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To: D-fendr

Didn't miss it. Just glad they are leaving our denomination.


5,262 posted on 01/11/2007 6:51:53 PM PST by Blogger
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To: Blogger

They were you're denomination?


5,265 posted on 01/11/2007 7:45:53 PM PST by D-fendr
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To: Blogger

You earlier asked about Jimmy Carter's salvation. The answer is, of course, "I don't know". But this gives me an opportunity to clarify something that tends to be misunderstood in the Catholic teaching about the role of works in salvation.

As I hope I already made clear, works of legal or ceremonial obligation, works done for social or material reward do not have any salvific value, as St. Paul nmakes clear in Galatians, Romans, and elsewhere. The works that do count are often called works of love or works of charity (caritas is Latin for love). There are problems with either term in the way the modern context twists them. "Love" here is a theological virtue, meaning desire of salvation of others, or more generally desire for the good of the other, rightly understood. Modernity often understands love incorrectly as emotional attachment and permissive attitude. This connects to the profoundly un-Catholic modern relativism, which presumes that to love somebody means to be nice to them. This is not how love is understood in Catholic soteriology.

"Charity" means nothing other than the love as described above. The modern society offers ways for the governments to use taxation as an instrument of social engineering, and that is called charity. Even when taxpayer money is not used, a charity often becomes a tool of social recognition. The moment an act of theological love becomes forced through law, or is used as a photo-opportunity or any similar leverage by a politician, or generally is not seen as an act of love offered to God, it loses its salvific value. In application to President Carter, his visible role in supervising elections, or in the Habitat for Humanity, counts for him inasmuich as it conditions his heart in the love of God. Its high visibility can only be an obstacle in his road to salvation. At the same time, one doing the works of love is not asked to be a sociological or economical sage. The fact that some, if not all, works of Presidant Carter stem from errors of the political left does not in itself disqualify his works. This a politician who works toward a noble goal virtuously yet achieves the unintended and deleterious outcome as the left is prone to do, may do a lot of harm, but this work will not imperil his salvation as long as his heart is in the right place.


5,387 posted on 01/12/2007 10:16:58 AM PST by annalex
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