church of Christ

[steaver]

HP: Ro 12:3 For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.

I cannot help but think that verse might be appropriate to ponder Steaver.

Ponder away brother! :wavey:

 

[Heavenly Pilgrim]

Amy: Look at the word believe in this verse:

John*3:15 That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

pist-yoo'-o
From G4102; to have faith (in, upon, or with respect to, a person or thing), that is, credit; by implication to entrust (especially one’s spiritual well being to Christ): - believe (-r), commit (to trust), put in trust with.


This is what the word believeth means. It's not just a mental assent. The devil does NOT put his trust in Christ.


Also notice that those who put their trust in Christ (believe, have faith) will NOT perish.

HP: I agree that belief is no mental assent. It is the placing of ones trust in obedience to God’s commands. Obedience and trust go hand in hand. Trust and obedience take intents of the will formed voluntarily in conformance to His Word. Man must do something to place trust in Christ as well as to form intents in obedience to His initial call to repentance and then to active obedience. Man has to do something to voluntarily submit his will to God. As I have stated numerous times, that which man is called on to do is not meritorious in nature, but rather is always thought of in the sense of ‘not without which.’ We are NOT saved ‘for the sake of our repentance’ or ‘for the sake of our trust,’ or ‘for the sake of our obedience,’ but neither will any be saved apart from those things.

If I told you that I ‘should not’ do something, does that mean ‘I cannot’ or ‘I will not’ do it? ‘Should not’ does not mean or imply ‘cannot’ or ‘will not.’ Try re-reading John 3:16 as it actually reads, not how one might desire for it to read or tries to make it read.:thumbsup:

 

[Darron Steele]

Hold on here.

Alexander Campbell died in the 1860's. The Churches of Christ did not finalize their split from the Disciples of Christ/Christians until 1906.

Alexander Campbell was not the leader of the Churches of Christ. He was one of several leaders of the Restoration Movement.

Further, Alexander Campbell did not hold all of the views required to be fully acceptable in the Churches of Christ. In most Churches of Christ, the best he could expect would be a welcome to a seat.

The following essay disputes what you say:

The Religious Affiliation of
Alexander Campbell
Co-Founder of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement within American Protestantism

Alexander Campbell's family background was Presbyterian (they were from Scotland), but he and his father became Baptists in 1812. Campbell became a popular Baptist preacher and editor of a widely circulated paper, The Christian Baptist. Rejecting a variety of elements in the Baptist churches of his time, Campbell later formed the Churches of Christ denomination. Campbell rejected infant baptism and confessions of faith, especially the Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742). Campbell's maxim was "Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent."

From: Timothy George, "Southern Baptist Ghosts" in First Things No. 93 (May 1999): pages 17-24 (http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9905/george.html; viewed August 1999). [This essay is adapted from a lecture presented to the St. George Tucker Society at Emory University. The author is Dean of Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, and Senior Editor at Christianity Today]:

R. B. C. Howell (1801-1868) was one of the founders of the SBC [Southern Baptist Convention] in 1845. He served four terms as president of the Convention and was also pastor of the First Baptist Church of Nashville. Near the end of his ministry, he reviewed the history of Baptists in Tennessee and described the devastation wrought by these three movements:

Now for the third time within forty years, the desolation of Baptist churches in Tennessee was complete. They were first rent, overthrown, and destroyed by the violence of the controversy on the doctrine of predestination; they were secondly crushed and scattered by the "Reformation" of Mr. [Alexander] Campbell; they were thirdly severed and prostrated by the Landmark controversy. Scarcely had they begun to recover from one calamitous division when they fell into another. Will the Baptists of Tennessee ever be united, and labor together continuously in the cause of Christ?

The movements Howell mentioned were all led by powerful personalities, but they also dealt with basic issues of Baptist identity and Christian faith: namely, the balance of Scripture and tradition as norms of belief and practice (Campbellism); the nature of the true church and its identity markers (Landmarkism); and the reality of divine grace in the plan of salvation (hyper-Calvinism)...

Alexander Campbell was born in Ireland, educated in Scotland, and emigrated to Pennsylvania with his father, Thomas Campbell, where both were immersed as believers and affiliated with the Baptist denomination in 1812. The Campbells were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians by background, but after Alexander's wife, Dorothy, gave birth to their first child, they rejected infant baptism. Campbell was a popular speaker at Baptist gatherings and disseminated his ideas through a widely circulated paper he edited called the Christian Baptist.

The Campbell movement (the word "Campbellite" was a nickname coined in 1832) began as an effort to counteract the disunity of Christendom. Campbell's reforming movement was part of the larger restorationist impulse in American Protestantism. Campbell wanted to bring visible unity among all Christians and hence "restore" the true church by returning to the New Testament, which, he believed, contained a precise blueprint for church order and belief. Building on the earlier restorationist call of Barton W. Stone, Campbell led many erstwhile Baptists to leave their congregations and affiliate with his newly formed Churches of Christ.

The results of this schism are with us still; it is not uncommon to find Baptist and "Christian" [i.e., Stone-Campbellite] churches still facing one another across town squares and village lanes throughout Tennessee and Kentucky... Why did Campbell leave the Baptists after seventeen years of ministry among them? For one thing, Campbell's stark biblical literalism led to disagreements over many aspects of church life and ministerial order. Campbell opposed, for instance, the use of instrumental music in worship and refused to call ministers by officious-sounding titles such as "Reverend" or "Doctor."

Campbell also had serious soteriological differences with the Baptists. He taught a doctrine that sounded very much like baptismal regeneration, denying the direct agency of the Holy Spirit in conversion. Indeed, Campbell would often poke fun at Baptists who talked about "getting religion" or being convicted of sin and drawn to Christ by the work of the Spirit. For Baptist awakeners in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Wesleys, this smacked of heresy or even blasphemy, ruling out what the Baptists called "an immediate work of God's grace in the heart."

A still more serious breach between Campbell and his Baptist cohorts stemmed from his outright rejection of confessions of faith. Campbell viewed religious authority according to a simple maxim: "Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent."

...By the nineteenth century, Baptists had produced many... confessions, but the one against which Campbell directed most of his ire was the Philadelphia Confession of Faith, a document printed for the Philadelphia Baptist Association by Benjamin Franklin in 1742. By the 1830s it exerted a magisterial influence among Baptists North and South. At the founding meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, each of the 293 "delegates," as they were then called, who gathered in Augusta, Georgia, belonged to churches that embraced this confessional standard.

Although he was the most important opponent of confessions of faith, Campbell was not the first Baptist to oppose their use...

By the time of Campbell's death in 1866, Baptists and the Restorationists had already gone their separate ways. Yet the lingering influence of Campbell's legacy would continue to haunt Southern Baptists...

Baptists of the nineteenth century also rejected Campbell's strong anti-confessionalism. In the early part of the twentieth century, however, the ideal of American individualism was wedded to the Baptist concept of "soul competency" resulting in the triumph of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the infinitude of the private mind." Many contemporary Baptists would be surprised to learn that venerable shapers of the Baptist tradition such as Andrew Fuller, Richard Furman, B. H. Carroll, and even E. Y. Mullins often spoke in an affirming way of "the Baptist creed."

...It is ironic that Campbell's slogan, "No creed but the Bible," has become a shibboleth of Baptist identity among many of the denominational descendants of those who stoutly opposed it in Campbell's day.

http://www.adherents.com/people/pc/Alexander_Campbell.html

This essay does not concern me, as it is a second-hand source at best. It also seems to assume the same historical errors that many make, namely that Alexander Campbell was a founder of the Churches of Christ, and that the Restoration Movement = the Churches of Christ.

The first item:
I spent a total of over two years in the Churches of Christ. I still participate in one congregation thereof.

I have personal firsthand knowledge of what they are like.

I also have the most important work ever written by Alexander Campbell in my personal library. It is a 2001 reprint of his 1830's classic The Christian System.

I have a firsthand knowledge of his views.

I can assure you that some of his views would have put him in the `let him sit in a pew, but keep him mostly quiet' category in most Churches of Christ. I know this from firsthand experience of both his views and of the Churches of Christ.

The second item:
Also, these are historic facts: the Churches of Christ formalized their split from the Disciples/Christians via the 1906 census, and Alexander Campbell died in the 1860's.

Alexander Campbell was a leader of the Restoration Movement; he died too soon to be a member of the breakaway Churches of Christ -- even in the unlikely scenario he would have wanted to be.

 

[Amy.G]

If I told you that I ‘should not’ do something, does that mean ‘I cannot’ or ‘I will not’ do it? ‘Should not’ does not mean or imply ‘cannot’ or ‘will not.’ Try re-reading John 3:16 as it actually reads, not how one might desire for it to read or tries to make it read.:thumbsup:

Sigh.

Jhn 10:28 And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any [man] pluck them out of my hand.

Is that better?


How about this one?

Jhn 3:18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

 

[OldRegular]

I have a firsthand knowledge of his views.

How old are you? If you have firsthand knowledge of Campbell's views that would put you somewhere close to the age of Abraham when he died.:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

 

[Darron Steele]

How old are you? If you have firsthand knowledge of Campbell's views that would put you somewhere close to the age of Abraham when he died.:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Smart allac. :smilewinkgrin:

How much of his own work have you read? I have first hand knowledge of his own views from reading his own work -- something you show no sign of having done. Instead, you quoted somebody else about him.

As much as you do not like to admit it, you just did not know what you were talking about when you alleged him to be a leader of the Churches of Christ. However, we all make mistakes, and when one is shown to us, the responsible thing to do is accept it.

You compound your mistake by persisting in it -- and making a snooty comment to the person who brought it to your attention. These activities do not exactly project intellectual responsibility.

If you would actually read any significant portion of his own work, you would a choice of two options. One option: you would have to accept that his views on some issues very important to the Churches of Christ are substantially different. Your second option: lie. This would be your choice to make if you read any significant portion of his own work.

As for chronology, it is this simple: Alexander Campbell was not a leader in the Churches of Christ. He could not have been a leader of a religious group that did not exist in his lifetime. The Churches of Christ split away from the Disciples/Christians via the 1906 census, decades after his death.

The Churches of Christ as they exist today are due in large part to the influence of Daniel Sommer in the 1880s and afterward, and the leader of the actual 1906 split was David Lipscomb. Alexander Campbell had been dead since the 1860's.

 

[TCGreek]

HP: That is not the point TCG. I could not agree with you or the scriptures more on that point. No one is asking you to improve or deny that point of Scripture. I asked a completely different question. If you do not desire to answer it, that is your choice. I asked you , “Does God’s grace, in and of itself, determine the outcome?”


I hope you will try once again to answer the question directly. Can we reason together?

Yes, God's grace determines who is saved. It is what brings salvation to all people. It is by which we are saved (Titus 2:11; Eph 2:8).

 

[JSM17]

Yes, God's grace determines who is saved. It is what brings salvation to all people. It is by which we are saved (Titus 2:11; Eph 2:8).

1 Tim 2:3-4
3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior,
4 who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
NKJV

I am wondering that if God wants all men to be saved then why does he not extend His grace to all men to be saved if He has determines who sahll be saved?

Them what do we call the people that God does not extend His grace to, since ther will be people lost and God desires tht all men be saved, yet not all saved, what happens?

 

[annsni]

1 Tim 2:3-4
3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior,
4 who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
NKJV

I am wondering that if God wants all men to be saved then why does he not extend His grace to all men to be saved if He has determines who sahll be saved?

Them what do we call the people that God does not extend His grace to, since ther will be people lost and God desires tht all men be saved, yet not all saved, what happens?

Who can know the mind of God?

Are we, the clay, powerful enough to tell the potter what to do?

We call those that God does not extend His grace to ..... lost.

 

[Heavenly Pilgrim]

Ann: We call those that God does not extend His grace to ..... lost.

HP: Is that code words, or simply a nice way of saying, those that God predestined to damnation? Sounds like double predestination to me...and to Calvin as well.

 

[OldRegular]

This thread will soon close but I want to make one observation. The Church of Christ is misnamed because it teaches a false doctrine of baptismal regeneration and that God cannot eternally secure the Salvation of those for whom Jesus Christ died. I do not doubt that it teaches other false doctrines but these two are enough to disqualify it as a Church of Jesus Christ.

 

[Dr. Timo]

I guess I didn't get in on this thread much. Oh well:tongue3: :laugh:
I was raised a Lutheran and sprinkled as a baby. The only baptism required for a person to go to heaven is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The ordinance of water baptism is the first important step of obedience for the believer but it is not required to be saved!!!:thumbsup: :jesus:

 

[OldRegular]

As for chronology, it is this simple: Alexander Campbell was not a leader in the Churches of Christ. He could not have been a leader of a religious group that did not exist in his lifetime. The Churches of Christ split away from the Disciples/Christians via the 1906 census, decades after his death.

You may be correct. I do know that back in Eastern Tennessee the people in the Church of Christ were called Campbellites. [It was them old Baptists.:smilewinkgrin:] Perhaps they were wrong or perhaps your knowledge is not as extensive as you think. :smilewinkgrin:

 

[OldRegular]

I guess I didn't get in on this thread much. Oh well:tongue3: :laugh:
I was raised a Lutheran and sprinkled as a baby. The only baptism required for a person to go to heaven is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The ordinance of water baptism is the first important step of obedience for the believer but it is not required to be saved!!!:thumbsup: :jesus:

Well said!

 

[annsni]

HP: Is that code words, or simply a nice way of saying, those that God predestined to damnation? Sounds like double predestination to me...and to Calvin as well.

No code words and no predestination to hell. All are headed to hell - God didn't predestine that. It's just a fact. It's that NONE are righteous, no not one. Yet by God's grace, some are saved. It's not like He's taking people who COULD be saved and sending them to hell. It's their choice in their sinful nature.

 

[DHK]

This thread will soon close .

That in itself was a good observation.
This thread, having reached 30 pages needs to close. Please feel free to start another.