Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: MIONE@pisces.rutgers.edu Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: So Great Salvation Message-ID: Date: 4 Jan 90 08:17:58 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Rutgers University - CCIS Lines: 86 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I just finished reading a book by Dr. Charles Ryrie entitled "So Great Salvation". It discusses some problems with the "Lordship/Mastery Salvation" theology. It is quite well written and it is easy reading (its about 150 pages long). The book was more of an overview of the issues instead of an in-depth treatise. Can anyone recommend a book which goes into greater detail than this one (speaking, of course, from the "Unconditional Salvation-by-faith" viewpoint)? Tony:: (VMS Systems, CCIS) [I didn't understand the term "Lordship/Mastery Salvation" theology, so I got the following clarification from Tony: --clh] Lordship Salvation, as I understand it, suggests that unless you make Jesus Lord of every aspect of your life, you do not have a 'saving faith'. Granted that the believer should be striving to be more Christlike each day of his/her life. But this theology suggests that unless the believer is totally committed to God and His will, he is probably not saved. This starts to suggest that our salvation is in some way dependant upon our works or performance. Charles Ryrie takes the opposite view...that our salvation is not dependant upon our deeds in any way, just on a sincere profession of faith and reliance upon Christ's blood for the forgiveness of sins. If you are interested in borrowing the book, I am finished with it and it is very easy reading. As I mentioned in my posting, the Lordship Salvation view is presented in "The Gospel According to Jesus" by John MacArthur. I have not read that yet, but probably will in the coming 6 months or so. Tony:: (VMS Systems, CCIS) [I can't help suspecting that I am going to disagree with both alternatives. It is hard to believe that anyone in this life is actually going to be committed completely to God, though that is certainly our obligation. And I certainly am unwilling to suggest that salvation is a reward for something we have accomplished. But I am also uncomfortable with the suggestion that salvation doesn't commit us to anything. I don't have any neat way to reconcile these two. The closest I've ever come to seeing someone to justice to both sides is Bonhoeffer's book "The Cost of Discipleship". Let me quote one relevant paragraph: Luther had said that all we can do is of no avail, however good a life we live. He had said that nothing can avail us in the sight of God but "the grace and favour which confers the forgiveness of sin." But he spoke as one who knew that at the very moment of his crisis he was called to leave all that he had a second time and follow Jesus. The recognition of grace was his final, radical breach with his besetting sin, but it was never the justification of that sin. By laying hold of God's forgiveness, he made the final, radical renunciation of a self-willed life, and this breach was such that it led inevitably to a serious following of Christ. He always looked upon it as the answer to a sum, but an answer which had been arrived at by God, not by man. But then his followers changed the "answer" into the data for a calculation of their own. That was the root of the trouble. If grace is God's answer, the gift of Christian life, then we cannot for a moment dispense with following Christ. But if grace is the data for my Christian life, it means tha I set out to live the Christian life in the world with all my sins justified beforehand. I can go and sin as much as I like, and rely on this grace to forgive me, for after all the world is justified in principle by grace. I can therefore cling to my bourgeois secular existence, and remain as I was before, but with the added assurance that the grace of God will cover me. It is under the influence of this kind of "grace" that the world has been made "Christian," but at the cost of secularizing the Christian religion as never before. The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that. Grace as the data for our calculations means grace at the cheapest price, but grace as the answer to the sum means costly grace. It is terrifying to realize what use can be made of a genuine evangelical doctrine. In both cases we have the identical formula -- "justification by faith alone." Yet the misuse of the formula leads to the complete destruction of its very essence. --clh]