Posted on 10/18/2016 3:08:25 PM PDT by Brookhaven
Evangelicals Didn’t Even Study for This Test
...this year, LifeWay used more stringent criteria for evangelical faith, as defined by some group called the National Association of Evangelicals. Only participants who called the Bible their highest authority, said personal evangelism is important, and indicated that trusting in Jesus’ death on the cross is the only way of salvation, were labeled “evangelical.” They totaled 586 survey-takers.
Everyone expected them to perform better than most Americans. No one expected them to perform worse. Seven in ten evangelicals—more than the population at large—said that Jesus was the first being God created. Fifty-six percent agreed that “the Holy Spirit is a divine force but not a personal being.” They also saw a huge increase in evangelicals (28 percent, up from 9 percent) who indicated that the Third Person of the Trinity is not equal with God the Father or Jesus, a direct contradiction of orthodox Christianity.
As before, it’s really the contradictory answers, not the outright heresies, that should most concern us. By definition, the evangelicals in this survey believed that “only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.” Yet nearly half agreed that “God accepts the worship of all religions including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.”
Former Newsday religion reporter Kenneth Briggs recently told Religion News Service that the faith he finds in “mega-type churches” is a “Bible-less,” “alternative version of Christianity.” Scripture, he says, has become “a museum exhibit, hallowed as a treasure but enigmatic and untouched.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
The original sin was the illusion of having the personal understanding of good and evil. Wise believers understand that they can’t EVER grasp that kind of understanding, and wait on the Lord to show them what is good and evil.
The urgency of having a complete formulation Right Here! Right Now! that I Cannot Possibly Make A Mistake About! is born of the original sin. The Savior deserves to be at the center. All other things, yes even the bible itself, are the Savior’s tools.
Thanks for that more accurate and in depth look at that survey.
Psalm 12:6-7
6 The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. 7 Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
If you think His word is preserved in one of the New World Order translations, then go for it. But just in case you don't believe God can keep His promises, how can you even be sure your soul is saved?
I'm just assuming you claim to be a Christian of course.
How do you know that English itself isn’t flawed and that all English speaking Christians aren’t going to hell? Riddle me that one Einstein!
You’re missing a key component in your argument.
You have yet to demonstrate that the KJV is definitively this ‘preserved word’ that you’re talking about.
Should I just believe it because YOU say so? Because I’m pretty sure that none of the prophets or apostles spoke English or spoke about THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION THAT MUST BE USED. English wasn’t even spoken during Biblical times.
So prove to me that this specific translation is THE Word of God. Oh, and your No True Scotsman argument is a logical fallacy.
Don't waste your breath telling me or anyone else what they need to get through their skull to feed your pretense of your being Christian in any way, shape, or form.
Are you a member of the LDS church?
Actually, 97% of Americans with Evangelical Beliefs affirm “There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit,” and overall are far more conservative than Catholics, and in another survey only 33% of Catholics, Lutherans and Methodists strongly affirmed that Christ was sinless on earth.
Moreover, rather than the deutros making any positive difference, it is Catholics who are the most liberal, while the factor that does make the difference is whether Scripture is held as being the wholly inspired literally accurate word of God, which few Caths affirm, versus liberal views. And it is RC scholarship that for decades even in her own NAB relegates literal historical accounts to being fables or folk tales.
Accept the anti-Christ, anti-Christian, Jewish Pharisee Rabbi Approved !! Luther Subset of Scripture and you accept the lie that the Holy Spirit could not and did not protect the Bible from the inclusion of error and in fact, that the Holy Spirit helped Satan lead people astray for nearly eighteen hundred years by allowing those errors to remain in the Bible.
More bombastic ranting, for not only is your premise that rejecting the deutros is the reason for liberalism contrary to the evidence, but the fact is that God allows both false prophets and writings to exist in order to test the people, while your charge here applies to the Catholic scholars who doubted or rejected the deuterocanonical books down thru the centuries and right into Trent, which provided the first indisputable canon, after the death of Luther, who was influenced by such (and who included deuterocanonical books in his Bible, albeit separately as per an ancient tradition)!
And rather than the Holy Spirit not protecting the Bible, He never referred to any writings from the deuteros as Scripture, or authoritatively "it is written," or "thus saith the Lord, though He can chose to include true statements from it, as He also did from Enoch and even pagans. But i am sure we have goen thru this before, so what you need to do now is prove your charge that not having the deuterocanonical books leads to liberalism, versus not strongly holding to Scripture as the wholly inspired, accurate and basically literal word of God.
Be back tomorrow by God's grace.
No, I am not, LDS. I guess I’m even more of a pariah to most Christians, I believe God’s promises and that He preserved His word. Oh, the horror of it!
No matter how hard you try, and no matter how many straw men you present, you will never convince me, that all modern translations are God's word.
No, he did not do that. You, however, falsely assert repeatedly that the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal books are part of Divinely-inspired Scripture and always have been.
They have NOT always been - the Jews, unto whom were given the Oracles of God - never recognized or included them with the other Scriptures;
they were NOT considered Holy Spirit inspired even by the early Christians though some saw them as edifying but not a source of doctrine. Jerome, in the fourth century translated them into Latin (Vulgate) along with the other universally recognized books but separated them;
Luther included them in his German translation in the same way as Jerome did as also did the early King James Version;
They were NOT always recognized as part of the canon and were only "officially" declared so by the Roman Catholic church at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century;
The Greek translation called the Septuagint (200 b.c.)contained them as it did several other books that NO ONE included in their canon;
They never claim to BE from the Lord - in fact, they acknowledge that there were NO prophets at the time they were written;
They contain many errors, superstitions, false claims and other problems that disqualified them as being of Divine origin and people knew that. Even at Trent, there was disagreement over their inclusion and recognition AS canon and the declaration was not unanimous.
Finally, ascribing the problem plagued Apocrypha as having a Holy Spirit origin is IN FACT denying the perfection of the Holy Spirit and therefore the Trinity along with flatly contradicting the words of Christ Himself. Jesus said the word of God will stand forever, that it is perfect, it is truthful, it has authority and will never fail - all things your extra books flunk. But, of course, you already know all this because it's been explained dozens of times to you. Don't let the truth get in the way of a good insult.
Being a genuine Christian is about so much more than what one thinks about the canon of Scripture. To pretend otherwise is to miss the message of Jesus Christ and what he has done for us.
Rasputtering is unable to carry on a discussion, so you are not going to get through to that one. Perhaps he/she will ping a few of his/her adorers to help him/her insult non-catholiciism Christians the more?
We are all sinners, but should not be heretics.
Yes, thank you for that post. As a Catholic, I note the enormous amount of common ground for orthodox Catholics and the great majority of evangelicals.
You mean Father, Son, Holy Spirit. God is triune, so it is superfluous to say God, Son, Holy Spirit.
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