If by acknowledge you mean a bare mental assent to the historical reality that Christ was crucified for sinners and was raised on the third day… Well, even the devil acknowledges that this took place. If you mean by belief a trust that Christ did everything necessary to bear the penalty my sin deserves, lived and died specifically for me and then trusting that work to justify me before God… yes, that would be faith.
Do you believe that you are required to participate in your salvation by LIVING an active Faith that manifests itself in Love,Charity and works as in James?Is Faith (that I perhaps mischaracterized as mere Acknowledgement),without works truly dead?
Yes, within our sanctification, we participate with an active, living faith, not because it adds to what Christ has done, but because we rejoice in what He has done, and respond with obedient joy, doing that which He has prepared us to do.
I agree completely.What becomes of he/she who does not participate with an “active living faith” but who acknowledges or believes that Christ died for our sins and believes that that is totally sufficient.In other words someone who has "Faith"that he/she is saved but does not “participate with an active living faith”?
JonNC summed it up nicely… The best way I can probably explain it, would be to say that the faith which unites us to Christ is something we receive passively, without participation on the part of the sinner. Which would mean, by extension, that the sinner doesn’t participate in his justification, either by works or by faith, since the faith is a gift. We would also disagree that justification is progressive… One is either fully just or not just at all.
.Please explain in detail.You have the Free Will to say YES or NO to Christ through the way you live(or not)your Faith.That IS participation in your salvation.
If I could draw your attention to the church affiliation marker under my join date. We probably mean very different things by “free will”.
Of course God works in us to will us to do them but he does not force us to do them nor does He deny us our autonomy,That’s why St Paul says we are to work out our salvation in “fear and trembling”.By participating or rather COOPERATING with our salvation we are detracting Nothing from God.Cooperating IS participating.Our salvation does NOT just occur with us as bystanders.That smacks of the Elect,pre-destination and other Calvinistic clap-trap.Don’t presume to say that I advocate sharing glory with my Lord and Master.
By passivity, Soutane, I mean that the human does not make a conscious effort to have faith. If faith is a gift, by its nature, it cannot be accepted. It can be rejected by resisting the drawing of the Holy Spirit in Word and Sacrament. The ability to have faith in God’s promises is not natural to the corrupted human nature. Because the spirit of man is dead in transgressions and sins (Eph. 2:1), it would be analogous to asking a corpse to will itself to life. It isn’t going to happen unless it’s resurrected by someone else, who is God.
Triune all gifts must be accepted or rejected.If it is imposed it no longer is a gift.I agree that Faith ONLY comes from God and that we cannot WILL it.But God in His Wisdom and Love does not impose Himself.He offers Himself and we can accept Him or reject Him through love of the world(sin)I was once wavering in my Faith and a Czech priest advised me "to be like steel"Something that took me a long time to understand as counsel to resist the blandishments of Satan.After all even Christ was tempted.As Catholics we reject the protestant idea that Man and the World are completely and irrevovably corrupt.We define ourselces as"fallen"with fallen natures and a prediliction to sin but it is by being born again through the sacrament of Baptism are we open to only Christ who will save us and we can choose to accept or reject this freely offered and totally undeserved salvation.I get the feeling that somehow we are talking past each other(sigh).
Soutane,
But that’s not what it says. It says that He works IN US to will and to do.