The Bible vs Eastern Orthodoxy
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Salvation is a process that spans our entire lives until our very last breath (and even after that through prayers and intercession of the living). No one is pronounced saved until the Last Judgment. Anyone who claims to be saved is in delusion. Do you really believe that people who profess faith in Christ will be saved if they don't repent and don't follow His command but persist in their sin, choosing death over life? I'm sure He says otherwise.
Matthew 7:21-23
John 14:20-22
John 14:15
Professing your love without manifesting it through your actions is fake and gay. If you truly love Christ you will follow His commandments and His Church. Imagine saying to your wife "I love you" and then treating her like a piece of trash and beating her up. It's meaningless and contradictory.
But protestants truly believe that and have some weird notion of splitting their mind from their body, where their mind professes the faith and is saved, and their body does all kinds of degeneracy as if they're not accountable for it by having free will. "Christ is my Lord and I'm saved, but my stupid gay body can't help going to gay bars on friday nights and doing cocaine until sunrise." This is truly schizophrenic. Such a dangerous spiritual delusion to believe salvation is as easy as signing a legal contract. If only it were that easy...
As mentioned in the video, your church leaders don't even claim to know they are saved, so how can you say that is THE church to follow? The church whose members aren't even sure they are saved, that's how you know you can be sure of this church?
Praise God we have the Holy Scriptures and don't need to rely on these uncertain men to be saved.
What matters is if you are saved. Fussing about whether you KNOW you are or not is a struggle session. Settle for faith.
If the Bible tells you that you can be saved as a certainty, and your church "father" tells you he can never know, then run.
The Bible is clear, it talks about "saved" people in the past tense. Not might be saved, or could be saved. Please watch the video.
No, it means you have wrong presuppositions and wrong interpretation of the text and commit a word-concept fallacy. Calling no man a father refers to the heavenly Father, not biological or father or father in the patriarchal traditional sense. Have you called your dad father? Well I guess you've broken Christ's commandment then. You see how stupid the protestant interpretation is?
This is outright lying or willful ignorance of the Scripture. You're quote mining as every protestant in existence, ignoring the passages that don't jive with your presuppositions.
You arbitrarily decided that knowledge of who's saved or not is the prerequisite. This is knowledge only God has because He's the one who judges. You're not only acting as your own popes by doing personal interpretation of Scripture, you're also acting as your own gods by making judgments of who's saved or not. Anyone could claim they are saved, therefore they are saved in reality? That's a non sequitur. What does anyone being sure if he's saved or not have to do with what the true Church is? Where do you get this from?
Refer to my other comment deboonking Sola Scriptura. You're in a contradiction, bro.
Imagine attacking God's word while following after traditions of men who admit they might not be saved. What utter madness! Repent!
Imagine blowing through what I said not answering anything and strawmanning me instead. If you were good faith and cared for the truth you wouldn't act like that. I'm sorry I got you cornered with your bs position.
Please show me where Jesus or any Apostle said you require a pope to read scripture. Also check with the prophets in the OT. Let me know what you find.
Secondly why haven't you addressed a single argument from the pastor in the video?
Jesus said "He that heareth my word and believeth on he that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation" John 5:24
We see the Apostle Paul write "saved" in the past tense. "unto use which are saved, it is the power of God" 1 Corinthians 1:18
And we are to know a "peace which surpasses all understanding" from God. That makes sense in the context of being saved already.
Far from a license to sin, Paul who said we are saved "by grace... through faith" showed complete devotion. If someone else uses a superficial faith in Jesus to justify a worldly life of sin they were never transformed and saved. Simple as that.
All your arguments/questions are answered here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2O58rX0K5o (on salvation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXQQSA9U3xs (on faith alone justification being based on nominalism)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_XS9xp7kiI (sola fide critique)
https://youtu.be/w_AjgIrk9-o?t=73 (sola scriptura)
If you think this means salvation happens at the death bed after keeping all commandments daily, then you must think the Book of Acts is full of zombies. Because people are referred to as "saved", past tense. Not "maybe saved on their deathbed, we hope, maybe some day".
In Acts Chapter 16 we see the passage called "The Philippian Jailer Saved". Did they make a mistake, and it should be called "Philippian Jailer could be maybe saved many years later on his death bed?" "Philippian Jailer was moved in the right direction, no idea if he got saved, who cares?"
Acts 15 also deals with salvation. Peter states to the council:
Where is wake up everyday unsure and maybe when you die you are saved?
Your only out is attacking scripture. "Well who compiled these texts..." argument.
Yes of the Protestants that do this. And, continuing the memetic treatment, it sounds like Catholicism with fewer steps. Because there is evidence that some Catholics do exactly the same and then regularly count on the confession booth and the Hail Mary to compensate for the failure of responsibility instead of, as Protestants, counting once for all on the altar call and the Sinner's Prayer.
It's not analogous because my criticism is not directed at people failing to act as they are expected but at the system level. I'm not Catholic, but their system doesn't suffer from the problem I described because they have very different soteriology. They don't have Sola Fide but also have works as a requirement for salvation so the scenario I described - professing Christ as your Lord and savior, then going to the gay bar and still believing you are saved (because of "once saved - always saved") is not applicable. If anything Catholics go the opposite end and get overly legalistic to absurdity.
Fair enough, Winston, I have never remembered exactly what position you take. Ultimately though, Protestants and Catholics in considered theology come to the same place with different definitions; the subgroups that don't are just being standoffish about distinctives. For instance, Protestants who believe OSAS generally believe if you don't stay present-saved you were never past-saved; those who don't ("frozen chosen") are regarded as legalist and hyper-Calvinist. Those who believe sola fide lately add "but not by a faith that is alone": that is, works always accompany faith. Meanwhile, Catholics agree with those Protestants that works are a "requirement" but, in the fine print, admit our works do not contribute to the grace by which we were infused with righteousness as shown in baptism (a real OSAS if there ever was one); merit always follows grace. Catholics recognize the three tenses of salvation (2 Cor. 1:10) and that they are still "saved" from sin nature (baptized) even when they need again to be "saved" from a recurrent sin (confessed). So I did some work reconciling the two and found these things out.
Protestant churches "expect" Christians to act grateful for their justification by faith; only the frozen chosen do not, which is clearly against Romans 3. And we could argue about which expectation, P or C, is better at stopping the stupid weekend sins you describe. But I don't think it's a result of the system, and if you want to say hyper-Calvinism is more endemic than I think it is then there's pretty good evidence that mortifying legalism is more endemic in Catholicism than appreciated as well.
I'm Eastern Orthodox.
This is contradictory and renders Sola fide meaningless. Protestants should either double down on Sola fide and that their faith alone is salvific, regardless of anything else, or that it's not just faith alone, because true faith is always proven in deed (which has always been the teaching of the Church). It's an either-or.
The Orthodox teaching is that grace is uncreated and given through participation in the divine energies (Church life and sacraments) with the ultimate purpose of theosis (deification), which is being united with God. God became man so that man can become god (St. Athanasius).
Protestants inherit the mistakes of the Catholics because they share the same basic presuppositions about grace while disagreeing on how it is given/achieved. This is because Western Christianity lacks the essence-energies distinction as taught by Gregory Palamas which makes participation in God impossible. Protestants reject synergism (cooperation of man with God required for salvation) and believe salvation is only in the hands of God.
In this case the world "saved" points to different concepts. Being in the Church is the path to salvation. But if you're not dressed appropriately (living a virtuous life) you will be kicked out of the wedding. So it's not single things leading to salvation but the whole package. Protestants who claim to be saved lack humility and make judgments that only God can make.
Justification by faith is legalistic. By definition, it's a legal declaration of righteousness through faith alone, with transformation and good works following as proof. The problem of Sola fide is it treats faith as a formal abstraction and not as a personal relationship with the living God (which is ironic, considering protestant worship looks much more personal and informal on the outside).
It's easy to see how the Reformation has demystificated the faith and tried to make it of this world - abstracted, transactional and legalistic. Faith is not lived but professed. Salvation is not participation in divine energies but legally declared by God. Christ didn't become incarnate to lift up and restore our pre-fall nature, His resurrection being cosmological in scope, opening our path to eternal life, but He was a necessary victim to pay our debt incurred by Adam in order to satisfy God as the plaintiff. It's only logical that this theology leads to secularism, materialism and cold-heartedness in society and this is exactly what has transpired in all Protestant states. It's funny because this is not unlike how the Talmud views God...