiracy of silence on something which was quite clear for Paul (as indeed for Jesus). Paul, in company with mainstream second-Temple Judaism, affirms that God’s final judgment will be in accordance with the entirety of a life led – in accordance, in other words, with works. He says this clearly and unambiguously in Romans 14.10–12 and 2 Corinthians 5.10. He affirms it in that terrifying passage about church-builders in 1 Corinthians 3. But the main passage in question is of course Romans 2.1–16.

This passage has often been read differently. We heard yesterday that Augustine had problems with it (perhaps the only thing in common between Augustine and E. P. Sanders). That is hardly surprising; here is the first statement about justification in Romans, and lo and behold it affirms justification according to works! The doers of the law, he says, will be justified (2.13). Shock, horror; Paul cannot (so many have thought) have really meant it. So the passage has been treated as a hypothetical position which Paul then undermines by showing that nobody can actually achieve it; or, by Sanders for instance, as a piece of unassimilated Jewish preaching which Paul allows to stand even though it conflicts with other things he says. But all such theories are undermined by exegesis itself, not least by observing the many small but significant threads that stitch Romans 2 into the fabric of the letter as a whole. Paul means what he says. Granted, he redefines what ‘doing the law’ really means; he does this in chapter 8, and again in chapter 10, with a codicil in chapter 13. But he makes the point most compactly in Philippians 1.6: he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus. The ‘works’ in accordance with which the Christian will be vindicated on the last day are not the unaided works of the self-help moralist. Nor are they the performance of the ethnically distinctive Jewish boundary-markers (sabbath, food-laws and circumcision). They are the things which show, rather, that one is in Christ; the things which are produced in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation. In this way, Romans 8.1–17 provides the real answer to Romans 2.1–16. Why is there now ‘no condemnation’? Because, on the one hand, God has condemned sin in the flesh of Christ (let no-one say, as some have done, that this theme is absent in my work; it was and remains central in my thinking and my spirituality); and, on the other hand, because the Spirit is at work to do, within believers, what the Law could not do – ultimately, to give life, but a life that begins in the present with the putting to death of the deeds of the body and the obedient submission to the leading of the Spirit.

 

[Drew]

Part 2 of NT Wright on final justifcation by works:

I am fascinated by the way in which some of those most conscious of their reformation heritage shy away from Paul’s clear statements about future judgment according to works. It is not often enough remarked upon, for instance, that in the Thessalonian letters, and in Philippians, he looks ahead to the coming day of judgment and sees God’s favourable verdict not on the basis of the merits and death of Christ, not because like Lord Hailsham he simply casts himself on the mercy of the judge, but on the basis of his apostolic work. ‘What is our hope and joy and crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus Christ at his royal appearing? Is it not you? For you are our glory and our joy.’ (1 Thess. 3.19f.; cp. Phil. 2.16f.) I suspect that if you or I were to say such a thing, we could expect a swift rebuke of ‘nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling’. The fact that Paul does not feel obliged at every point to say this shows, I think, that he is not as concerned as we are about the danger of speaking of the things he himself has done – though sometimes, to be sure, he adds a rider, which proves my point, that it is not his own energy but that which God gives and inspires within him (1 Cor. 15.10; Col. 1.29). But he is still clear that the things he does in the present, by moral and physical effort, will count to his credit on the last day, precisely because they are the effective signs that the Spirit of the living Christ has been at work in him. We are embarrassed about saying this kind of thing; Paul clearly is not. What on earth can have happened to a sola scriptura theology that it should find itself forced to screen out such emphatic, indeed celebratory, statements?

The future verdict, when it is positive, can be denoted by the verb ‘justify’. This carries its full forensic sense, rooted in the ancient Jewish belief that the God of Israel, being the creator of the world and also the God of justice, would finally put the world to rights, in other words, that he would conduct a final Assize. On that day there will be ‘glory, honour, immortality and the life of the age to come’ for all who do right (Romans 2.7); in other words (verse 13) they will be justified, declared to be in the right. This ought to have highlighted long ago something which I believe has played too little part in discussions of Paul: justification by faith, to which I shall come in a moment, is the anticipation in the present of the justification which will occur in the future, and gains its meaning from that anticipation. What Augustine lacked, what Luther and Calvin lacked, what Regensburg lacked as a way of putting together the two things it tried to hold on to, was Paul’s eschatological perspective, filled out by the biblical fusion of covenantal and forensic categories. But before we get there I want to address a question which Paul seldom touches explicitly but about which we can reconstruct his thought quite accurately. This is just as well because it has played an important role in protestant discussions of soteriology and lies, I think, at the heart of today’s controversies about justification.

 

[glorydaz]

Does It? Okay, it sounded like the saints have to perservere to be saved.

Check this out....It's the balance we've been talking about. It's not "anything goes" and it's not "works", but it's OSAS in it's true form.

Peter's life exemplifies what the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints means in the life of a faltering believer. Christ's present intercessory prayers assure that genuine believers will be saved to the uttermost. This is the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. Those with true faith will not lead perfect lives, though some have attributed such a claim to proponents of working-faith salvation. The teaching of "once saved, always saved" may carry the false implication that after "accepting Christ" a person may live any kind of life and still be saved. That leaves out the doctrine of perseverance, which carries with it the need for a holy life. Peter in his first epistle furnishes six means through which God causes every Christian to persevere: by regenerating them to a living hope, by keeping them through His power, by strengthening them through tests of faith, by preserving them for ultimate glory, by motivating them with love for the Savior, and by saving them through a working faith. Quantification of how much failure the doctrine of perseverance allows is impossible, but Jesus did prescribe a way for the church to deal with a professing believer whose life sin had seemingly come to dominate. (cont.) http://www.biblebb.com/files/MAC/J93-41-1.htm

 

[Drew]

the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, 6who WILL RENDER TO EACH PERSON ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS: 7to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life; 8but to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation.

It is with these words that Paul gives us the first treatment of salvation in his most famous book, the book that is held forth as embodying the famous “justification by faith alone†doctrine. And yet in the words above, Paul clearly describes a coming judgement based on good works, with eternal life in the balance.

What are we going to do with this text? Those who deny that ultimate salvation is based on “good works†are not stupid. They can read and they know that these words from Paul completely undermine their position. So what option do they have? The only option, of course, is to assert that Paul is describing a hypothetical path to salvation – a description of how we would be saved by good works if that were possible. But of course, the argument proceeds, we can never do enough good works to be saved in this way. So a loving God gives man a way of salvation that can be achieved – salvation by faith.

But clearly there must be a justification for the very unusual move of suggesting that Paul is speaking hypothetically in Romans 2, especially since Paul never explicitly declares this in that chapter. This is where a series of misreadings and conceptual errors comes to their aid. Fortuitously, Romans 3 offers them an “out†with its treatment of the hopelessly fallen state of man (first part of the chapter) and its later embrace of justification by faith and concomitant denial of justification by “works of the Lawâ€. This material is used to justify reading Romans 2 as an unachievable hypothetical – if all are hopelessly sinful, and if we are justified by faith and not by the Law (read as a general moral law), then clearly Paul is not intending to be taken seriously in Romans 2.

Well, the problems with this are obvious. First, Paul never denies justification by “good works†in Romans 3, he denies justification by the works of the Law of Moses. When Paul attacks “works of the Law†in this manner, he is mounting a pointed critique of the Jew who thinks the ethnically-limited talisman of Torah limits salvation to Jews. This is clear from context. Furthermore, it is clear from the overall progression of Romans 3 that the description of fallen man in verse 10 to 18 is specific to unregenerate man. A final problem is that a statement that man is justified by faith in the present does not rule out a future justification by good works. Of course, those who reject ultimate salvation by good works insist these notions are contradictory. But that is because they are bringing their own “one-time†model of the nature of justification to Paul’s argument, thereby ignoring the clearly “past-present-future†structure that Paul brings to the concept of justification (and salvation). So one cannot use these kinds of arguments to suggest that Paul does not mean what he says in Romans 2.

That Paul does indeed mean what he says there is settled by the material in Romans 8. In Romans 7, Paul has reprised the argument about the hopeless state of fallen man (as per verses 10-18 of Romans 3). But then in Romans 8, Paul explains why there is no condemnation for those in Christ, that is, why Christians can indeed pass the Romans 2 judgement. Paul argues that the gift of the Spirit allows man to walk in the way that lead to life. And this capped off at the end of the chapter with the famous promise that Christians will be conformed to the image of the Son. And if that does not mean they can pass the Romans 2 judgement, what would?

In summary then, to deny ultimate justification by good works requires a very strange move – that Paul is speaking about a hypothetical path to salvation in Romans 2:7. What kind of writer describes how God will give eternal life to those who persist in doing good and not mean it? In any event, the efforts to sustain that improbable reading simply do not work for the reasons indicated. Furthermore, in Romans 8, Paul tells us how