Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc Holliday said:
The difference is sola fide makes repentance, obedience, and transformation non-instrumental to salvation, and therefore collapses them into optional evidences rather than necessary means through which God saves and changes a person.
Pointing out that your churches prefer repentance doesn't answer the theological issue any more than sarcastic caricatures of Orthodoxy do. The fact remains that in your system repentance is not actually part of what saves a person, while in the historic Church salvation is a real participation in Christ that includes faith, repentance, and transformation for life.
I honestly feel like I'm taking crazy pills when arguing against sola fide, because Jesus gives us commandments, parables, warnings, and a whole pattern of life to follow, yet in many Protestant systems all of that ends up being treated as optional, good for spiritual growth, but not actually necessary for salvation. Christ doesn't just save us by giving us information to believe; He shows us how to live, and expects us to follow Him. In Orthodoxy that's taken seriously as a lifelong path of obedience and transformation, not something we can safely ignore because of a one-time moment of belief.
In most Protestant frameworks, daily repentance, spiritual discipline, and moral effort are signs that you're already saved, but they are not part of remaining in salvation. So a Protestant can believe they're saved even if their spiritual life grows cold, because their assurance is grounded in a past moment of faith. In Orthodoxy, daily repentance, prayer, fasting, confession, and participation in the sacraments are not just "evidence," they are the way we continue to cooperate with God's grace and actually grow in salvation. So the Orthodox Christian's daily life is shaped by the awareness that salvation is a lifelong commitment that requires ongoing synergy with God's grace, while the Protestant's daily life is often shaped by the belief that salvation is secure regardless of how spiritually disciplined, repentant, or obedient they are on a given day.
When you put that into the real world of temptation, you end up with people falling into sin while telling themselves, "It's okay, I'm already saved," because sola fide gives a built-in confidence even in willful sin. That's exactly why I can't accept it: Christ didn't just ask us to believe something once, He asked us to follow Him in a lifelong path of obedience, repentance, and transformation, not to treat His teachings as electives.
Rejecting sola fide is a more difficult and narrow path.
I'll let Mothra respond to the meat of your post, but I wanted to point out that you continue to mischaracterize what sola fide means. In order to set up your straw man, you continually present sola fide as "I believed at one time, now I can sin all I want". In other words, not "faith alone", but "claimed faith that exists alone".
Sola fide just means that faith is what saves, not the fruit of that faith. Fruit will be present in those with real faith, given time. As I said before, how much and how fast this fruit appears is going to vary among believers. Different believers have different problems, different "demons" to fight. In some cases, someone with real faith might struggle against their demons and die only showing little fruit, or even none at all depending on the case.
The issue with your Orthodox view, that the fruit is the means by which we are saved (i.e., the fruit IS the faith), is that it puts the onus on the individual believer's performance to become saved, and their ultimate trust rests on this rather than on Jesus' completed work. It makes them always ask "Have I done enough to be saved?". Not only does this contradict the clear teaching of Paul, that we are saved by faith, not by our works, it makes a believer's assurance impossible. According to your view, we can never know if we've done enough and thus are saved. But that is in direct contradiction to Scripture which says, "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life". My question to you, then, is this: how can John write that, if he has no idea where those believers are in their spiritual journey, or how well they've "followed Jesus"? The only stipulation he puts on salvation, it seems, is that we "believe". That's sola fide.
Jesus says, "Every branch that does not bear fruit is cut off" (John 15), not because fruit earns salvation, but because life in Christ always produces fruit when we actually abide in Him. Your model says fruit does not matter for salvation; Christ says it is the very sign of remaining in Him. That is not salvation through works, its salvation as communion.
Once saved, always saved is a dominant belief in huge portions of American Evangelicalism, Baptist traditions, nondenominational churches, many Reformed groups. Tens of millions worldwide hold it and they got it from sola fide. Many of them have and will deny Christ later on after they claimed salvation. That's nowhere close to your definitions of sola fide.
This creates a problem for sola fide: there's a built-in contradiction when people who were once considered "saved" later deny Christ: either A) their original faith wasn't real, meaning they were never truly saved in the first place, which destroys any claim to assurance because no one can ever know whether their faith is genuine, or B) they remain saved despite rejecting Christ, which contradicts Scripture, Christ's warnings, and the entire historic Christian Tradition. Either way, sola fide ends up undermining itself.
We should reject despair and reject presumption. The apostles never taught the kind of airtight, mathematical certainty you're describing. "That you may know you have eternal life" is not a guarantee based on a past moment of belief but the confidence that comes from present communion with Christ, walking in the light, keeping His commandments (1 John 2:36), loving the brethren (3:14), and purifying ourselves as He is pure (3:3). John immediately follows his assurance with warnings: "If anyone says 'I know Him' but does not keep His commandments, he is a liar" (2:4). That is not sola fide.
If faith can be lost, salvation can be lost.
If faith is alive, salvation is alive.
If faith dies, salvation dies.
I can write a long post to answer this, but you're not really listening. So let's try keeping the focus to one point at a time. Let's take your statement:
"That you may know you have eternal life" is not a guarantee based on a past moment of belief but the confidence that comes from present communion with Christ, walking in the light, keeping His commandments (1 John 2:36), loving the brethren (3:14), and purifying ourselves as He is pure (3:3)."
So answer this: to what degree of "being in communion with Christ", "walking in the light", "keeping his commandments", "loving the brethren", and "purifying ourselves" would qualify a knowledge that we have eternal life? After all, the apostle John is saying that we CAN know, right? So that means there's a point where one can say they've been succesful at all this and thus can know. But where is that point? I mean, let's be honest, we're all still sinners, and we all fail at these to varying degrees, don't we? If you can't establish a point, then it means we can't ever really know. And that would make John wrong, wouldn't it?
