M
mercygate
Guest
When Mother Teresa was alive – or Pope John Paul II – Catholics generally pointed to them as living saints. No problem there with your friend’s pointing to Paul on the matter.
Your friend doesn’t understand the difference between BEING a saint and being** recognized** in a way that allows public celebration of the fact via an act of the infallible teaching office of the Church. For example, someone might appear to be a saint to all who know him, and might believe in his heart of hearts that he is “saved,” but be harboring a fatal moral flaw, perhaps invisible even to himself, that will keep him out of heaven when he comes to be judged. Now, your friend will not allow that, of course, but that is a problem with the subjectivist view of salvation.
Catholics view salvation (as differentiated from redemption or justification) as a lifelong process; certain fundamentalists, who insist on the dubious teaching of “eternal security,” think salvation happens once and you’re good to go forever. The flaw in that emerges when a “saved” person takes a serious dive into sin. The only explanation is that the person wasn’t really saved in the first place. So much for eternal security.
Too much of the New Testament speaks of running the race and working out our salvation to think of eternal security as anything other than a “tradition of men” that makes void the word of God.
Some extremists even believe that eternal security means that you can sin like mad after you’ve been saved and it won’t affect your salvation at all. Others say that the moment you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, all of your sins, past, present, and future are forgiven.
Where do they GET this stuff? :whacky: Don’t they ever say the Lord’s prayer? Shouldn’t Jesus have told us to pray: “Thank you for forgiving all our trespasses” rather than “Forgive us our trespasses?”
