Doc Holliday said:Mothra said:Fre3dombear said:Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc Holliday said:4th and Inches said:FLBear5630 said:
So, if good works are not there, the person is not a true believer. So, not saved.
in my understanding, this is accurate.
Who determines if the good works are there is the sticking point. Faith saves, the outward expression of faith is works but no work can save you. Matthew 7:21-23 applies here
I appreciate that Protestants want to protect the truth that we cannot earn our way into heaven, which is true, salvation is a free gift of God's grace...but in modern times they do a terrible job of defining what faith even is.
Faith isn't "Oh I agree and recognize Christ is Lord". Its not mental assent, agreement or trust and belief that the gospel is factual and true. That's dead faith. That's the same thing the demons are aware of as Saint James reminds us.
Faith is giving your whole being to Christ and persevering in that endeavor. True faith is a total, lifelong offering of your entire being to Christ. It is inherently synergetic: a dynamic cooperation between human free will and divine grace. You can only persevere and cooperate in that relationship if you're working through love which is a combination of your own willpower and God working in you. Our faith must be alive, active, and moving us toward union with God and that can only take place if you use your free will to say 'Yes' to grace for the rest of your life.
God isn't going to save unrepentant sexual degenerates that genuinely think they have faith in Christ, but don't really think their behavior or sin is that big of a deal. People who push once saved, always saved or hyper grace theology are pushing this kind of nonsense that mental assent is all you need. We've got to put an end to that.
Our behavior matters, we can't have dead faith. And we never lose free will. Reconciling these two facts means you have to bootstrap effort with your faith.
How much free will cooperation and perseverance qualifies one's faith as a true faith? What is the cutoff point?
So according to this, a believer can never know if they are saved, because they can never know if their own free will effort to cooperate and persevere is enough. This contradicts Scripture in many ways.
Grace plus one's merit and accomplishment is not grace. Again, Scripture is crystal clear about this.
Salvation comes by receiving this grace through faith in Jesus alone. The process of free will "cooperation" with God and perseverance, i.e sanctification, are the fruits of salvation, not the cause or mechanism towards it.
"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faithand this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of Godnot by works, so that no one can boast." - if someone's salvation is contingent upon their own free will effort, as you are saying, then they will have something to boast.
Your position only works if monergism is true. I suspect you are a monergist because of your strict adherence to Calvinism.
"Monergism = God alone does the work of saving you; your will has no real say, faith is just the effect of God changing you, not a free choice you make.
Synergism = God's grace does the heavy lifting and makes salvation possible, but you still have to freely say yes to it, not earning it, just actually receiving it as a person, not a rock."
Do you believe the human will has any actual, uncoerced role in believing, even the passive act of not resisting grace, or is faith itself 100% caused by God with zero human agency involved at any point?
Do you believe your church's own canonized saint, St. Cyril Lucaris?:
"We believe that free will is dead in the unregenerate, because they can do no good thing, and whatsoever they do is sin; but in the regenerate by the grace of the Holy Spirit the will is excited and in deed works but not without the assistance of grace. In order, therefore, that man should be born again and do good, it is necesary that grace should go before;"
Pretty ironic. I've been wanting to talk about your St. Lucaris for a while. Boy oh boy, there are some doozies for you guys. Are you ready for them?
A patriarch's writing doesn't become Church teaching just because of his office, it gets tested against the Church's conciliar consensus. The Confessio attributed to Lucaris was condemned as heretical at Constantinople 1638, Jassy 1642, and Jerusalem 1672 (which reaffirmed synergism by name and explicitly acquitted Cyril the man while rejecting the document as spurious).
Most Orthodox historians consider it a forgery pushed by his Reformed contacts. His 2009/2022 canonization is as Hieromartyr for his execution by the Ottomans, not an endorsement of any theology attached to his name.
This is a common L from prots, because you don't understand. Orthodoxy doesn't work on "an Orthodox person said it, therefore it's Orthodox teaching." Authority runs through councils, not individuals, even patriarchs. A synod's ruling has to be received by the whole Church (clergy and laity, across time) to actually count as binding teaching. That's why Ecumenical Councils (Nicaea, Chalcedon, etc.) carry final authority, while a local synod or a patriarch's private letter doesn't .
Are you a monergist? Are you going to continue to hide your denomination and theology system your adhere to?
We know for 1,000,000% certainty Paul was not a protestant because of 1 Timothy 3:14-15 which flies in the face of every protestant orthodoxy
Paul was neither Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, as such didn't exist back during Paul's times. The real question is whether Protestant doctrines can be derived from apostolic teaching. They most certainly can. Quoting 1 Timothy 3:15 doesn't establish that every later Catholic or Orthodox doctrine is correct; it merely affirms the importance of the Church in preserving and proclaiming the truth.
Indeed, if 1 Timothy 3:15 disproves Protestantism because the Church is the 'pillar of truth,' then it would also prove every local church Paul wrote to was infallible, which is obviously false, because several of them fell into serious doctrinal and moral error. 'Pillar of truth' does not mean 'incapable of error.'
The "local churches erred" point actually proves too much for you: those errors got corrected by apostolic authority stepping in from outside the local congregation, not by each church privately reinterpreting Scripture for itself. That's the whole point: truth wasn't self-correcting within an autonomous local body, it was safeguarded by a structured, hierarchical Church exercising authority over it. And that's the context of 1 Tim 3:15.
If 'pillar and ground of truth' just means 'preserving truth' in some vague sense with no actual governing authority attached…cool, then which Protestant body is doing that preserving?
And let's not pretend like Protestants are united. Y'all are deeply divided on the gospel, the Trinity, baptism etc. "Scripture alone plus the Spirit's guidance" guides Oneness Pentecostals to ditch the Trinity and re-baptize people "in Jesus' name only." Same Bible, same Spirit, somehow arriving at Christianity's one non-negotiable doctrine being wrong. And the Word of Faith guys ran the same method into a gospel where Jesus wants you rich, which Paul, the guy who got beaten and shipwrecked for the gospel, would find news to him. Mainlines are gay and woke.
Does Christ approve of this circus? If you say no, cool, you just admitted there's an authority above "whatever I read this morning." If you say "my criteria is just Scripture," buddy, that's not a criteria, that's the thing that broke in the first place. Scripture doesn't read itself out loud and settle disputes. So who's the tiebreaker: you, Luther, the Oneness guy, or the guy with the private jet and the prosperity gospel? Everyone's "led by the Spirit" and somehow landing in different galaxies.
As I have repeatedly pointed out (to no avail, apparently), you're still committing a category error by acting like all Protestants are one church or body. Protestants don't claim to be a sect or denomination. Protestant is not synonymous with Catholic or Orthodox. Stop treating it that way.
Pointing to Oneness Pentecostals or prosperity preachers isn't an argument against Protestantism. Instead, it's an argument against those specific groups. I reject them for the same reason you do: because their teachings contradict the apostolic faith. So let's dispense with the intellectual dishonesty.
And appealing to the apostles correcting churches doesn't prove a perpetual infallible hierarchy. The apostles had unique authority. The question is whether that authority was passed down to an infallible institution, and that's exactly what's being debated.
As for 1 Timothy 3:15, again, calling the church the "pillar and foundation of the truth" doesn't make the church the source of truth. We've been over this. A pillar supports and holds up something else. The church bears witness to the truth; it doesn't create it.
