Getting Saved

[Publisher]

I grew up in the Church of the Nazarene…my mom was Nazarene and my dad was “lasped Baptist”…but now in his last days…he has found fellowship and strength in the Pentacostal Holiness church…"They have the old-tyme songs and singing…piano…maybe a guitar but nothing else…he relates to the congregation…most of them his age or older…he’s 83yo…and his meetinghouse has a large attendence of “older folks” who come to “worship the old way…”…namely speaking in tongues and a “sermon” is worked out from the different interpretations of the “tongues”…not entirely different among Friends…we weigh the “vocal ministry” provided in the individual and corporate Ligth of the Meeting. Those “weighty Friends” still exist…it is not a quick process.

Any way…salvation is like a birthday…one is “born again”…there is comfort looking at that date where one “Accepted the Lord”…or “became a Christian”…and by “Christian” one meant not a member of any church group…but one who has had an experience with the Risen Christ and have repented of their sins and by faith asked them to live “in their hearts by faith”…entire sanctification and other such “works of grace” are the means of growth in grace and understaning of God and His ways.

 

[asd72]

When you look at the types or shadows in the Old Testament you can see how the Catholic view of Salvation makes sense.

Noah trusted God, but if he simply said my belief in God will save me, and did not follow through by building the ark and entering it he would have surely died.

The Israelites also had to actually cross the sea, not sit in Egypt and say my faith will lead me out of slavery.

I think conversion is the catalyst, but when those who were cut to the heart after hearing the Gospel after Pentecost asked Peter and the other Apostles “brethren what shall should do?” Peters answer was “Repent and be Baptized”.

We are also saved through water. The Sacrament of Baptism which takes away sin and confers the Spirit.

Sorry I may have got a bit of topic…

 

[CompSciGuy]

No, Calvin thought you could be certain that you were among the elect. In fact, that is an intrinsic part of faith for him. However, he granted that because of human weakness a true believer might struggle with doubt. (See Institutes 3.2.15-23.) I actually don’t find Calvin telling people to look at their good works as evidence that they are elect. I wouldn’t swear that he never did so, but the general consensus of scholarship on Calvin (from Max Weber to Richard Muller) is that this isn’t Calvin’s primary approach. You find this more in later figures like Beza and the Puritans, though Muller argues that they aren’t as different from Calvin on this as some have claimed. Calvin certainly insisted that the elect would produce good works, but he believed, like Luther, that truly godly people were acutely conscious of their own sinfulness, so looking at their good works as a source of assurance would be a recipe for trouble!

Edwin

You’re right, I was making that claim based on the beliefs of the Puritans, who I mistook for the “purest of Calvinists.” At least, when I was raised in Protestant schools, we were taught that they were so.

 

[Contarini]

I don’t think that’s Calvin’s concept. Calvin was the originator of TULIP, which has no standing with the concept of a person deciding anything, much less deciding to be saved.

This is a common, but serious, misinterpretation of Calvinism.

Calvinists do believe that people decide things. They just think that people decide according to what God has eternally ordained. Now whether this violates human freedom or not is a difficult philosophical question and not as obvious as many people think. It is important not to confuse your judgment as to what someone’s position implies with what they explicitly believe. This is what Protestants do when they claim that Catholics “worship Mary” or “believe that Jesus is crucified all over again in the Mass.” Catholics have explanations of why their views do not imply these clearly heretical and blasphemous things, but some Protestants do not find the explanations convincing. Similarly, Calvinists have explanations for why their views do not take away human responsibility or make God the source of evil, but many other Christians find these explanations unconvincing.

I think it would be extremely interesting to find out the basis for OSAS (in a flash of time) I heard a Catholic Answers show where the guest attributed the concept to people like Billy Graham and Bill Bright (Campus Crusade for Christ). I suspect that if it didn’t arise there it was certainly given “legs” by those guys.

You’re confusing two things here: OSAS and instantaneous conversion are not the same. Many Arminian evangelicals believe in the latter and not the former. And depending on how you define your terms, many Reformed folks believe in the former but not the latter.

The phrase “in a flash of time” isn’t a very precise one, I think. What exactly are you saying happens “in a flash of time” in this view? I think all Christians believe that there is a moment when a person is regenerated, or at least begins to be regenerated. Traditionally it’s baptism–the Reformed and their many offshoots in Protestantism reject this. The Reformed hold that regeneration is a work of God that immediately produces effects consisting of repentance, faith, and good works, but is not itself identical with any human act. They also believe that only the elect are regenerate (in contrast to Augustine, for instance). This is the original form of “OSAS,” though many folks distinguish it from OSAS.

Calvin used the phrase “sudden conversion” to describe what he believed to be the work of God’s grace bringing him from what he called “Papist superstition” to evangelical belief. There’s a lot of debate as to just what he meant by this. 16th-century Reformed folks generally did not look for evidence of a “conversion experience.” That was a more typically Puritan emphasis.

So I’d say that the “flash of time” view is best defined as the view that an instantaneous conversion experience (a felt change of heart to which one can testify and assign a date) is to be identified with regeneration, either as its immediate effect (the Calvinist view) or its immediate cause (the Arminian view). This has never been as universally held as many people think–lots of evangelicals through the centuries have admitted that for some people it may be hard to p(name removed by moderator)oint the exact moment, while of course saying that such a moment must, objectively, have existed (which really isn’t controversial, I think, though for Catholics and other traditional Christians the moment would be baptism). Nor does it necessarily imply perseverance/OSAS.

I would say that Billy Graham and those like him actually moved away from the highly experiential Puritan/Pietist tradition by identifying the moment of “being saved” with *intellectual *assent to the truth of John 3:16. This view was very controversial among more conservative evangelicals/fundamentalists, often derided as “easy believism.” My family came close to seeing Billy Graham as a false prophet for this reason, though usually softening the blow by admitting that he seemed to be personally godly and that his formal theology was basically orthodox. (Essentially we thought that he was a well-meaning believer who had nonetheless done much unintentional damage by giving people the impression that they were “saved” when they hadn’t really experienced the transforming power of God’s regenerating grace.)

Edwin