Do babies go to Heaven?

[Matchett-PI]

M-PI: "you should be able to give us the Scriptures that reveal when God chose his elect, what they will receive, and what those he didn't select (elect) will receive. Would you be so kind as to provide those Scriptures from the Bible?"

Jael: "What's the election due to?"

You changed the subject. Where are your Scriptures that answer the above 3 questions?

[MarMema]

As these Bibles are translated, they take increasing liberties with the text to try to reinterpret it to allow female and/or sodomite clergy, the diminution of many references to Christ which debases Him. One new version even refers to God the Mother.

Lord have mercy. I have a friend at work who is currently attending a methodist church and seems to have found a desire to become more conservative, cautiously asking me questions about Eastern Orthodoxy as of late... and stated that her family is praying for guidance in moving to a new church.
Although she has hinted at such things, I confess I am shocked by what you have posted here.

Thank you also for the other information, which again I was not aware of at all.

[MarMema]

Thank you for your post.
I read your first link and then found the second you meant to link to on the orthodox information center.

Our computer is having trouble right now so I found that I am unable to pull up both your first link and FR in order to respond chapter by chapter. Having made several attempts and had it close down on me each time, I am now going to try to repeat mostly from memory what I recall trying to type previously.

The only content of the first link which I find to be in disagreement with current Orthodox teaching is the part on predestination, and the words "hereditary sin". While we would agree with the rest of that statement/chapter, we would not call it *hereditary* sin.
The Orthodox church accepts that Adam and Eve sinned and brought mortality to us all. However we see the rest of humanity as victims of their sin, not inheritors of it. Sin keeps us separate from God. The propensity to sin is because of the fall, but we are not born with actual sin. Christ's death on the cross was a victory over death/mortality - ours of course. (Thus in our Paschal hymn we joyfully sing "Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.")
A brief comment on the chapter in which those without faith cannot be saved. I am fairly certain the EO church would hesitate to make such a statement, and instead would simply say it is up to God.

Someone posted that they had no difficulty picking and choosing between the teachings of Augustine, and I believe the EO church is also in this boat.

Now for the second link.....the orthodox information center has some good reading at times. I know the author of the site as he used to live in Seattle and attended the ROCOR parish in which I entered the church. Etna is part of an Old Calendar section of the Orthodox church, and some would say they are not really part of the Orthodox church at all, actually.
I would have to say that many of us would question anything coming out of Etna. They are extremely traditionalist and so very much out on the one side that they rarely represent the mainstream beliefs of Eastern Orthodoxy.

The traditionalists in Eastern Orthodoxy tend to find fault with many details of daily life, as in a priest who shaves his beard too short.

While I do enjoy a beard on a priest which hangs to his middle, it does not make a statement about clergy if they choose not to grow one that long. This is the kind of thing Etna will put forth, along with other oddities such as women menstruating should stay home from church or at least not commune. You may notice if you read the piece the comment the archbishop makes about "modernism".
I am the first to agree that modernism is to be avoided, but in the case of Etna it refers to things such as cutting your beard, sometimes cutting the hair of your female children, etc. Offhand I can't remember any of the other things, but they are unusual for the most part. Kind of reminiscent of the Old Believers in some ways...
I found much humor in the writings of this archbishop, though I am sure he has some good points. (Certainly one thing he wrote is true. In the EO church we really do not find a conflict between Scripture and the church or between faith and works, etc.)
Falling squarely into the Russian side of Orthodoxy, I admit I am far from knowledgeable about much of the Greek side of it.

In just one more post I want to comment on one of the chapters from the first link. I apologize for having to do it in a separate post.

[MarMema]

is nonetheless "above our comprehension... concerning this matter, we feel we ought to rather in humility to observe silence than to indulge in vain discourse"; the affirmation of Article 10 that each of the regional Churches should have a President not to be confused with the Head of the Church; and the "noble" though not worshipful treatment of Icons in the appended Question 4)

I see now that you have already commented on just the thing I was going to re-read.
All of these comments from the link are acceptable in current Eastern Orthodoxy. And the distinction about the head of the church is one you will find repeated over and over today in EO literature.
"in humility to observe silence than to indulge in vain discourse" This makes me laugh as it is clearly Orthodox teaching, with huge capital letters, but it does not strike me as fitting in with protestant teachings. :-)
We are often taught in the EO church re: the value of restraining the tongue and the virtue of silence.

In summary I am amazed if the bulk of the writing from the first link is also acceptable in your church.
Though so many things were not mentioned that could be conflicting. We baptize and commune infants, for one.

[Rambler]

I won't even bother to dissect the flaws of such shallow treatment of his work and its demonstrated historical veracity.

If you have some demonstrated historical veracity of the Textus Receptus, let's see it. Maybe you can include a list of the Greek texts he used and their dates of origin, and include other information to document your claims.

Far more serious, you fail to note the glaring and inesapable defects in the Textus Sinaiticus and Textus Vaticanus, manuscripts so corrupt that even Rome won't use them or permit a full scholarly inspection of them.

Do you mean the 4th century manuscripts Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus? Both of these earliest of Bible manuscripts have been studied extensively, and used, by Rome and others. Your conspiracy theory about Rome doesn't hold water because the Codex Sinaiticus (most of it anyway) was acquired by the British Museum. Nice try though. If you do a search on Google using the common names, you can find quite a bit of information about them and actually see copies.

[xzins]

I would baptize the man using the canteen water. That was also the choice of the baptist chaplain and of many of those who later discussed the incident. There were those who opposed the notion....they also cited the thief on the cross as their reason for saying baptism is optional.

I believe there is a blessing bestowed via baptism. I also believe the situation allowed for both the chaplain and the dying soldier to respond. Neither Jesus nor the thief on the cross were in any position to respond.

[xzins]

Hi, GW. See #466

[George W. Bush]

I would baptize the man using the canteen water. That was also the choice of the baptist chaplain and of many of those who later discussed the incident. There were those who opposed the notion....they also cited the thief on the cross as their reason for saying baptism is optional.

Well, proper baptism is by immersion, the uniform example in the New Testament. However, baptism is an ordinance of the church, not a sacrament. Baptists are pretty strict scriptural minimalists. That is our greatest spiritual contribution, I think, and it is why we are legitimately regarded as children of the Reformation churches. However, since the Bible only gives examples of adults being baptized by immersion, we follow that practice. I think that baptism is viewed by Baptists as an act of obedience. At almost every baptism, a Baptist minister will tell his flock that there is nothing magical in baptism. And Baptists believe this.

However, I have no doubt at all that many Baptists see in their own baptisms a special private blessing that God has given them. It may also have some merit in wedding a Baptist to the rule of the Word which offers a uniform example of belief in Christ followed by the simple obedience of baptism. Or a Baptist might see it as his formal claim upon the promises of scripture and see it as an induction into the priesthood of believers.

I believe there is a blessing bestowed via baptism. I also believe the situation allowed for both the chaplain and the dying soldier to respond. Neither Jesus nor the thief on the cross were in any position to respond.

In this instance, few Baptists would condemn this battlefield sprinkling. However, Baptists would object to taking an act of harmless spiritual charity in extremis and then using it to justify some general principle of sprinkling or infant baptism or other unbiblical practices.

You still haven't acknowledged the inherent weakness of arguing theology from such extreme circumstances. Personally, I think there are deathbed conversions but they're pretty rare. So your example has little to do with the spiritual life of most Christians throughout history.

[George W. Bush]

During the time when the corrupt manuscripts were used as the basis for writing the modernist bibles, the documents most certainly were not available for study. They were highly restricted and controlled. Study your history. Vaticanus had, for instance, languished on a back shelf of the Vatican for centuries and was considered to be of no importance to anyone.

The use of Codex Vaticanus is especially problematic because it has so many marks of erasure and deletion. It was very obviously a work in progress and has blank columns left in it, like a partially finished work. Many suspect it was an early working copy from the set of 50 Bibles Constantine ordered to be supplied to the first established Roman churches. It is clearly an inferior text and cannot be compared to the care of preservation of text used by ancient Jewish scribes or the demonstrable accuracy of reproduction of scripture within the Byzantine church's manuscripts.

Codex Sinaiticus was snatched from a wastebasket (a burn bin) by a gloryhound manuscript collector/scholar in the Convent of St. Catherine's at the foot of Mount Sinai. His academic record is hardly that of a sober student of scripture. He was both a prima donna and a flake. It is the very limited support which these two exemplars of the Alexandrian line offer each other which is used to support the claim that they are legitimate manuscripts. But if you believe this, then you have to accept that God's true word was have perished if the German scholar hadn't snatched Codex Sinaiticus from the burn bin. I don't believe it. God preserves His Word.

The two manuscripts are actually the real basis of the modernist bibles. And neither is truly complete and neither agrees with the other. Both manuscripts and the very few members of this manuscript family all come from a very small region of the Roman empire. There are variant readings in all of them. They are a tower of Babel, not a unified testimony. Other members of the Alexandrian script family were known by and rejected by Erasmus and the early Reformation churches. Even then, these versions were regarded with great suspicion and the modern Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are not a redemption of the manuscript line but are instead its final condemnation.

By contrast, the Byzantine family of manuscripts preserved by the Eastern church (the Received Text, the basis of Erasmus's Textus Receptus), are over 95% of all the ancient manuscripts that we have. Their ancient existence is attested thoroughly by the earliest church fathers because they quoted those manuscripts. These manuscripts and the patristic affirmations of their readings come from every corner of the ancient Roman empire (not just from the Alexandrian area which was a hotbed of heresy).

In short, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are examples of corrupted scripture. And they most certainly are not the oldest manuscripts, another common lie used to forward their claims. Much as the Biblical archaeology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose false claims were so much the basis of the apostasy of the liberal Protestant denominations, was exposed as a false guide, so I believe that the overwhelming and unified testimony of the Byzantine family will be vindicated. The roots of the modern "bibles" in the apostasizing liberal churches of that era does not recommend them very highly to me.

I will remain content with orthodox Christian doctrine and the scripture readings of the ancient church which served all orthodox Christians throughout the Christian era.

Oh, yeah, and don't bother memorizing any bible verses from your modern "bibles" because none of them will agree due to copyright law and publishing profits. If they didn't disagree in key portions, they couldn't be copyrighted and secure publishing profits. And in order to maintain the publisher's profits, they have to be revised and reworded every few decades. And the new versions have to vary from the old ones (i.e. a newer NIV cannot agree with an older NIV).

You can instead have the modern "bibles" based ultimately on the narrow and conflicting authority of these two manuscripts and a very small handful of problematic Alexandrian manuscripts and spend the rest of your life explaining in your rambling way to your lesbian pastorette why you don't always enjoy praying to God the Mother and why the sin of Sodom wasn't actually inhospitality to strangers. Good luck with your modern quicksand bible.

[Quester]

"The man/woman __untouched by the grace of God__ will not come to God.

"Sounds like Eve talking. Sounds like what a member of one of the feminized churches would say.

Sounds like a misleading, deceptive Arminian concept, rather than the biblically accurate concept, "unregenerated".

Rather, ... it sounds quite biblical (i.e. something GOD would say).

But, of course, you would describe the the very words of God as feminized and Evish, would you not ?

Behold the Word of the Lord ...

Genesis 32:24 And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

25 And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

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1 Samuel 10:24 And Samuel said to all the people, See ye him whom the LORD hath chosen, that there is none like him among all the people? And all the people shouted, and said, God save the king.

25 Then Samuel told the people the manner of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book, and laid it up before the LORD. And Samuel sent all the people away, every man to his house.

26 And Saul also went home to Gibeah; and there went with him a band of men, whose hearts God had touched.

27 But the children of Belial said, How shall this man save us? And they despised him, and brought him no presents. But he held his peace.

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2 Kings 13:20 And Elisha died, and they buried him. And the bands of the Moabites invaded the land at the coming in of the year.

21 And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of men; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha: and when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet.

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Jeremiah 1:7 But the LORD said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.

8 Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the LORD.

9 Then the LORD put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the LORD said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.

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Matthew 8:2 And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.

3 And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

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Matthew 8:14 And when Jesus was come into Peter's house, he saw his wife's mother laid, and sick of a fever.

15 And he touched her hand, and the fever left her: and she arose, and ministered unto them.

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Matthew 9:20 And, behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment:

21 For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole. 22 But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.

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Matthew 9:28 And when he was come into the house, the blind men came to him: and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said unto him, Yea, Lord.

29 Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you.

30 And their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See that no man know it.

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Matthew 14:34 And when they were gone over, they came into the land of Gennesaret.

35 And when the men of that place had knowledge of him, they sent out into all that country round about, and brought unto him all that were diseased;

36 And besought him that they might only touch the hem of his garment: and as many as touched were made perfectly whole.

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Matthew 20:30 And, behold, two blind men sitting by the way side, when they heard that Jesus passed by, cried out, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David.

31 And the multitude rebuked them, because they should hold their peace: but they cried the more, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David.

32 And Jesus stood still, and called them, and said, What will ye that I shall do unto you?

33 They say unto him, Lord, that our eyes may be opened.

34 So Jesus had compassion on them, and touched their eyes: and immediately their eyes received sight, and they followed him.

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Mark 7:31 And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis.

32 And they bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him.

33 And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue;

34 And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.

35 And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.

36 And he charged them that they should tell no man: but the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it;

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Luke 22:47 And while he yet spake, behold a multitude, and he that was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them, and drew near unto Jesus to kiss him.

48 But Jesus said unto him, Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?

49 When they which were about him saw what would follow, they said unto him, Lord, shall we smite with the sword?

50 And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear.

51 And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear, and healed him. Luke 22:51 And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear, and healed him.

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So, it appears that the language of touch is, not only, abundantly biblical, but refers to that which is quite effectual.

Define "untouched", please.

John 6:44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.

45 It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me.

untouched ...

... undrawn by GOD,

... untaught of GOD,

... having not heard/having not learned of GOD

[Matchett-PI]

M-PI: "Define "untouched", please."

Quester: [snips]"..it appears that the language of touch is, not only, abundantly biblical, but refers to that which is quite effectual."

That's for sure! God's "touch" was quite *effectual" here, too:

Num 22:28 "And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and ..."

LOL

[Jael]

you Arminians

Here is your problem, (among others.)

You believe that I am something I am not. I am not Arminian. I do not believe that one could lose their salvation. I do not believe that a man can save himself. I have never followed those man made beliefs. If you are a Calvinist, you however do follow a man made belief.

God's truth was not lost and then rediscovered with Luther and then later Calvin. Rome is not the true church, so she never could of been reformed and indeed never shall be.

The daughters of Rome comtinue on with parts of hre heresies, including infant baptism. The true body of believers never symbolized with Rome.

Revelation 2:22  Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.

[Jael]

Change the subject? You can't discuss the subject unless you know what causes it. Again, what is election die to? www.justbible.com

Thanks for your reply.

[Jael]

I would baptize the man using the canteen water. That was also the choice of the baptist chaplain and of many of those who later discussed the incident. There were those who opposed the notion....they also cited the thief on the cross as their reason for saying baptism is optional.

I believe there is a blessing bestowed via baptism. I also believe the situation allowed for both the chaplain and the dying soldier to respond. Neither Jesus nor the thief on the cross were in any position to respond.

You wouldn't of been baptizing him, is the point. You would just been sprinkling him with water. I'm not saying that is a sin, or did any harm, except that it isn't a baptism.

I just don't see the need. If his faith was not sure and he needed to be sprinkled on the head to feel better about it, then he probably wasn't a believer anyway. Going to the Scriptures would of been more comforting to him, and might of given him some assurance.

1 John 5:13  These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.

If all you need is a few drops, couldn't Jesus have spit on the theif?

[Rambler]

By contrast, the Byzantine family of manuscripts preserved by the Eastern church (the Received Text, the basis of Erasmus's Textus Receptus), are over 95% of all the ancient manuscripts that we have.

LOL, the Received Text is not an ancient Byzantine family of manuscripts preserved by the Eastern church. And the Received Text was not the basis of Erasumus's Textus Receptus. Instead, his work contriubuted to the making of the Received Text, otherwise known as the Textus Receptus.

None of the manuscripts used by Erasmus dated earlier than the 11th century and some of the seven were from as late as the 15th.

As far as the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, I don't think many serious Biblical scholars agree that these manuscripts are as useless as you assess them to be. I think I'll stick with the scholars and not the one who doesn't even know what these manuscripts are called.

[Jael]

And I doubt any of you Arminians are in complete agreement with Arminius either. And many wouldn't know the particulars of his theology even as well as we know Calvin's shortcomings.

Note to George here. I am not Arminian.

[JesseShurun]

The thief had a baptism of suffering, died and was resurrected with the Lord.

[Quester]

That's for sure! God's "touch" was quite *effectual" here, too:

Num 22:28 "And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and ..."

Recall that in this miraculous instance, the ass saw truth and spoke truth to the deceived.

[Jael]

Suffering isn't salvation. Neither is baptism. He was simply paying for his crimes upon the cross. Paying for his crimes didn't baptize him.

[JesseShurun]

Never said it was, yet, apparently, unbeknowst to you, there is what is known as, a baptism of suffering, and Christ referred to it, as the cup that he was to drink. Isn't learning fun?