Posted on 08/27/2010 11:45:13 AM PDT by Hank Kerchief
Here’s the deal Roman Catholics don’t understand because their church has blinded them.
When a belief, practice or article of faith is explicitly taught in Scripture, it is incumbent for the Christian to follow that belief, practice or article of faith.
When not specifically spelled out in Scripture, the Christian has the liberty of conscience to follow that conscience.
Scripture does not clearly spell out the fate of babies who die in infancy. Therefore, we look to the rest of Scripture to formulate an opinion. And it’s just that. An opinion.
I’m content to believe babies who die in infancy go to heaven. I can certainly understand the alternate view that some may go to heaven and others might not.
But Scripture is very clear that there is no such thing as Limbo. Limbo is a figment of Rome’s over-active imagination. It is flagrantly false. It is a lie. And it leads to other errors.
AMEN!
Because it is understandable to believe infants are saved exactly the same way any man is saved -- not by works, but by grace.
Men can't earn their salvation. Infants can't earn their salvation.
It's all grace. Free and unmerited.
You can’t see it, but you just basically re-stated the Catholic approach to the question of scripture and infant death. Currently we lean, based, as you do, on other scripture, that God calls children to him.
However, for many Reformed, problem of infant death is only magnified by their doctrine, specifically the Westminster Confession of Faith.
The question of the death of children exposes the problem with the doctrine. To be consistent with doctrine your “free” belief must mean that only elect children die young and reprobate children never die young.
Such as?
I am not sure what you are referring to. Judaism believes that the messiah (the anointed one), or meshiyah, will accomplish among other things, the gathering of the scattered Jewish diaspora in "all four corners of the world" and bringing them back to Israel. Therefore the Jewish messianic mission is focused only on the Jews, the physically and spiritually lost sheep of the Jewish nation that wondered off.
If what the NT says is true, then something really doesn't fit. After all, Samaritans would have been first on the list, yet Jesus strictly prohibits his disciples going there! The Samaritan schism happened only a few hundred years prior and bringing them back into the fold would have given Israel a significant numerical advantage.
Not only would he know that but the nature of his innovations are simply not something an observant Jew (of any persuasion) would say, such as "I cam not to abolish the law but to fulfill it." I mean, to a Jew that is asinine.
The Jews believe that the Torah was written by God before Creation (not by Moses; Moses only received the Law by dictation). The OT itself says the Law is eternal, and is to be observed forever, and as such cannot be fulfilled. Oy!
It's not just frowning, he would have been stoned long before he had a chance to be crucified, and being associated with him would have been equal to crime, so all his disciples owuld have ended up on crosses too, or at least stoned to death. Stoning someone to death for even lesser things was not unheard of.
We all commit sins. Calvin and Scripture remind us that those who end up in heaven have had their sins paid for by Christ by the grace of God.
Men cannot earn their salvation. Infants cannot earn their salvation.
All of grace.
According to your Confession of Faith, you’re fate is determined in the womb, without any regard to anything.
It is a clear description of an unjust, capricious god. For every infant, child, man and woman.
If you teach this god to children, IMHO, it is just cruelty.
Paul addresses the points you raised regarding the Jewish expectations of Messiah and the reality that the law must be written on the hearts (in the Person of His Holy Spirit indwelling the human spirit) for no man can keep the whole law blameless, with his letter to the Romans and in his first letter to the Church at Corinth. As to the Jews, their current blindness serves God's purposes. He will lift the scales from their minds in His own good timing.
I’ll make it as clear and real as I can:
Could you stand up in front of a classroom of children and tell them:
Some of you sitting there are “foreordained to everlasting death.” God foreordained you to hell. And He hates you.
Could you do that?
No. No one would. For all I know every single one of those children are predestined to heaven.
I’m a postmillenialist. I believe more and more Christians is the ordained plan of God.
It’s a wheat field; not a tares field.
As far as any of us knows, every single person alive today could be among the elect.
We only have the evidence of the fruit they bear. And even then, tomorrow might be the day God has ordained that He would send the Holy Spirit to turn their eyes from sin to God.
You just never know. So we preach the Gospel to all men, and trust God for all the rest.
Romans 11:28 As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, 29for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. 30Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, 31so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. 32For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.
The legend (or "recollections" of Talmudic rabbis) says he lived to be 120 years (BC 110 - AD 10), like Moses. However, the Jewish sources, while admitting that Jesus may have been influenced by Hillel, provides a broader answer than Hillel does (who only mentions the brother love among Jews).
Correct. The Jews were not allowed to be intimate with foreigners, to eat with them, etc. They were considered profane. Their food was "unclean." Their gods were offensive to the Hebrew God, etc. Moreover, Leviticus specifically states that a Jew may not own a slave who is a Jew. But owning slaves who are not Jews was like owning property. The slaves and their children were part of the inheritance. It's all in the Old Testament.
That's why no observant Jew would seek to equate Jews with Gentiles. That is simply part of the Christian myth that was fabricated.
Pope Benedict tells of an interesting detail that occurred in 6 and 9 AD, but I am surprised he doesn't say that formal schism occurred at the time of the Babylonian captivity, circa 6th century BC.
I'm very glad to hear that. I'd keep them from reading Chapter 3 of the Westminster Confession as well. :)
You just never know. So we preach the Gospel to all men
Logically, again, it doesn't fit with your Confession. You are out of the equation - they are predestined.
As far as any of us knows, every single person alive today could be among the elect.
That, I believe, is the only way to get any kind of good and loving God from double predestination. Obviously, I think, we both would have problems with universalism, but it would at least avoid the beast of a god who foreordains a human fetus to hell "without any foresight of faith, or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature, as conditions, or causes"
As far as someone else knows, "every single person alive today" could be among the doomed as well. IF they believe the same Confession as you. Both statements are correct as far as the doctrine is concerned. As would be the in between of some are doomed, some are saved, for no "cause" from the womb.
God is either a universalist saviour or some measure of beast.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but are you interpreting this to mean:
God’s judgement is based on the actions of our ancestor’s actions; and,
God made us “bad” so he would have something to have mercy on.
?
Sure it could. it was not known to the entire Church for at least 300 years and to the east much longer.
Between Augustine and Anselm the Western Church became unrecognizable to the traditional East.
And Gregory of Nyssa at one point believed in heretical notion of the universal salvation he picked up from Origen, only to change his mind later on. The point is Cassian is not a heretic, just as Gregory of Nyssa isn't, or Augustine (he retracted many of his confessions, if you get a chance read his Retractions, not an easy book to find in stores), but Origen's and Pelagian teachings are.
The consensus patrum never accepted Pelagius or Augustine and their teachings never became Church-wide doctrine. The Church was never Pelagian. Augustinian beliefs subsisted in the West out of sight and out of mind of the East. When they were finally brought to the East they were flatly rejected.
Indeed, but the duty to raise the children in the ways of God applies to the fathers.
Exactly. Calvin believed otherwise...I guess he wasn't a real Calvinist! LOL.
D-fendr,
Do “you believe you can earn your way to heaven”?
Is this a correct assumption/presumption of what you believe?
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