Yes! This very minute and forever.
Heb 10:10 “By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
Jimmy Akin addressed this error here:
Sometimes claims about the Greek are flat out erroneous—that is, they assert something that simply is not true. A well-known example of this is the assertion that in Greek the aorist tense indicates a
punctiliar event or even a
once for all event.
For those not familiar with this terminology, the aorist is one of the major tenses in biblical Greek. It occurs more frequently than any other tense in the New Testament (though the present tense is a close second). The word
aorist means
undefined or
indefinite, and the tense tells you about an action (usually in the past) without telling you whether the action was just begun or is ongoing or finished. Since it leaves the latter topics undefined, it is called the
undefined or
aorist tense.
(Other Greek tenses are more definite on this topic; the imperfect tense, for example, usually indicates a past action that was ongoing, while the perfect tense usually indicates a past action that was finished.)
With that as background, it is ironic that some preachers—and even some Greek textbooks!—describe the aorist as indicating a “punctiliar” action—that is, an action that occurs at a point in time. For example, in the sentence “Bob’s fist hit Bill face,” the verb
hit describes a punctiliar action, something that occurred in a single moment. (For comparison, the action would be described as continuous or ongoing if it read, “Bob’s fist was hitting Bill’s face.”)
Matters are even worse when some preachers say that the aorist not only describes a punctiliar action but that it describes a “once for all” action—something done once, never to be undone and never to be repeated.
Why would anyone claim such things? The aorist, of all the past tenses in Greek, means
the least. Why would such
definite meanings be ascribed to the
indefinite tense?
Much light is shed on this mystery when you look at the
doctrines in conjunction with which such claims are often made—in particular, the doctrine of justification.
Modern Protestant theology very much wants to portray justification as an event that occurs to us at a definite point in time—one that is not ongoing—and that happens only once in the life of the believer. It would service Protestant confessional interests if direct support for these claims could be found in the Greek itself.
And so, since the aorist tense gets used in the New Testament to refer to our justification, we find many Protestant preachers and commentators front-loading Protestant theology into the grammar itself. The aorist thus gets portrayed as a tense which indicates a punctiliar or even once-for-all action when in fact it is the tense of all the Greek tenses that tells us the
least about the kind of action under discussion.
Of course, when the theological cart gets put behind the grammatical horse, it can cause problems, and this particular one has come back to haunt many traditional, confessional Protestants. You see, it turns out that the New Testament uses the aorist when it talks about sanctification as well as justification. This helped lead the Protestant Wesleyan and his holiness movement to claim that not only is justification an instantaneous, once-for-all act but that sanctification is as well.
This irks non-Wesleyan, non-holiness Protestant theology, which wishes to hold that sanctification is a
process rather than an instantaneous event.
In fact, the portrayal of sanctification as a process plays an important role in much Protestant theology, because it is the means by which Evangelical theologians are able to take account of the fact God continues to work in the life of the believer after justification. It is clear that God does continue to work in our lives even after conversion and initial justification. Catholics have often used the word “justification” to refer to this continuing work of God, as well as to his initial work, but Protestant theology has not wanted to do this. It has wanted to portray justification as something all done in an instant, and so it needs another term to refer to God’s ongoing work in our lives. The term it chose was
sanctification.
It begins to get dicey, then, when Wesleyans begin saying to non-Wesleyans, “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the aorist describes a punctiliar, once-for-all action, and if the aorist is used for both justification and sanctification, then both of these must be point-action events in the life of the believer.”
This underscores the need to be careful in what one says regarding Greek. Not only apologetics but also doctrine itself can be seriously skewed if one is not cautious in these matters.
When I took Greek (from a Protestant, incidentally), he passed on to the class a saying that he had learned in his own student days—“There’s nothing more dangerous than a first-year Greek student.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, while that’s true everywhere, it’s more true in Protestant circles than in Catholic ones. Catholics have Tradition and the Magisterium to keep them within the bounds of sound theology. Those who pride themselves on operating
sola scriptura, and who then try an encounter with the Greek
scriptura alone, do not have these boundaries and are more likely to get an odd idea about the Greek and start a new, false theology based on it.
catholic.com/thisrock/2001/0102bt.asp
