Featured Baptism question

Is it possible to receive scriptural baptism -- which I believe is baptism of a believer by immersion -- without joining a church? Do you think there are pastors who would do this?

 

Doctrinal issues

 

I have been studying theology and church history for nearly five decades, including the Greek fathers and the early church. Nowhere in scripture or the early church is PSA taught or believed. I suggest it is you who needs an education in elementary principles of the atonement as held in scripture and the early church.

 

atonement doctrine, original sin, character of God, salvation, hell, the human condition

 

Look, my purpose in my last two threads is not to argue about the atonement. I am fully convinced beyond any doubt that neither the NT nor the early church teaches PSA or any of the later Western, Latin atonement theories. Anyone who sees PSA or any of the Western theories in the NT are interpreting the NT from a Western mindset and perspective which is absent in the first century church. For a millenium, the church held to the Eastern view of the atonement. That is an undeniable fact. The Western, Latin views began with RCC Anselm's Satisfaction theory and continued with the Protestant Reformers. All of these views were unknown in the early church and indeed in the church of the first 1000 years after Jesus. Again, this is historical and theological fact. Based on that, the question that RCC and Protestants need to ask themselves is what is their justification for changing the atonement views taught in the NT and the first 1000 years of church history. These are all non-scriptural innovations and thus false doctrine.

 

Orthodox and RCC have little in common. RCC and Protestants have more in common, as I have outlined several times on this forum. Both share a Western, Latin background, mindset, and soteriology. The RCC is the "mother church" of Protestantism; the Orthodox Church is not. So, if anyone holds to and teaches another Gospel, it is the RCC and the Protestants. It's amazing to me that Protestants don't realize how much they still share with the RCC even though they attempted to reform it.

 

Is this a joke?

 

Don't you realize that PSA is just an expanded and worse version of the Satisfaction theory invented by the Roman Catholic Anselm? The early church and the EOC never held PSA. Satisfaction theory is the seed and root of PSA, invented 1500 years after Christ by Protestant Reformers who didn't reform enough. They should have reformed the doctrine of atonement back to what it was in the NT and first century, and first millennium.

 

It's an undeniable fact of Christian history, a near universal consensus, that PSA and none of the theories developed in the West were present in the early church.

I never said nor believed that the fathers' writings are the word of God. What I am saying is that a knowledge of the early church and context are essential in correct interpretation of scripture. This leads me to the conclusion that Western interpretations are invalid if they do not line up with what the earliest churches believed and taught. To me, that's the danger of sola scriptura and why I prefer prima scriptura. Sola scriptura fails to take context into account.

But thank you for your post.