Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: rbaker@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Robert Baker) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: once saved, always saved Message-ID: Date: 17 Dec 90 00:42:59 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: The Ohio State University Lines: 58 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu One thought I've had on this ,"once saved, always saved" question is that I have not seen anyone talk about the role of free will choice in salvation. Although if you are predestined to salvation...ahhh, that's another can of beans...anyway my point is if I have a free will choice to accept Christ and all he has to offer I ought to still have a free will choice to renounce his hold/postion in my life a.k.a. "not be saved" anymore. not that I'd recommend or be willing to go to hell to prove my point Robert"not Bob" [I thought this had already been dealt with. As I understand it, there's a disagreement about what is within our ability to decide. Those who believe in election believe that someone who has not been regenerated is unable to choose God -- not physically incapable, but rather their motives and character are so corrupted by sin that without God's intervention they are always going to do the wrong thing. God's intervention involves regenerating us -- making us the "new creature" that Paul talked about. Once that has happened, we are going to respond to God. If you end up rejecting God, this would be taken as evidence that you hadn't really been regenerated in the first place, but were simply showing some of the outward signs of salvation. Logically you could take the position that even after having been regenerated, someone could fall again. The reason I believe those who believe in election reject this position is that it implies that salvation is caused by something about us, rather than by God's grace. That is, those who persevere would have to be viewed as in some way "better" than those who fall back. The concept of election was reintroduced into the Church by Luther. As far as I can tell, he had a radical distrust of people (and in particular himself). He felt that if his salvation rested on anything other than God, it would not be secure. To him, requiring that you had to be good enough to persevere in salvation was just as bad as requiring you to be good to be saved in the first place: it meant you had to rely in some way on your own goodness. Frankly I'm not sure there is any way out of this existential trap. Luther obviously had no question of whether he was elected. Anything that required him to do something, even something as simple as simply not rejecting Jesus, left him feeling uneasy. He had no confidence in his own goodness. We wanted his salvation to rest entirely on God's decision, and nothing of his own. However the later history of Calvinism makes it clear that putting all the responsibility on God leaves us with a different but just as serious problem: how do we know that God has really elected us? Given that some people start out appearing to be saved but fall away, we have to adopt the view that there are no infallible external signs that guarantee that you are saved. So the same problem Luther had with relying on his own goodness, the later Calvinists had in relying on God's election. This led to all sorts of odd modifications to Calvinism, including Universalism. A lot of effort in Calvinist theology went into defining ways to known that you are elected. I'm ont proposing any specific resolution of the problem here, but trying to make the consequences of the positions as clear as possible. --clh]