Red Herring and straw man fallacies.
I did not say you do not believe in salvation by grace through faith. I am not attacking your beliefs about conditional security. That's a red herring.
I am pointing out that according to Thomas C. Oden, himself an Arminian of the Wesleyan persuasion, that there was a very clear teaching in the pre-Reformation period regarding the imperishability, indefectability, and perpetuity of the visible church. These things were true of the visible church, not because she would do these things herself, but because God would preserve her in such a way that this would always be true. Oden sums up their teaching by saying, 'Grace does not coerce, but neither does it bat zero in any given season." In other words, it is impossible for the church to lapse into total apostasy and thus completely disappear. God desires all men to be saved, and He has entrusted the gospel to His people, therefore, in order for this to happen, the Church itself is indefectable, perpetual, and imperishable. This is throughout the writings of Cyril, Gregory of Nazianzen, and Anasthasius, among others. Modern theologians do not deny that this was the teaching of the early church fathers about the visible church.
These same exact concepts are the concepts that underlie the doctrine of perseverance of the saints. You would have us believe that there was no understanding of these concepts at all. That simply is untrue. It is a distortion of the facts. These ideas are the ideas that men like Calvin and Knox, et.al. would say applied to individual believers, not the visible church. They would apply them to the invisible church not the visible church alone. They would also redefine the visible church to not include the corpus mixtum.
Their predecessors, on the other hand, prior to the Reformation, did include these persons in the invisible church. Ambrose said that the church was composed of both, in that there were those who were baptised who were unresponsive to grace, but nevertheless they were part of the church and thus regenerate. The pre-Reformation fathers did so based on synecdoche in their exegetical reasoning. They did this very freely. The whole of a thing was spoken of as a part or a part of the whole. Thus, they taught conditional security in light of this. The church as a whole could be taught as imperishable, indefectable, and perpetual, but not the salvation of individuals, who could fall away. By synecdoche, the visible church,the hagian ekklesian, which was imperishable, indefectible, and perpetual, was inclusive of all persons who had received baptism and were thus regenerate, but not all of them would persevere and thus would "lose their salvation," while the church as a whole would never lose it and could never do so.
The Reformers did not do this. They reasoned that the whole can not be greater than the sum of its parts. They did not employ this kind of thinking in their writing, thus, the ideas regarding perpetuity, imperishability, and indefectablity could be interpreted, rightly, with respect to individuals themselves. They agreed that the visible church might include unbelievers, but the invisible church never would and that both were imperishable, indefectible, and perpetual, the former because it included all true believers and the latter because God would see to it that they would never fully and completely fall away, and, if they did, they were not truly regenerate at all.
Thus, very clear, the doctrine of perseverance of the saints was, in fact, alive and well in the pre-Reformation church, but it was applied only in one direction, towards the visible church as an institution. At the time of the Reformation, it was applied to individuals, in part, because of the excision of synecdoche from free use in exegesis.
Now, as for the inclusion of Ernst Käsemann in your views, correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't he a follower of Bultmann, and, if so, are you also in agreement with Bultmann's views?
