That contradicts what Catholics on the Religion Forum have said, what the Catechism says and what I experienced as a Catholic. It has always been presented as faith PLUS works for salvation. If it were really about a proper understanding of grace then there would be no question about OSAS. What you state about "free will" as counter to "predestination" double or otherwise shows that the truth of the Gospel of grace HAS been missed. How Scripture speaks of salvation certainly entails both justification and sanctification. We have been justified by faith in Christ, his blood has cleansed us from ALL sin. Our Cristian walk AFTER being justified is a life long process of God conforming us into the image of Christ. As far as sanctification - where it means sanctified or set apart - we have been and are as children of God indwelled with the Holy Spirit of promise. That Spirit is given as the "earnest of our inheritance" and we have been sealed unto the day of our redemption. The Holy Spirit does not leave us, therefore we can know we are saved and will be glorified.
Predestination, where someone is chosen before the foundation of the world to be saved while others are predetermined to be damned would indeed make us robots without free will, but that is not the predestination Scripture teaches. Because God is all-knowing, among his other attributes, he knew before the world existed who would come to him in faith and be saved. Those that he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ. This is not the same thing as saying God predestined who would be saved and who would be damned. I know some people believe it like that, but I do not.
So, do Christians sin after they are born again? Yes, and God says if we confess our sins he forgives and cleanses us from all unrighteousness, but whenever a child of God sins, they do not cease to be his child nor does the Holy Spirit depart. This is because we are not saved based upon our own merit or works but by his grace. When we receive Christ, believe in him, we are exercising faith. We accept the gift of eternal life. That faith is NOT a work in the sense of merit. It is an act of free will that believes. I won't fall for the line that faith is a work, because Scripture says it is not. Ephesians 2:8,9 says "By grace are ye saved through faith and that NOT of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast."
The idea that the doctrine of OSAS is based on a "movement" of faith alone, as if it is not found anywhere in Scripture, is flat out false. It most certainly IS Scriptural and did not come from a manmade tradition. In fact, if it WERE manmade, it's more than likely men would have made it by works in order that they CAN boast. That is our nature after all.
The issue of the Fathers of the church, if what you are saying is true, then Luther would not have invented Scripture Alone. It is because the Fathers looked so Catholic that he rejected them as an authority.
Luther did not invent sola Scriptura but it is both Scriptural as well as being held by nearly ALL of the early church fathers. The Reformation, if you have studied it objectively, was an attempt to change the Catholic Church BACK to its catholicity. From the site http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/04/historical-roots-of-reformation-and.html we learn:
"In fact, recent research on the Reformation entitles us to sharpen it and to say that the Reformation began because the reformers were too catholic in the midst of a church that had forgotten its catholicity. That generalization applies particularly to Luther and to some of the Anglican reformers, somewhat less to Calvin, still less to Zwingli, least of all to the Anabaptists. But even Zwingli, who occupies the left wing among the classical reformers, retained a surprising amount of catholic substance in his thought, while the breadth and depth of Calvin’s debt to the heritage of the catholic centuries is only now beginning to emerge….There was more to quote [from the church fathers] than their [the reformers'] Roman opponents found comfortable. Every major tenet of the Reformation had considerable support in the catholic tradition. That was eminently true of the central Reformation teaching of justification by faith alone….That the ground of our salvation is the unearned favor of God in Christ, and that all we need do to obtain it is to trust that favor – this was the confession of great catholic saints and teachers….Rome’s reactions [to the Protestant reformers] were the doctrinal decrees of the Council of Trent and the Roman Catechism based upon those decrees. In these decrees, the Council of Trent selected and elevated to official status the notion of justification by faith plus works, which was only one of the doctrines of justification in the medieval theologians and ancient fathers. When the reformers attacked this notion in the name of the doctrine of justification by faith alone – a doctrine also attested to by some medieval theologians and ancient fathers – Rome reacted by canonizing one trend in preference to all the others. What had previously been permitted also (justification by faith alone), now became forbidden.
In condemning the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent condemned part of its own catholic tradition….Interpreters of the New Testament have suggested a host of meanings for the passage [Matthew 16]. As Roman Catholic scholars now concede, the ancient Christian father Cyprian used it to prove the authority of the bishop – not merely of the Roman bishop, but of every bishop….So traumatic was the effect of the dogma of papal infallibility that the pope did not avail himself of this privilege for eighty years. But when he finally did, by proclaiming the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on November 1, 1950, he confirmed the suspicions and misgivings of the dogma’s critics. Not only is Scriptural proof obviously lacking for this notion, but the tradition of the early Christian centuries is also silent about it….In asserting their catholicity, the reformers drew upon the church fathers as proof that it was possible to be catholic without being Roman. Study of the fathers thus became an important part of the Protestant panoply as well. In fact, the very word 'patrology' as a title for a manual on the church fathers and their works is a Protestant invention, first used by Johann Gerhard (d. 1637).
When Protestant liberalism developed during the nineteenth century, one of its principal contributions to theological literature was its work on the fathers. The Patrology of the Roman Catholic scholar Johannes Quasten and an essay by the Jesuit scholar J. de Ghellinck both reveal the dependence even of Roman theologians upon the scholarly achievements of Protestant historians, the outstanding of whom was Adolf Harnack (d. 1930). Although the generation of theologians after Harnack has not been as interested in the field of patristic study, Protestants have not completely forgotten the heritage of the fathers. Meanwhile, Roman Catholics have begun to put an assessment upon the fathers that differs significantly from the traditional one. Instead of measuring the fathers against the standards of a later orthodoxy, Roman Catholic historians now interpret them in the context of their own time. This means, for example, that a church father like Origen is no longer interpreted on the basis of his later (and politically motivated) condemnation for heresy, but on the basis of his own writings and career….The study of the church fathers is now a predominantly Roman Catholic building, even though many of the foundations for it were laid by Protestant hands….the heritage of the fathers does not belong exclusively to either side. Roman Catholics must acknowledge the presence of evangelical or 'Protestant' ideas in Irenaeus, and Protestants must come to terms with the catholic elements in the same father." (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Riddle Of Roman Catholicism [Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1959], pp. 46-49, 51-52, 78, 83, 195-196)
The issue is free will. We are saved by faith. But God will not force us to love Him. No one can steal us away from the Father. But we can choose to reject Him, as unthinkable at that might be.
>>So, do Christians sin after they are born again? Yes, and God says if we confess our sins he forgives and cleanses us from all unrighteousness, but whenever a child of God sins, they do not cease to be his child nor does the Holy Spirit depart. This is because we are not saved based upon our own merit or works but by his grace. When we receive Christ, believe in him, we are exercising faith. We accept the gift of eternal life. That faith is NOT a work in the sense of merit. It is an act of free will that believes. I won't fall for the line that faith is a work, because Scripture says it is not. Ephesians 2:8,9 says “By grace are ye saved through faith and that NOT of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast.”
Absolutely initial Faith is a totally free gift, no works. But after wards we are accountable to that gift of faith. The scripture also says that we are save by faith working through love. Love is a verb and is action based.
>> The idea that the doctrine of OSAS is based on a “movement” of faith alone, as if it is not found anywhere in Scripture, is flat out false. It most certainly IS Scriptural and did not come from a man made tradition. In fact, if it WERE man made, it's more than likely men would have made it by works in order that they CAN boast. That is our nature after all.
Where in scripture?
>>The issue of the Fathers of the church, if what you are saying is true, then Luther would not have invented Scripture Alone. It is because the Fathers looked so Catholic that he rejected them as an authority.
Luther did not invent sola Scriptura but it is both Scriptural as well as being held by nearly ALL of the early church fathers. The Reformation, if you have studied it objectively, was an attempt to change the Catholic Church BACK to its catholicity. From the site http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/04/historical-roots-of-reformation-and.html we learn:
What are these references. I went to the link you provided, it offers a lot of opinion from unknown sources, I went to the old testament links, they talk a talk about the Septuagint but they are missing one critical component. The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament was used by Jesus and the Apostles.