S
smithm29
Guest
Let me start this off by saying I don’t consider myself an evangelist. I’m pretty good at countering the aggressive attacks I experience living in Southern West Virginia, but I’ve never considered myself someone who “goes out” to spread the truth.
I went out to lunch today at a buffet pizza place and was reading a book called “making Senses Out of Scripture”. The book has a picture of an icon of Christ on the front. After a few minutes, a guy came up and asked if he could sit with me. I agreed, but in my head, I went “oh no, not here, not now”… Luckily, he turned out to be very nice and very educated about his faith- neither of those seem to be the norm with protestants who evangelize/proselytize around here.
He asked a few questions about what I considered the absolute biggest differences between Catholicism and Protestantism (and admitted that the term “Protestant” is impossible to work with), and I said that the presumption of salvation was the biggest that I could think of. We talked about grace for a good 20-30 minutes after that- what it meant to accept God’s grace, whether it was possible to reject it after first accepting it, and what our concepts of this meant for free will, for “works”, and for the difficulty of achieving salvation.
I don’t think he’s going to go home and go to RCIA, but I could tell that the discussion had some effect on him. I’d like to be a little more prepared for these discussions in case they happen in the future, and I think that knowing more about the relationship between God’s grace and our will might be the best approach to take with people in my area. Can anyone recommend good resources for discussing this?
I went out to lunch today at a buffet pizza place and was reading a book called “making Senses Out of Scripture”. The book has a picture of an icon of Christ on the front. After a few minutes, a guy came up and asked if he could sit with me. I agreed, but in my head, I went “oh no, not here, not now”… Luckily, he turned out to be very nice and very educated about his faith- neither of those seem to be the norm with protestants who evangelize/proselytize around here.
He asked a few questions about what I considered the absolute biggest differences between Catholicism and Protestantism (and admitted that the term “Protestant” is impossible to work with), and I said that the presumption of salvation was the biggest that I could think of. We talked about grace for a good 20-30 minutes after that- what it meant to accept God’s grace, whether it was possible to reject it after first accepting it, and what our concepts of this meant for free will, for “works”, and for the difficulty of achieving salvation.
I don’t think he’s going to go home and go to RCIA, but I could tell that the discussion had some effect on him. I’d like to be a little more prepared for these discussions in case they happen in the future, and I think that knowing more about the relationship between God’s grace and our will might be the best approach to take with people in my area. Can anyone recommend good resources for discussing this?
