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To: chajin

And people say Catholics split hairs...

Reread the article. He deals with this by pointing out the parable of the debtor. Was he forgiven by his master? Whether in time, for all time, or at one time... he was. Should he then have forgiven others? Yes. Did he fail? Yes. Was he ‘unforgiven’? Yes.

This parable answers your complicated challenge.


8 posted on 02/25/2015 12:29:53 PM PST by pgyanke (Republicans get in trouble when not living up to their principles. Democrats... when they do.)
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To: pgyanke
This parable answers your complicated challenge.

Let's assume that the parable exemplifies what it seems to exemplify, that the king represents God, the servant with the huge debt represents me, and the man who is indebted to me represents my neighbor.

The two men with the debts can be interchangeable with their representations: I can be just like the servant, and my neighbor can be just like the one indebted to the servant.

But the king cannot be interchangeable with God, because the king is a man. As a man, the king gives forgiveness one day, and then removes it the next, because his experience of his own life is temporal, and the experience of the king's actions by others can only be seen temporally.

God, on the other hand, already knows, before offering forgiveness for my debt, whether I will be willing to forgive others, and thereby allow the forgiveness to "take" as salvation--otherwise, God is neither omniscient nor omnipresent. One might go a step further, based on Ephesians 2:8-10, and surmise that God already has acted in my life to both enable and cause my forgiveness of my neighbor--or, for that matter, enabled but not caused, while knowing whether or not I will cause the forgiveness. These are both possible, and it is therefore not hairsplitting: it is letting God be God, and not entrapping God as nothing more than a temporal king, someone who can act with authority, but who is entrapped in time.

14 posted on 02/25/2015 12:44:02 PM PST by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)
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