The Bible vs Eastern Orthodoxy
(www.youtube.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (53)
sorted by:
Those of us trusting in Christ as Lord are saved. It is sanctification that is the ongoing process.
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...
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.