Featured The Atonement of Christ: What did it REALLY Achieve ? 9

You mean post like you do?!

Seems that is your m.o.

You know all about being childish as you provoke without cause.

Your doctrine garnishes the title.

Not at all. I have shared much biblical truth with you and you toss it aside as irrelevant to your cause of self over God.

You could. You are a master at accusing the brothers. But, you have no substance or idea what gnosticism is so your labels fall away like chaff in the wind.

My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus Christ, my righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus’ name.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand,
All other ground is sinking sand.
2
When darkness veils His lovely face,
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.
3
His oath, His covenant, His blood,
Support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.
4
When He shall come with trumpet sound,
Oh, may I then in Him be found;
In Him, my righteousness, alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne.

 

Your Boydian speech is well known. Open-theism is simply disguised humanism masquerading as a sheep.

 

If you are correct that people are only held responsible for what they were given, then how is sending missionaries not the cruelest and most hateful thing you can do to someone?

I mean, if an un-reached people group essentially gets a free-pass to heaven because no one has told them about Jesus (and creation does not reveal His life, death, and resurrection, for their sins), then by preaching Christ to them (and thereby chancing that some will reject Him) aren't you are condemning them to hell? How is this beneficial or loving on our part? And, if we argue that we're simply following Jesus' orders to take the gospel to the nations, then how is He not mean for sending us to rob the unreached of their ignorance?

The Archangel

 

Per Romans 1 and Romans 2, the light of creation, and the light of conscience, respectively, are enough to condemn, but not enough to save.

No one gets a free pass.

 

We agree. You cannot come to saving faith by observing nature alone.
Your heart may be stirred that there is a creator and you may even be in a culture that sees one creator, however, you cannot come to saving faith on that alone. In fact, Paul tells us that with only nature to go on, humans will worship the created things, rather than God, the Son, who is the Word of Life.

 

Have to conclude that these verses are not in your bible.

Rom 1:20 Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse;
Rom 1:21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

The unreached do not get what you call a free pass. They will be judged by God for what they do know and how they respond to it.

 

So none of the OT saints were really saved according to you. They never heard the gospel message in fact they had never even heard of Christ Jesus.

 

So, is there "salvation" or heaven for those who have never heard the Gospel?

The Archangel

 

Do you think that the OT saints are saved since they never heard the gospel did they. I do not presume to tell God who He can or can not save or why He would choose to save someone.

 

It's funny that you mentioned that, but Paul already covers that. And you're going outside the parameters of the discussion at this point by going to the Old Testament.

The Archangel

 

We humans are without excuse. We openly rebel against the Creator, even though we know he exists.

The unreached, therefore, need a messenger from Christ. We need to go and tell them or else they will die in their sins.

The saints of old were justified by faith in the Promised One. From Genesis 3:15 and onward, God shows the saints His grace and the means of redemption through the promised second Adam who would redeem them. They, the OT saints, were justified by faith in the revealed Promised One of the Old Testament. This is why it was a tragedy that Israel did not share this good news with the nations. They failed to go. May we not be like wicked Israel that did not share the grace of God with others.

Silverhair, Jesus oozes from every page of the Old Testament. The saints of old were saved the same way as us. By faith in the Messiah who redeemed them of their sins.

 

The sin of Satan, Adam, and Eve, is that they questioned God's goodness and rebelled against it. This is the same sin we make when we think we can tell God he is "evil" for being selective in His salvation. It shows God that we are still influenced by the serpent and his question of "Has God not said..."
How sad it must make God when He graciously chooses to save a man and then that same man turns around and declares that unless God lets him do his own choosing, God becomes evil.

God saves him and that man declares himself to be the cause of his salvation. It is just an absolute tragedy and a heartbreaking thing to hear after all that God has done in saving that man even when he was dead in his trespasses and sins. The arrogance and pride of such a thought is heartbreaking. Yet, in spite of such arrogance, God still chose to save such a rebel. It is amazing grace indeed.

 

How so? Do you not think that the way God dealt with people in the OT is relevant to the question you asked? God has not changed has He?

 

Salvation, whether in the Old or New Testament has always been by faith. Paul makes this clear.

The Archangel

 

I agree

 

Saying it doesn't make it so.

Also, the term "ad hominem" is almost universally misunderstood and misused on these web forums. People seem to think that it is synonymous with mere name calling, which isn't correct, but your post happens to actually be an excellent example of a real ad hominem where you appeal to the emotional reaction of calling someone a name to sway your audience rather than addressing the actual issue with a real argument. You want to associate me with someone who you think everyone surely knows is some sort of villain, and throw around a pejorative such a "humanism" in an attempt to get those who already agree with you to cheer and to potentially frighten anyone who might be undecided.

The fact is that it doesn't bother me at all to be associated with Boyd. What little of his published works I've read seem to be well reasoned and skillfully articulated. Boyd very definitely is not the person I've learned my doctrine from but the point is that you associating me with Boyd does no harm to me or doctrine.

Also, you very clearly do not know what humanism is. The term does have a rather broad definition but there isn't anything I've said or believe that could correctly be categorized as actual "humanism" except by those who are hilariously ignorant or intellectually dishonest. I suspect in your case that it's a bit of both.

Regardless, the point is that you are utterly without substance and are seemingly incapable of refuting even a single syllable of anything I've said. Thank you for conceding the debate (if you can even call it that)!

 

Is this a real question?

The testimony of the created order is sufficient to cause someone to be without excuse but that doesn't make it anywhere near as effective a means of getting people saved as does the preaching of God's word. If it were, God wouldn't have inspired it's writting nor revealed the gospel of grace to the Apostle Paul.

Who said any thing about it being a free pass? It still took the shedding of Christ's blood to rectify the issue of the sinful nature that was passed to them from Adam, so that was far from what I would call free and, more directly, their salvation would not be based on grace alone through faith alone as we who are in the Body of Christ enjoy, but rather it would be based on their actions. That means it isn't going to turn out well for the vast majority of those who are never exposed to the gospel and thereby offered an actual "free pass", to use your term, into heaven.

 

The TULIP doctrines are completely false from the first syllable to the last. They are not biblical any more than [any other false] doctrine is biblical. You can make a so called biblical argument to make washing dishes a sin or murder a virtue if that's what you really want to do but that doesn't mean that you've made an argument that is actually rationally and biblically sound.

The simplest proof of this is that that TULIP doctrines directly imply, and are at least partially predicated on, the idea that God is arbitrary.

The God of scripture is the opposite of arbitrary. Therefore, the TULIP doctrines are false.

Now, that is definitely a very very simplified argument. A more rigorous argument that took each of the five doctrines one at a time and in some detail would be required to assert dogmatically that their falsehood has been fully established, but the point is that this simplified version communicates the gist of one of the most powerful arguments against the Calvinist system. In short, if God is just, Calvinism is false.

Another, equally powerful argument is the fact that all of Calvinism - the entire system - is based on a single premise. That premise being the immutability of God. If God can change, in any way whatsoever, Calvinism (and any other system based on Augustinian doctrine including, but not limited to, Arminianism and Catholicism) is falsified.

There several are other arguments as well that mostly try to tackle individual doctrines and that don't necessarily wipe out the whole Calvinist construct. These arguments are mostly used by those who want to try to pick and choose which doctrines they like and want to hang onto and which they wish to discard. The Arminians (Free Will Baptists, Church of the Nazarene, Church of Christ, et. al) fall very much into this category.

In short, if their doctrine is correct, which ever way anyone wants to come at it, God has predestined me to not only believe in free will but to be very well practiced and quite good at crushing Calvinists to powder by the power of sound reason and the plain reading of God's word. (Matthew 21:44)