A non-Catholic said to me - " “Justification” is in a perfect or aorist tense in the Word of God. It is a one time action that is good for eternity. That is the definition of perfect tense. “Sanctification” is not. The process is “justification” (eternal) “Sanctification” (temporal) and Glorification (eternal) This is hilarious. I agree with what you posted concerning justification and the Council at Trent. Read it again. You don’t agree with it! Where in there does it say you can become un-justified? Catholics are so confused they don’t even understand their own doctrine."
I am pretty sure Trent’s understanding that we can fall from the state of justification. So how do I explain how this happens? But as far as the Greek is concerned, I don’t know Greek. So I need some help there.
A non-Catholic said to me - " “Justification” is in a perfect or aorist tense in the Word of God. It is a one time action that is good for eternity. That is the definition of perfect tense.
No, no, no! Aorist just means it has a nondurational aspect, like if you’re just saying that something happened without reference to whether it took time to happen.
Sadly this is what happens when Protestants learn Greek, they stuff an entire theology into a simple grammatical feature. And I only hear this from Protestants who speak languages that do not have an aorist aspect, like English, especially Americans. To say the aorist aspect means justification was an instantaneous action of God that is good for all eternity or whatever is like saying “I have sinned” means I personally possess past sins as my personal property or that sin is a quality of me, like “I have a car” or “I have red hair”. “Have” is just an auxiliary verb, it’s the way the perfect aspect works in English; it doesn’t mean “own” or “possess”. And to say that justification is perfect and complete and total because the word “perfect” happens to be the technical term for this aspect in Indo-European grammar is to miss the point entirely. “Perfect” just means done, like the English perfect “I have already eaten dinner”.
If you want to argue about the exact meaning of the aorist aspect, and maybe test him to see if he actually knows what he’s talking about or if he’s just uncritically repeating what he heard from his pastor or whomever, ask him to explain the difference between these two Greek sentences:
They say almost the same thing but one is aorist and the other imperfect. Because if he says the aorist means a one time action good for all eternity, he will have to admit that Jesus had a transubstantiated Eucharist in mind, something that is his body, blood, soul, and divinity, outside time and space, that is always the same and is never divided, like what Catholics have. But if he says the imperfect means a repeated action that could go on to the end of time, then again he will have to admit he meant frequent communion that could even be daily mass if you like, which is what Catholics have.
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