Doc Holliday said:
BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Doc Holliday said:
BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Doc Holliday said:
Hey guys, quick PSA: you can't love your sin, not care about it, never repent, never lift a finger to struggle against it, and still claim your faith is legit. That's not "resting in grace," that's just not having faith. Wild concept, I know.
I get there's a lot of easy believism floating around out there, "said a prayer once, so I'm covered no matter what I do for the rest of my life,". It's theology created to get butts in seats at entertainment driven churches that are all about vibes. Faith that never shows up to the fight isn't faith. You will create degenerates who have no idea how to handle sin.
And this isn't some rare edge case. There are millions of people walking around fully convinced they're heaven bound on this exact logic, no struggle, no repentance, no fight against sin, just a moment of assent they're banking everything on. That's a lot of people building their eternity on a theology that Christ Himself warned about in Matthew 7.
We've got millions of people throwing around "idolater" at Orthodox/Catholics over icons or Marian honor, while they're out here worshipping their bank accounts, their cars, their houses, chasing corporate titles to feel superior, lusting after people who aren't their spouse, and calling none of it idolatry because it doesn't have incense attached to it.
You: "... you can't love your sin, not care about it, never repent, never lift a finger to struggle against it, and still claim your faith is legit. That's not "resting in grace," that's just not having faith." - it means you really don't have faith to begin with. Do we need to keep repeating this?
Now a question, and seriously, please answer it: if you have to "care about" your sin, and "lift a finger and struggle against" it in order for your faith to be real... then tell us exactly what constitutes being successful at that? What level of "care"? How assiduous the "struggle" in order to have a "real" faith? How do you know? If you can't know, then how can we know that we are saved, as Scripture tells us? How can Jesus be correct in saying that anyone who believes in him will be saved, if ultimately our salvation is based on our performance, not our faith?
You're just finding another back door through which to bring works/merit into the salvation equation. That's ultimately the issue here. You believe in salvation that is ultimately contingent upon our free will to "achieve it" for ourselves. Not only is that clearly NOT the gospel, Scripture calls it ANATHEMA.
We don't claim to know with certainty who is finally saved, that's God's judgment, not ours, which is why Scripture tells us to work out our salvation "with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12) instead of handing out certainty cards. Your system needs a moment you can point to and say "that's it, guaranteed, forever, regardless of what follows" specifically because it can't tolerate the tension of ongoing dependence on God. Assurance isn't a one-time stamp you get and then own unconditionally forever, it's tied to staying in the faith, and staying in the faith is tied to struggle and maintenance.
Nobody's claiming there's a percentage threshold of effort you have to clear like a test score. The question was never "how hard did you struggle," it's "is there any actual struggle happening at all, or none." A marriage doesn't need a formula for "how many acts of love per year count as a real marriage" for us to recognize the difference between a married couple and two strangers who signed papers once and never spoke again.
Go read what Paul is actually anathematizing in Galatians. It's a different gospel, one requiring circumcision and Mosaic law-works as the entry price into the covenant apart from Christ. That's not remotely what synergy is. Nobody here is saying you achieve salvation by your own unaided effort as an alternative to grace. Synergy says grace does the saving and enables the response, the will cooperates rather than earns.
This isn't about "knowing with certainty who is finally saved". This is about an individual who believes in Jesus knowing that they are saved, by the basis of their faith alone. That's what Scripture directly and explicitly tells us. If the final verdict of your salvation is contingent upon your performance as well your faith, and it is God's decision on whether your performance was good enough, then no one can ever know if they are saved until the end when it is decided, even if they believe. And that is directly contradicting God's word. Your view contradicts God's word. Shouldn't that settle it?
You seem to have retreated in your view to a more modest one, one where now "struggling" is all one needs to do. Before this, you've been crystal clear that through one's own free will "cooperation" one MUST achieve Christ-likeness (as well as performative sacraments), NOT just "struggle" with them while actually achieving NONE of them. And even in this more modest view of yours, you're STILL stuck with the problem of determining what exactly constitutes "struggle" and to what degree is satisfactory to God (what is the cutoff point). You're still in your conundrum of contradicting Scripture. You're still forcing God to act arbitrarily in determing a person's eternal fate by having him choose a cutoff point. Your view is always going to have these problems when you tie one's performance to salvation. A perfect, holy God has only a cutoff point at perfection. We've all fallen short, and it is impossible for us to achieve it. That's why the only way for us to be saved is to have Jesus' perfection imputed to us, which we receive as a free gift by our faith alone. This is the gospel. You are stuck in the mindset of works-based righteousness, which is essentially the same mindset as those who rejected Jesus and who relied upon their own Law-keeping for their righteousness.
You accuse me of retreating from "achieve Christ-likeness" to "struggle," but that's not a retreat, that's what theosis has always meant. It's a lifelong process of cooperating with grace, not a performance bar you clear before salvation counts. Nobody in Orthodoxy has ever said you must fully achieve Christlikeness in this life to be saved. You misunderstand completely what Theosis is.
Now the cutoff point. You act like this problem is unique to my position, but it's not…it's yours too, and you've just been hiding it inside your system. You need a way to distinguish real, saving faith from the kind of faith James describes in demons, who believe with total certainty and tremble. So what's your cutoff for "real" belief versus "just intellectual assent"? What's the minimum threshold of assurance, hope, or ongoing conviction someone needs to have genuinely believed rather than merely nodded along? You can't answer that with precision either. Every soteriology that distinguishes true faith from false faith has this same discernment problem, because it's not a flaw in one system, it's the nature of assessing an internal, invisible reality.
I never said assurance requires knowing you've hit a performance quota. That's your framework, not mine. Assurance rests in the trustworthiness of Christ and His promises, not in a self-audit of whether you've struggled hard enough. That's precisely why Scripture pairs assurance with ongoing trust and perseverance rather than a single backward-looking event, "he who endures to the end will be saved" (Matt 24:13), "if we hold fast the confidence… firm to the end" (Heb 3:14). Assurance and ongoing cooperation aren't in tension in Scripture, you're the one introducing the tension because your system Is transactional and extremely legal.
The Pharisees rejected grace and relied on Torah observance as a substitute for Christ. Synergy is grace enabled response to Christ, not a substitute for Him. Conflating those two is the same move as calling a marriage "transactional" because the spouse still shows up every day.
You're just not comprehending what I'm telling you. Your faith can't be dead, and we never lose free will. So there is something you need to do. That doesn't mean works-righteousness or relying on law keeping whatsoever. It means REAL faith.
You clearly retreated. At first, salvation required achieving Christ-likeness (as well as performative sacraments), and now, you can "struggle" and not achieve Christ-likeness at all, and you are still saved. If someone "struggles" to do good works, but ultimately fails to do them, how is he different from someone with no fruit at all? How is he more "Christ-like" if nothing really changed? He isn't. There has been no "theosis".
My view (the biblical view) does not suffer from the same conundrum as yours does. Faith, being an internal disposition of the heart, is not quantifiable in degrees - you either have faith or you don't. It's an all-or-none phenomenon. There is no "half" conviction, "half" hope, or "half" assurance. You either have conviction, hope, or assurance, or you don't.
Assurance and ongoing "cooperation" IS in tension. Are you kidding??
You've acknowledged it yourself. You admit that in your view,
we can't know if we're saved, only God knows. This isn't assurance. How can you even be arguing this?
I am comprehending your view fine. You believe ultimately that salvation is based on one's merit/performance. By one's free will, one achieves their own salvation. That's what your view ultimately boils down to. You're saying this loud and clear. Your church uses biblical terms like "grace", but you've redefined it away from its true meaning. Instead of God giving us the grace of salvation as a free gift, not of works, your church says rather that God gives us grace ...
TO work for our salvation. This obviously is NOT what "grace" means, it's had works shoehorned into it in bad faith. And so it's not the true Gospel, in fact it's the antithesis to it.
I'm just so amazed how your view can be so clearly against Scripture, but yet it doesn't faze you... but then I'm reminded of how you aren't fazed a bit by bowing and praying to Mary and crediting her for your salvation, and then it all makes total sense.
