Christian salvation theology; why so complicated?

Great Debates
141

I like the idea, but have seen no support in the scripture, I haven’t found any support that you will have a chance to change your mind after the ‘first death’ which is death of the physical body.

Not that Satan is forced to do evil, but that’s what he chooses to do and he chooses how to do those things (within the framework that God allows him to operate.). There is no benefit for him to do anything else - God has already passed judgment. What would happen of Satan just ‘turned good’, not much for him, I suspect that he too has no way to repay God for his ‘sins’

Do you accept the unjustness to a child of parents deciding that it would be good to move to red china?

Perhaps, but that would require some satanic order of ‘humans’, now your getting into secret orders of witches and the like, a fundamental difference between humans created by God and by Satan. But against what you posted, I suspect that the weeds are mainly referring to demons.

My direct answer to your question is - to my understanding it would be unjust to save all the people.

Re: the good Samaritan, Jesus uses that to show who are your neighbors (the beat up man is a neighbor to the Samaritan). So you know who to love as stated in the 2nd commandment, but the first one takes priority - love they God.

So the way I read it is Jesus said Love thy God with everything you got, that will lead you to loving thy neighbor. So again it’s your beleive and love for God that is the condition (just belief alone doesn’t cut it ‘as even the demons know God and shutter’.

That is a good one for your point about works alone can get you into heaven, but also a good one for eternal punishment. But the sheep are ‘blessed’. Blessed is a special term and means a lot more then we commonly think of. this comes about following God’s commandments (see Deuteronomy 28), which again is 1 - Love God, 2 Love Neighbor. The opposite of Blessed is cursed and comes from disobeadiace to God’s commandments. So the sheep are blessed and have followed the commandments 1 & 2, which means they know and beleive in God, the goats are cursed and disobey this.

I’m not saying deeds are unimportant, but belief and acceptance of Christ is primary.

142

I seem to recall you using this answer before. I’m afraid I don’t see what your point is by it - yes, the parents do have blame for bringing a child into that situation.

Now, again IIRC, your response will be “Is it the fault of the parents, or is it the fault of the situation in China?” To which I would respond; it is both. Mostly the fault of the parents, since they don’t have to move there. And partly the fault of the causers of the situation in China. Now, to analogise this back to God; putting us here is his fault, since we don’t have to be put here. And the creation of the situation of existence is, again, down to God. So he is in fact (well, not in fact. Assuming he exists.) to blame even more so than the parents of the child are.

143

Even though I quoted a scripture saying that God wants to save all people? Thats interesting. So you believe that passage is false?

It’s significant that the Samaritan, who were not liked by the Jews, was the one to act with compassion while religious leaders passed the man by. It was the one who *acted * with compassion rather than those who just believed the correct beliefs that mattered.

I haven’t said that works alone can get you into heaven. Thats not the point I’m making and please don’t put words in my mouth.

Yes the sheep have followed God’s commandments by…visiting those in prison, comforting for the sick, feeding the hungry. Thats exactly what Jesus said. Real meaningful belief is reflected in the actions of the individual rather than a superficial belief in the “correct doctrine” that doesn’t change the person.

Thats not what Jesus taught. Jesus taught that true acceptance of the Holy Spirit was obvious by our deeds. There’s even quite a few passages that say we are judged according to our works and rewarded according to what we have done.

I know we’re not going to agree and there’s no need to go around in circles.

144

How does one do this, and why is it the only unpardonable sin?

145

More germane to the present discussion, who is at fault if the child is not allowed to move back after he has grown and the parents are dead?

146

The parents are the ones who knew what it meat they decided for themselves and their children as they knew it was a one way trip. Likewise A&E knew that the fruit will mean their death, the truth was not hidden from them.

Though it is not really spelled out in detail how to commit it, it is in the context that people were accusing Jesus casting out demons by the power of the devil. It is normally attributed to crediting works of the Spirit to the devil. For instance if you know that the Holy Spirit has heal you - you know in your heart that it was in fact God that did that for you and you go saying that Satan, or for that matter false gods, healed you. It helps to understand the context of how much God hates false gods to know why this is the only unpardonable sin, and what it means to do the above. This is my understanding on how to violate this and a vague idea of why it is the only one.

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The passage and my comments are consistent, God loves his children and wants to save all, God is the judge and knows His job and does it fairly regardless of what we would think of as a conflict of interest that would force a human judge to step aside.

We are in agreement.

Jesus taught He is the ONLY way to the Father - there is no other way and it is totally clear in scripture. Our deeds come as a result of love thy neighbor. Yes they are important, but I still contend that primary is accepting Jesus, that will lead you to love thy neighbor, which will lead to doing good godly deeds. So yes if you accept Jesus it will be obvious by your deeds but not necessarily immediately obvious, but obvious in the long term and man’s vision is very limited.

Another way to look at it, when one turns to Jesus and surrenders to Him as his King, no longer living for oneself, but as a servant of Christ, your deeds will be the ones assigned to you by Christ, which should be externally obvious.

147

IMHO the scripture this comes from is pretty interesting.
Mark 3:
28I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. 29But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."

Luke 12:10And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.

In the NT Jesus says the HS is what guides us to all truth. It’s also spoken of as that spirit within that transforms us as we learn to listen to that inner voice. We can go from, reading Love they neighbor, to sincerely loving our neighbor as we learn to trust this inner spirit.

So here Jesus says it doesn’t matter what we say about Jesus the Man but it is the denial of the HS that is the issue. If the HS is speaking to us and trying to guide us and we in stubbornly clinging to our own ego and position of power refuse to listen, that is a choice for which there are consequences.

If you are in tune with the HS within you then you will feel it’s presence in others as well. So IMO much of what Jesus talked about when he referred to people recognizing him for who he was. It wasn’t so much a personal statement about Jesus the physical man, but about people getting a real sense of the spirit within him. If you couldn’t feel the presence of the spirit within him it was because you weren’t tuning in to it within yourself.

148

.\I agree with this, but don’t agree this is the unpardonable sin. It is obvious that the unpardonable sin has to do with you speaking out against the Holy Spirit, not acting against the Holy Spirit everytime it is mentioned it is in the context of speech.

149

Sorry, I don’t find your comments very consistent. Your statement here is one of the ones I mentioned earlier. When an inconsistency, something in doctrine that seems unjust according to our mere human standards, something that seems to conflict with the very qualities of love mercy and justice we attribute to God, is pointed out, then the problem must be that we just don’t understand God’s ways rather than questioning the validity of the doctrine. IMO thats placing a traditional doctrine in the place of reverence that the truth should hold.

I am familiar with the often quoted passages. The question arises "what exactly did he mean by those passages? How do those passages fit together with the other passages about being rewarded according to our deeds and judged by our works in a way that both are true.

Exploring Christian history we see there were lots of different ideas and interpretations of Jesus message in the decades and centuries that followed. It was not fully understood but merely the seed as in the parable that was to grow and bear fruit with the help of the Holy Spirit. It may be comforting to assume that those who wrote the Nicene Creed were sanctioned by God in some way and have passed on the teachings of Christ and the apostles accurately , but if we look at that history honestly and see the bloody persecution on those that disagreed with the government sanctioned “official” church, we should realize that the HS was not their guide.
Suppose that when Jesus said “Believe in me” he meant “believe that what I am doing you can do as well” Suppose when Jesus said " I am the way the truth and the light, no man comes to the Father but by me" he meant, “if you can live as I live, in communion with the HS and surrender to it’s calling , then you are approaching the kingdom of God, and there is no other way to do it”

I find that more consistent with the other passages than worshiping the physical image of Jesus, and the name of Jesus more than the spirit.
John 4:23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

Putting the name and the image of Jesus first has been programed into Christianity for centuries. I revere Christ and his teachings. I just think the spirit of what he taught should be first. That’s what Jesus teaches in the passages I quoted. Accepting Christ by name is one thing. Our inner relationship with the HS is the only real thing. Any person in any religion or no religion can have that relationship , even if they call it by another name. I believe we are called to seek that spirit within ourselves and honor it in others. When anyone acts with love and compassion for their fellow man we are seeing that loving spirit. If anyone from any or no religion accepts the guidance of the HS then they have accepted Jesus regardless of what they call it.

150

The term used is “blasphemes” which which is an act not just words.

The HS guides us to all truth. If we ignore or deny the urgings of that inner voice then we are not serving in truth. Those choices have consequences and will continue as long as we continue to ignore that inner voice. In that sense we cannot be forgiven until we surrender to the leading of that spirit.

151

Again I agree with your premise, but not that this is the unpardonable sin, as these actions you state are reversible and pardonable, though they are known to cause a curse. It is the sin of putting the carnal above the spiritual. The curse is that of barrenness see Jeremaih 17:5-6:

I’m having a hard time understanding this, can you please clarify.

Jesus has stated the above, the faith of the mustard seed, Peter walking on water, ect. So I agree with that as a possible translation.

Well not the physical image as no man alive knows what that is.

I did have to look for a while:

There is warning about accepting a false Christ and getting a false spirit. Also it is pretty standard stuff that any false ‘God’ is utterly detestable to God.

152

Ignoring the issue that they were far from experienced in making these decisions, they did not know it would mean the deaths of their children - since in their pure state they would not have known about children.

153

Well let me throw some more mud on this to clear it up a bit. This taken along with the parable of the weeds and the wheat, where if we take the weeds as satanic demons, which are now introduced into the human realm in such a way that they are now intertwined with us at the root level, and God determines it is better to let things develop as is then to rip away the demons, and we have to one to blame - Satan.

154

Because it’s so easy to pass the buck.

155

Experts - is his statement that the weeds refer to demons commonly held?

It’s bad enough that we’ve been made inherently sinful, but now I learn that God has also made immortal beings to make things worse. Some of them no doubt quite good looking also. What chance do we have? Our damnation would never stand up in a court of law.

156

I’ve never heard the weeds described as demons (or anything other than sinful people) in my life.
(Strongly dualistic Manichaean-influenced Christian denominations may have expressed that idea outside my hearing, of course.)

157

I completely concur; the idea that the parable refers to anything but the judgment of mortal human beings is startlingly new to me. William Barclay, a famous Scots Presbyterian Bible scholar, had this to say (short excerpts from several pages of commentary):

Though I’d take issue with how Barclay (Calvinist that he is) approaches some points here, it’s clear that he is talking about the difficulty in judging between people and the fact that judgment in the religious sense belongs to God, not to any human being.

And the only point where devils play any role in the whole thing is that implicitly the Diabolos, the opposer/accuser/enemy, is what the vindictive enemy who sowed the darnel among the wheat is supposed to be.

158

[QUOTE=kanicbird]
Again I agree with your premise, but not that this is the unpardonable sin, as these actions you state are reversible and pardonable, though they are known to cause a curse. It is the sin of putting the carnal above the spiritual. The curse is that of barrenness see Jeremaih 17:5-6:

What?? Isn’t *all *sin putting the carnal above the spiritual?

If I’m following yours posts you claimed that it isn’t just that all would be saved even after I pointed out a scripture saying God wants to do just that. Your explanation of this was what?

Which is the kind of contradictory justification I mentioned earlier. When confronted with an example of how your doctrine that doesn’t make sense you chose to rationalize to protect the doctrine rather than question it to find the deeper truth.

paraphrased “if the doctrine doesn’t make sense then it’s because we mere men can’t understand God’s ways rather than because the doctrine itself is incorrect”

The question then arises, What is the priority, defending a traditional doctrine or seeking the truth?

Correct, and yet Christianity surrounds itself with images of the physical man.

I did have to look for a while:

Can we believe that all people are sons and daughters of God and cover this one?

AS I already pointed out. By following the inner voice of the Holy Spirit anyone would be following Christ even if they didn’t recognize it as such. The scriptures indicate that Jesus is concerned about the spiritual condition of the inner person rather than superficial recognition of his name.

Should we then just assume that traditional Christian theology is correct because we are afraid we might accept something false, or, when tradition seems incorrect should we keep seeking the truth? IMO Jesus gave us a rather simple way to discern a false spirit from a true one. Do we see acts of love , forgiveness, compassion and mercy?" If we do then we know only the true spirit of God can author those things, and must be moving that individual. If someone praises Jesus but behaves in a way that is contradictory to those qualities we should be able to tell. The more we tune in to our own inner voice the easier we can sense the spirit of others.

For me, all the superficial labels don’t matter one bit. Someone can say they are a Christian but that really doesn’t tell me what kind of person they are. They might be kind and loving, or they might be pious judgmental jackasses. The same for other religions and the non religious, although some religions simply teach better principles than others and are less likely to produce Swaggarts, Falwells or Haggards, Dobsons and their ilk.

It is the inner spirit that matters.

159

The issue of making the weeds into people is:

  • Some people are condemned from birth - there is no hope for them a a weed can not change it’s genetic code and become wheat.
  • Other people are saved automatically by birth.
  • No one has a chance to change
  • Life makes no difference - it is determined by birth
160

The temptations provided by demons are part of our sinful nature - it very well may be the root level entanglement in that parable. I don’t know what you mean that you just learned that God created (semi?)immortal beings to make things worse. Demons are throughout Jesus’s work - it’s just not a obscure reference, it was one of the 3 main things He did - teach, heal the sick and cast out demons - He did this over and over, and instructed His followers to do the same, and scripture tells of 1000’s of demons cast out by Jesus. It was God’s power which created everything, but God does delegate the use of His power.

Won’t stand out in a court of law, you won’t have constitutional rights in God’s court, it appears like we will be the ones to testify against ourselves.