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K:If you believe you are the elect, no matter what you do you are forgiven already. It's a religion tailor-made to man's taste.

Everytime I see this type of thinking I realize how weak the EO and RC believe GOD to be. It has been made very clear by EO and RC posters that your church does not believe in the power of the HOLY SPIRIT to transform the inner heart of the elect.

Mark 1:8 I indeed baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

John 14:16-17 And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that he may abide with you forever-the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

The whole problem is that of the concept of the elect.

The logical extension of such a concept is that the elect may do as they wish since they are going to be saved. Futher, the non-elect may do as they wish since they are not going to be saved.

But it flies in the face of the Biblical concept that all men are called to God, that God wishes hell on nobody, and that it is by your actions whether you accept or reject God. Do you have responsibility for your actions?

The premise of the elect automatically relegates us to irresponsibility, which contradicts great swathes of the Gospels, never mind the entire Bible.

Everytime I see this type of thinking I realize how weak the EO and RC believe GOD to be.

Exactly. I don't think weak is the word as much as deliberately and calculatingly impotent. God creates everyone to go to heaven, but he has no power on his own to save anyone, instead he lets all men have a choice in whether or not to save themselves.

I see nobody bothered to answer the question of "Why would a loving God give men free will"? The fact of the matter is that if men have free will, the only way they can be saved is to jettison that free will, since free will is nothing more than an albatross around men's necks.

Catholics seem to worship the idea of free will rather than the omnipotence of God. To Catholics the scriptures are murky, God is impotent and FREE WILL reigns inviolate and supreme on the throne.

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It has been made very clear by EO and RC posters that your church does not believe in the power of the HOLY SPIRIT to transform the inner heart of the elect.

Amen!

It's been said the Reformation was a rediscovery of the truth of the indwelling Holy Spirit in the lives of God's children.

And foremost in that rediscovery after centuries of denial was John Calvin and reformers such as John Owen...

JOHN OWEN On The Spirit In The Life Of Christ

"...He (Owen) realised that central to the Reformation's rediscovery of the gospel had been the place, person and power of the Spirit. He saw (as Warfield later did) that Calvin was the theologian of the Holy Spirit. This was what made reformed Christianity different. In this point at least he might well have agreed with the view of Edmund Campion (the famous sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary in England) that the greatest difference between Rome and Geneva lay in the doctrine of the person and work of the Spirit.
Why should this be the case? Because the Reformation's emphasis on the ministry of the Spirit took salvation out of the hands of the Church and put it back where it belonged, in the hands of God!..."