Fruitless indeed!
Fruitless indeed!
Thanks for you patience. Your question is a valid one, but not a simple one.
No, I don't.
You're not paying attention.
The way YOU are presupposing it to be true cannot be true because it creates contradictions that do not and CANNOT exist.
Until you have questioned your presuppositions on all of your Paul Said You Can Lose Your Justification verses, instead of ignoring the contradictions your position creates, further discussion will be fruitless.
Fruitless? discussion is fruitless unless I agree with you? Surely you wouldn't give up so quickly on someone that disagrees with you. Wouldn't you patiently take the time to explain what you are telling them in words they can understand, like 2 Tim 2:24, 25? My son is a bit of a geek, and when he talks to people about geek things, he tends to assume they understand the geek language he is using, so he blasts right through his explanations not checking to see if his listeners are understanding what he's saying. I regularly have to admonish him to recognize his audience and speak in terms they can understand. If we presuppose our listeners are understanding us, we do them the disservice of talking gibberish to them, similar to Paul's admonition about speaking in tongues vs. prophesying:
But if all of you are prophesying, and unbelievers or people who don't understand these things come into your meeting, they will be convicted of sin and judged by what you say. [1Co 14:24 NLT]. Which not only tells us that we need to talk in a language our hearers can understand, but it also tells us that unbelievers need to be convicted of sin and judged by what we say, which helps to answer your survey question in the affirmative.
If you want to talk with me on this, fine. First, nail down once and for all whether a person who has already been forgiven all trespasses and declared justified in Christ can then become unjustified and lost. I believe you already said "no" but when you keep raising these objections, you're talking out both sides of your mouth.
Your choice is really very simple: Either
a) forgiveness and justification in Christ cannot ever be lost
or
b) they can be lost.
PICK ONE.
This may get too long for the question you are asking, but bear with me for a moment. I think it's easy to confuse a couple different things here.
There are a few questions I'd like to ask and try to answer.
The first is, when did/does the act of justification take place? If Jesus' death was the act of justification for every one who believes, then it occurred once, and of course would never be needed again. The question we now ask is when is Christ's righteousness imputed to us? I think most would agree it's at the moment of belief, right?
So then my question from earlier in your thread (which was addressed to one of your other posters, unfortunately), becomes important: Can a believer cease believing?
Additionally, from what I've seen of your posts, you ascribe to open theism. If so, then I have a question for you: Is God able to tell at the moment of belief whether a person is "truly" believing or not? Is it something that is apparent to God? If so, then our argument about Abraham has lost all it's footing--if God knew from the first time that Abraham believed anything that He would believe all the way, then there was no reason for God to say "
now I know that you fear God" (Gen 22:12), as He would have known all along, at least from the point where "he
believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness." [Gen 15:6 KJV]
Jesus seem to be distinguishing between true believers and the other kind in His parable of the sower. This verse might apply to our conversation:
They on the rock [are they], which, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, which for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall away. [Luk 8:13 KJV]
Calvinists have it easy on this point--they acknowledge that God must make the decision to justify based on His own wisdom in what He is going to do with that person in the future, and Arminians say God only has to look into the future to determine the final state, i.e., whether that person's faith was sufficient to outlast the temptations. Open Theists have it the hardest--they have to acknowledge the free will of the believer both before and after their decision to believe, and God's limitation to only know what the believer's past and current state of belief; thus it seems to me Open Theists would have to allow for the possibility for believers to stop believing, at which point, any benefits, including justification, that apply only to believers would not be available to them.
I went looking for a good citation after I wrote the above, and the following does an excellent job of describing what I was trying to say. And it applies equally well to the question of justification addressed in the survey.
Certainly clinging to an act of profession of faith in our past would not be a way to assure us of salvation, but rather what is our current state? Are we believing in Jesus NOW? Are we bearing fruit NOW? Are we loving the brethren NOW? If not, then you have to ask yourself:
