Posted on 07/31/2002 12:36:33 PM PDT by JMJ333
That is a false statement, and revisionist history.
Neither Calvin nor Luther *rejected* the book of Revelation, they merely ignored it and refused to focus on, or write any commentaries on it, because they didn't understand it. God had them focusing on getting back to the origional teaching of justification (salvation) through God's gift of faith alone.
Shr: "...Luther placed Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation at the end of the New Testament in his translation because he considered them non-canonical, rather than because of any reverence to the special nature of Revelation."
That is another false statement and revisionist history.
Even though Luther was troubled by those four books, Jude, James, Hebrews, and Revelation, and though he placed them in a secondary position relative to the rest, he did not exclude them.
John Calvin said it is God Himself, via the Holy Spirit who assures the transmission of the text down through the ages, not the human efforts of the Catholic Church or any other group. (Hannah, Notes, 3.7). Calvin rests the authority of the Scripture on the witness of the Spirit and the conscience of the godly. He wrote in his Institutes:
"Let it therefore be held as fixed, that those who are inwardly taught by the Holy Spirit acquiesce implicitly in Scripture; that Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit. Enlightened by him, we no longer believe, either on our own judgment or that of others, that the Scriptures are from God; but, in a way superior to human judgment, feel perfectly assured as much so as if we beheld the divine image visibly impressed on it that it came to us, by the instrumentality of men, from the very mouth of God." ~~
An Eschatology of Grace by Prof. David J. Engelsma, A.B., B.D., Th.M.
"That the Reformation recovered the gospel of grace and, in connection with this, the sole authority of Holy Scripture is well known.
But did the Reformation say anything distinctive about the last things? Did it do much with eschatology at all? Does it not betray the Reformation's lack of interest in the last things that both Luther and Calvin neglected, indeed refused, to write a commentary on the book of Revelation?
To be sure, there was the rejection of purgatory. That was definitely important for eschatology. But other than this, did the Reformation really influence the church's doctrine of the last things?
To all which, the reply is: "Do you, as a Reformed believer, confidently expect to be with Christ at the moment of your death? Do you look forward, without fear, to the coming of Christ as judge in the final judgment? And is this assurance concerning the future your own in a personal, experiential way-the way of heartfelt, living faith in the promise of God?"
You owe this hope (for this is what the positive answer to the questions is) to the Reformation.
The Reformation set the biblical truths of the last things, particularly the second coming of Christ for judgment and the death of the believer, in the joyful light of the gospel of grace. This was a radical reformation of the church's teaching on the last things.
Day of Wrath, Day of Mourning
The medieval church had plunged eschatology into the gloomy shadows of its gospel of salvation by the will, works, and worth of man. It taught the people to view their death and the coming of Christ for judgment as divine reckoning on the basis of their own works and worthiness.
This was an eschatology of terror.
It terrified the people. The attitude of the people toward the Day of Christ was that of the popular hymn, "Dies irae, dies illa" ("Day of wrath, day of mourning"). The paintings of the middle ages vividly portrayed the terrifying eschatology of a gospel of works. A fearsome Christ descends upon the cowering people.
In no small degree, this explains the popularity of the cult of Mary in the developing Roman church.
Representing a god of works and merit, Jesus Christ was frightening to the members of the church. Mary, on the other hand, was seen (and preached up) as a sinner's only hope-another gross insult to Jesus Christ, who "hath loved us, and hath given himself for us" (Eph. 5:2).
The attitude of Martin Luther before his conversion toward death and the judgment was typical. The thunderstorm near Stotternheim not only terrified him with the prospect of death but also drew from him the vow to become a monk.
His fear of death was rooted in the notion that only his own works and worth could satisfy a wrathful God. In the monastery, he dreaded judgment and judge with the result that he intensified his feverish efforts to earn acquittal.
The whole of eschatology was a doctrine of damnation and dread. The cause was the false gospel of righteousness by man's own works.
Day of Grace, Day of Laughter
The gospel-truth of justification by faith alone thoroughly revised eschatology. The basis of the final judgment will not be the sinner's own works and worth on account of his free will, but only the perfect work of Jesus Christ on his behalf.
In the final judgment, the life-long obedience and atoning death of Jesus Christ will be imputed to the sinner through the faith that God gives him.
Indeed, the decisive verdict has already been uttered: the "not guilty" of the gospel, heard by faith. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, for the believing sinner to fear in the coming of Christ for judgment.
On the contrary, there is everything to anticipate!
The judge comes to vindicate the righteous believer publicly, before the world. The judgment will finally bestow the reward of grace, so eagerly desired throughout the burdened and afflicted pilgrimage of the godly: eternal life and glory of soul and body in a renewed creation. And for the enjoyment of both public vindication in the judgment and everlasting bliss as the outcome of the judgment, the body of the elect believer will be raised from the grave into immortal life.
Who would not long for the Day of Christ as the day of grace, the day of laughter. Luther called the day of Christ's coming "the most happy Last Day."
The church of the Reformation could again pray, "Come, Lord Jesus."
The good hope of gracious salvation extends to the believing sinner's death. The gospel of grace dispels the nightmare of purgatory, which Luther, in the Schmalkald Articles, called a "noxious pest" and the "excrement of idolatry."
How can there be any remaining torment of punishment for one in whose stead Christ died with His all-sufficient death as the gift of a gracious God? The Christian can again face death with calm confidence, indeed desire death, as does the apostle in Philippians 1:21-24. Grace compels the king of terrors to become the believer's helpful servant.
The effect of the gospel upon eschatology is reflected in the change of Luther's attitude toward death. Whereas under the malign influence of the gospel of works he had been terrified at death, as a believer in a gracious God he welcomed death.
We must accustom and discipline ourselves to despise death in faith and to regard it as a deep, strong, and sweet sleep. We must consider the coffin as nothing more than the bosom of our Lord, or paradise, the grave as nothing more than a downy bed on which to lay ourselves. . . . Death and grave mean nothing more than that God neatly lays you as a child in his cradle or soft little bed where you sweetly sleep until the day of judgment.
Luther prayed, "Help us not to fear but to desire death." He confessed, "We should be happy to be dead and desire to die."
Viewing the death of the believer in the light of the grace of salvation in Christ, Calvin rejected the doctrine of soul-sleep. This was the purpose of his first theological work, Psychopannychia, dating from 1534. For Calvin, the teaching that the soul of the believer falls asleep at death is a miserable error because it implies disruption of our communion with Christ. It sins against grace.
But we must not suppose that biblical eschatology in the light of grace only enables us to die in peace and to await the coming of Christ without fear.
It also empowers us to live. The gospel of works paralyzes the guilty sinner. Or it drives him to work with the motive and demeanor of a slave. The gospel of grace moves the justified sinner to work, with grateful love, in the hope of Christ's coming. In the hope of Christ's coming!
Not only did the Reformation put all of eschatology under the sign of grace, but it also made eschatology, that is, the second coming of Christ, the goal of the life of the Christian and of the history of the church.
Not this life with its trinkets and pleasures, not the dream-world of an earthly millennium, but the resurrection of the body at the coming of Christ must be the one, lively, steady, intense purpose of every Christian and of the church.
John Calvin gave sharpest expression to this practical aspect of biblical eschatology in that section of his Institutes where he treated eschatology: "He alone has fully profited in the gospel who has accustomed himself to continual meditation upon the blessed resurrection" (3.25.1).
This total recasting of eschatology in the light of grace is evident in the Reformation creeds. "What comfort is it to you that 'Christ shall come again to judge the quick and the dead?' asks the Heidelberg Catechism in Q. 52. This question was unthinkable for the apostatizing church prior to the Reformation, as it is for the Roman Catholic Church today.
The answer of every Reformed believer is that he positively "look(s) for" the coming Christ as judge, to "translate me with all his chosen ones to himself, into heavenly joys and glory." The ground of the comfort is indicated: Christ the judge has "before offered himself for my sake, to the tribunal of God, and has removed all curse from me."
In the same spirit, Article 37 of the Belgic Confession declares with a fervor that the medieval church would have thought madness that Reformed Christians "expect that great day with a most ardent desire."
As for death, the Heidelberg Catechism says that the death of believers "is not a satisfaction for our sin, but only an abolishing of sin and a passage into eternal life" (Q. 42). In Q. 57, the Catechism has every believer confessing that "my soul after this life shall be immediately taken up to Christ its head."
Get Up, Dr. Martin!
Not to be overlooked in this Reformation-hope for the coming of Christ is the fact that every believer is personally assured that he himself, as one of the justified, shares the hope.
Certain later traditions, under the influence of teaching that urges saints to engage in doubtful introspection, devote enormous amounts of time and ink to demonstrating that a few in the church can finally arrive at their own personal assurance. The effect, often, is to spread still more doubt.
This is foreign to the Reformation, which simply assumes that every believer will be certain that he shares the hope of the coming of Christ. Faith is both a certain, or assured, knowledge and a hearty confidence. What this faith believes is the gospel of grace.
Thus, the Spirit works assurance in every believer, so that he is no more terrified at death than he is at the prospect of falling asleep and no more apprehensive of the coming of Christ than he is of the arrival of a dear brother.
The lively, spontaneous, personal assurance of every believer regarding his own death and Christ's coming for him, Luther expressed in a touching way: "We must sleep until He comes and knocks at our little grave and exclaims, 'Dr. Martin, get up!' Then in the twinkling of an eye I shall rise again and will rejoice with him eternally."
But this is a reality only under the gospel of grace.
In the Roman Catholic Church, this is an impossibility, as Rome itself acknowledges. A gospel that bases salvation on man's own will, works, and worth denies to all any certainty of salvation in the face of death and the judgment.
An eschatology of terror!
This same terror characterizes most of Protestantism today. Embracing Rome's basic theology of free will, Arminian evangelicals and fundamentalists put their people in doubt whether they will be saved at Christ's coming.
Other Protestants are showing themselves careless with regard to the comfort in the face of death and judgment that is only possible under the gospel of grace. These are the men who have compromised the Reformation's doctrine of justification by faith alone in the movement, Evangelicals and Catholics Together. These are also the theologians and churches that tolerate the heresy of free will and conditional salvation.
As for us, living and dying in peace is of some importance.
We are determined, therefore, to confess the blessed gospel of salvation by grace alone. We are also determined to curse, damn, and repudiate the false gospel of salvation by the will and works of man.
Here we stand!
See my reply to that in my previous post. Now I will make this point:
God is the only author of Scripture. People have the choice to reject it or accept it. The fact that some do reject some or all of it, changes nothing. Here are the facts:
(OT) Moses warned the people: "You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it ...". [Deut.4:2]
(NT) John warned the people of the same thing. [Rev.22:18-19, and elsewhere such as Hebrews]
The greatest Jewish historian of the first century, Josephus, (born c. A.D. 37/38), knew of the writings now considered part of the "Apocrypha", but he (and many of his contemporaries) considered these other writings "not ... worthy of equal credit" with what we now know as the Old Testament Scriptures. To Josephus, no more "words of God" were added to Scripture after about 435 BC.
There is no record in the NT of any disputes between Jesus and the Jews over the extent of the OT canon verifying the fact that additions to the OT canon had ceased after the time of Ezra, Nehemiah, Ester, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
This FACT is confirmed by quotations of Jesus and the NT authors from the OT. They quoted OT Scriptures over 295 times, but NOT EVEN ONCE do they cite any statement from the books of the Apocrypha or ANY OTHER WRITINGS as having divine authority.
Clement of Rome said in first century, "Look carefully into the Scriptures, which are the true utterances of the Holy Spirit".
Irenaeus, in his work Against Heresies, wrote: "The Scriptures are indeed perfect, since they were spoken by the Word of God [Christ] and His Spirit".
In 365, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, listed the complete twenty-seven books of the New Testament which he regarded as the "only source of salvation and of the authentic teaching of the religion of the Gospel" (Hannah, Notes, 2.6). While Athanasius stands out in the Eastern Church, Jerome is his counterpart in the West. Jerome wrote a letter to Paulinus, bishop of Nola in 394 listing just 39 O.T. books and our current 27 N.T. ones. The Synods of Carthage in 397 and 418 both confirmed our current twenty-seven books of the NT.
JEROME, author of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible (completed in A.D.404) included the Aprocrypha in his translation, but plainly said that they were not "books of the canon" but merely "books of the church" that were helpful and useful to believers.
The earliest Christian list of OT books that exists today is by Melito, bishop of Sardis [A.D. 170]. He listed all the OT books we have today with the exception of Esther. (There is an explanation for that - and that exception, advocated by a small minority, was eventually resolved). Melito, however, listed NONE of the books of the Apocrypha.
Eusebius quoted Origen as affirming most of the books of our present OT (INcluding Esther), but NO BOOK OF THE APROCRYPHA is affirmed as canonical, and the books of Maccabees are EXPLICITLY said to be outside of the canonical books.
And in A.D. 367, when Athanasius wrote his Paschal Letter, he listed all the books of our present NT canon and all the books of our present OT canon (except Esther).
He mentioned some of the books of the Aprocrypha, but also plainly said at the same time, that these are "not indeed included in the Canon...".[Athanasius, Letter 39].
It was not until 1546 at the Council of Trent, that the Roman Catholic Church officially declared most of the Aprocrypha to be a part of the canon.
They only did it then as an hysterical attempt to defend their teachings about prayers for the dead, justification by faith PLUS works, not by faith alone, etc., which God (through Martin Luther and the others he was using to REFORM his church) was exposing as heretical lies.
In affirming the Apocrypha as within the canon, Rome held that the Roman Catholic Church has the authority to constitute a literary work --- mere human words--- as "Scripture".
God says that we may only recognize as Scripture what he has ALREADY CAUSED TO BE WRITTEN as his own words.
God's words to his prophets in the OT and to his apostles in the NT are "Scripture" -- "The Word of God" in print. The closed canon of Scripture.
Accept it --- or reject it.
Then why has the Church condemned semi Pelagianism just as she has condemned Pelagianism??
She also sold days off purgatory for a few bucks..so the work of another can get you in too ( Do they still "pray" indulgences" to get folks out? ) That is not the work of Christ it is the work of man
Jhn 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
1Jo 4:19 We love him, because he first loved us.
Even Jesus, although he was without sin, had to learn obedience through suffering:
So Jesus was NOT complete? God had something He had to learn and THAT is why He had to suffer..funny I thought He suffered and died for us..not because HE had to learn anything!
Rom 8:32 He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
1Ti 1:15 This [is] a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.
Not to "learn "obedience
2Cr 5:19 To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.
You are sounding like the LDS doctrine of progression
God loves us so much in your theology that He planned an incomplete sacrifice for our sins and then burns us for a while to finish what His plan couldn't??
Heb 5,8 "And whereas indeed he was the Son of God, he learned obedience by the things which he suffered"
Thankfully he suffered so I wouldn't have to.
If the process of growth to the maturity of the sons of God is not finished in our earthly sanctification, then it will be as we draw closer to the Heavenly Glory of God.
So in other words we will have the opportunity after we die to have Christ's sacrafice work.
I think the fact that Jesus had to experience all that man does and to fulfil a law that we could not fulfil gets lost in all this..He became perfect obedience for ME because I can not be perfectly obedient
Think of the God of the universe that speaks things into existance. That has never had to be obedient to another, suddenly needs to be obedient to His creation. He has to learn to be obedient, so that He can fulfil the atonement of HIS creation.
A very humbling thought. The God of creation had to learn obedience to save me. He is my obedience, He is my righteousness, He is my holiness." In Him I live and move and have my being"
Once agian you take scripture OUT OF Context to attempt to prove purgatory when that is NOT what is being taught by Paul
Lets look at it in its fullness
Hbr 12:2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of [our] faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Note the opening Paul is teaching that Jesus is the author and the FINISHER of our fait
Hbr 12:3 For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.
Hbr 12:4 Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.
Hbr 12:5 And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him:
Hbr 12:6 For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
Lets continue on to see Pauls point (not YOUR point)
Hbr 12:7 If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?
Paul is speaking here of current correction and current correction not after death
Hbr 12:8 But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.
Hbr 12:9 Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected [us], and we gave [them] reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?
Hbr 12:10 For they verily for a few days chastened [us] after their own pleasure; but he for [our] profit, that [we] might be partakers of his holiness.
Hbr 12:12 Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees;
Paul is speaking of the correction that God gives each of us in our walk..and says it is a reason to worship God
Context!
Come on...there is no way you think that statement true.
Foxes Book of Martyrs is to history what Green Acres was to agriculture
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