Faith or Works or Both?

reply to post by graphuto


My issue with Paul is not the issue in this thread...

IF one says I believe in Jesus, then passes by someone in need... its his own issue, and again they are who he was speaking of when he said "I never knew you".... What you do to the least of these you did to me

And the fact is everyone is "saved" but not everyone will be happy at the end of their lives... We all face judgement...

Even to those who may be lacking in faith, work is still necessary...

DO you honestly believe everyone who is not of the Christian faith... OR does not believe in Jesus is screwed?

Those who have no faith, can still do good work... and they're not buying their way into heaven if they don't believe such a place exists

They do it because its right... it helps others...

reply to post by Akragon


I DO believe in the "exclusivity of Christianity". I think. I'm still working that one out.

Because our righteousness is as filthy rags. Which I take to mean : No matter HOW good of a life you live, without faith in Jesus, it's worthless. Filthy rags, useless.

I don't know though because that's just a verse out of context, he WAS talking about a specific people at a specific time.

I don't know, I'm still working this out. I've always believed that "believing in the exclusivity" was part and parcel to the rest of it.

graphuto
reply to post by Akragon

 

I DO believe in the "exclusivity of Christianity"
Yes, I DO believe they're screwed.

Because our righteousness is as filthy rags. Which I take to mean : No matter HOW good of a life you live, without faith in Jesus, it's worthless. Filthy rags, useless.

See I call that Paulianity...

Jesus came for the sinners not the righteous... which means some people are righteous...

Those who do not do as he asked of us... which means work, have no legs to stand on... especially those who claim to follow Christ

So listen to Paul if you will... I will not

reply to post by Akragon


Well, there must be more to it than simply good works. Over and over again in the Bible, there can hardly be found any righteous people in the cities that God brings judgement against. We're talking 1-10 people out of thousands!

We know from dealing with people during our lives that not most everyone is evil/wicked. Most people, in my experience, are "good/decent" people.

reply to post by graphuto

I don't know, I'm still working this out. I've always believed that "believing in the exclusivity" was part and parcel to the rest of it.

This really comes down to another issue... Is God fair and just, or a cruel tyrant?

Belief in the OT would understandably create the image that God is cruel... but this is not the case

Imagine a person who lived a good life, always helped his fellow man... gave to those in need.... Yet never once heard of Christianity or Jesus... You're telling me God would say "sorry, you're finished because you didn't believe in Jesus"

That my friend is just twisted... This elitest view that some Christians hold is rather sick in my opinion

As if Christians are the only ones that will to do heaven... but I tell you, IF there is a hell (which I don't believe there is) there are likely more Christians there then anyone else

graphuto
reply to post by Akragon

 

Well, there must be more to it than simply good works. Over and over again in the Bible, there can hardly be found any righteous people in the cities that God brings judgement against. We're talking 1-10 people out of thousands!

We know from dealing with people during our lives that not most everyone is evil/wicked. Most people, in my experience, are "good/decent" people.

edit on 5-4-2014 by graphuto because: (no reason given)

That's because you're reading the OT... they didn't know God until Jesus came... that's WHY he came...

And its not just works, its just love... period

reply to post by Akragon

What shall we say then . . .

This first verse of chapter 4 is a continuation, or conclusion of what is the argument in chapter 3, where in the final section Paul is comparing belief in the Law with belief in Christ, that those who didn't accept the Jewish law as the way to righteousness in the past, instead of being punished by God for that, were allowed to continue to exist so that they would still be around now, when they can believe in Christ as the way to righteousness, and then be able to demonstrate that God was right in doing so, since we see all these gentiles who are now good people as Christians.

OK, then Paul goes on here in chapter 4; What about people in the past, according to the Jew's stories, who were considered righteous?
Did they, for example Abraham, believe in the old written Mosaic Law, and is that the standard by which they were judged righteous?
Obviously not, because the old written Mosaic Law hadn't been written yet.

Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. (2011 NIV)

Here Paul is stating a generally accepted fact, to establish an axiom to build his argument on.
Wages are not gifts because there is a contractual agreement, where the employer must by law pay the employee once they did the thing they were supposed to do to fulfill their side of the bargain.

However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness. (2011 NIV)

How would someone who never entered into a binding agreement expect to receive benefits anyway?
They believe that God by nature makes people righteous, out of a desire for people to be righteous, and will do it by whatever means is available.
That includes ways that are outside a legal contract.

David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the one to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:

“Blessed are those
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the one
whose sin the Lord will never count against them.” (2011 NIV)

Paul here is giving an Old Testament passage that says being right with God is the state that one wants to be in, however that condition is arrived at.

reply to post by graphuto

It specifically says "to him that worketh not"

See my last post.
Paul is using rhetoric.
He defines the terms of his argument in the framing of this rhetorical argument.
"Works" here in the context that he establishes means one side of a two way obligatory legal contract, which he is using as a metaphor for the old covenant compounded within the document that the Jews held up as The Law that everyone was supposed to accept and join into with the blood of their foreskins as their token of being bound to it.
Paul is making a comparison between that and the better thing sealed with the blood of Jesus.

jmdewey60
reply to post by Maigret

 

P.S. You don't have to believe me now, but when you see it happening; Christians killing people for not worshiping Jesus, then you will know that those dying are the Elect/Saints of God.

Do you know how many Christians were killed by Muslims in Malaysia with government complicity, with total genocide?
Jesus didn't come.
Do every Christian on earth have to be killed first.
These are rhetorical questions because the only sane response in my opinion is to discard all these sensationalist theories.

f it's a figure of speech, then why specify that there will be no sea/s on the new earth? This is only said so that while we can holiday on the sea shores, we know this is still the old earth that one day it will be replaced - literally!

One is in the gospels and the other is in Revelation.
It is making use of a type of thinking that is in the apocalyptic literature, that the sea represents chaos that existed before God's spirit acted on it to bring forth land.
Sea represents danger of the world going back to its earlier state.
Sort of like hell being thrown in the lake of fire, it represents the removal of this source of fear.

edit on 4-4-2014 by jmdewey60 because: (no reason given)

I would be very happy if my beliefs did turn out to be nothing more than sensationalist theories!

reply to post by graphuto

. . . there are more verses to support "salvation by faith alone" than there are verses that support "salvation by works."

"Salvation" in the verse that says salvation is by faith, means inclusion in the congregation.
Those who crossed the Red Sea under Moses were "saved", congregating before God at Mount Sinai, but hardly any of them made it into the Promised Land.
Now we have the church as a congregation of the saved, and rather than doing obligatory works of the Law (killing Passover lambs), we enter through our believing.
That "salvation" does not guarantee us Heaven any more than being an Israelite with Moses guaranteed any of them the Promised Land.
We are "saved" to good works.
The immediate goal is living righteously.

reply to post by Maigret

I would be very happy if my beliefs did turn out to be nothing more than sensationalist theories!

You will go on living, and eventually dying, never being able to prove that you were right.
Meanwhile, you burned up a lot of energy fretting over things that you are meant to feel relieved about if you just read Revelation for what it means, rather than listening to preachers making a living off of people's fears.

reply to post by Akragon

Only when you read Paul... which is where the whole faith alone idea came from in the first place...

Excpt that Paul didn't write that.
That little phrase is taken out of a larger statement in Ephesians, which was written after Paul, but superficially made to look like it had been written by Paul.

reply to post by graphuto

26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

The 2011 NIV translates it differently,

and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

so there is a living by faith, as Paul says.

reply to post by Akragon

Those who have no faith, can still do good work... and they're not buying their way into heaven if they don't believe such a place exists.

Paul, in Romans, was dealing with earthly things concerning the idea of social status.
He starts off saying that he was writing to the gentiles of Rome, but he does several excursions into dealing with the Jews, and by that, in the Roman context, he really means Christians, but ones who think that they are the "real" Christians because of their Jewish background, and that the gentile converts to Christianity are lower class as to their moral status, since they never bothered to first convert to Judaism.

So, what today sounds like "saved" vs. not "saved" to us who are out of this loop, isn't even what it is about, and that is the source for all this bad religion, of the Free Grace cult that think it doesn't matter what you do.
It matters everything, and that is the point that Paul is getting at, it is what you do in your condition of righteousness, not how you arrived at that condition, through the Law, or not.

reply to post by graphuto

Because our righteousness is as filthy rags. Which I take to mean : No matter HOW good of a life you live, without faith in Jesus, it's worthless. Filthy rags, useless.

I don't know though because that's just a verse out of context, he WAS talking about a specific people at a specific time.

It is (out of context), because Paul is quoting the Old Testament, where there really isn't a verse that makes the same point that Paul is making because the OT of course is going to support the OT, and not the NT, since that did not exist when the OT was written.

But he is finding something in the OT itself that counters the claim of those Christians in Rome who were puffed up in their own self-importance because they also had kept the Law, meaning the OT.

If they think the OT proves that they are better than the "mere" gentile converts, then "Think again because here is a verse in the very same book that says that you aren't!"

reply to post by Akragon

Jesus came for the sinners not the righteous... which means some people are righteous...

I think that Jesus was being rhetorical here.
What he is talking about are those who call themselves righteous, or "The Righteous" who were going to "save" Israel, at least in their own rhetoric, and I mean this literally, the people we think of as the Pharisees wrote this in their own literature, and anyone not of their little group were by them literally called "The Sinners'.

reply to post by graphuto

there can hardly be found any righteous people in the cities that God brings judgement against.

Those stories by today's standards would have been classified as myths even when they were first written down.

reply to post by Akragon

Imagine a person who lived a good life, always helped his fellow man... gave to those in need.... Yet never once heard of Christianity or Jesus... You're telling me God would say "sorry, you're finished because you didn't believe in Jesus"

I like to imagine that whatever this situation is where something like this could exist, there might be even more people like the one you point out, doing good, if they had heard about Jesus.

reply to post by Maigret

I would be very happy if my beliefs did turn out to be nothing more than sensationalist theories!

Part 2, since it is too late to edit my earlier post.
I may seem rather flippant on the apocalypse issue but I really am not, at least internally.
I am a Seventh Day Adventist, and the last (and main) word in the title stands for the Second Coming.
The difference (from other denomination) is the urgency of this coming (since they all at least give it lip service).
You can look at that two ways, either it is going to happen right now so you need to get righteous really fast, or it is inevitable that judgment is coming and you need to get really righteous, and the sooner the better because you don't know when you might die.
I used to take the first approach mainly because that was how I was taught.
Based on my own research, I now take the second approach.

I think we as a people in Western culture have reached a saturation point where we are now mostly immune to being startled by predictions of the end of the world, so it isn't much use as an evangelistic tool as it was maybe in the nineteenth century, especially since it has been used from that point to today.

I recommend watching the movie, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.
People in it take it in stride basically when they are told on the news that an asteroid is coming that will kill all life on earth, and they are really only interested in being happy when it happens, to be with someone who they feel good with, and that's it.

Melancholia is good too, but you need to watch it three times (a bit tedious in places) to really get it.

reply to post by jmdewey60


What is your opinion on the "exclusivity of Christianity" ?

reply to post by graphuto

What is your opinion on the "exclusivity of Christianity" ?

I think it is what I said in reply to Akragon, that the more people, and the more they know, about Jesus, the better because that is the way to God, as set up by God, according to the Gospel.
As for people not knowing about Jesus, I think that is pushed back into the realm of the hypothetical, with the internet and other means of communication.
An example is a person who used to be pretty active on this forum (miriam0566), who was kidnapped as a small child and held captive, got ahold of a Bible (had to steal it), and once she finally managed to escape, was on here teaching everyone else about what it says.