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Lest anyone miss the humor here, Katzpur believes the unstated theme of every one of Irkle's posts is "I hate Mormons" - which doesn't stop her from following him like a dutiful puppy. The humor is how quickly her façade of "Christian niceness" crumbles. In their own weird way, Katzpur and Mystic are two peas in a pod - legends of "Christian niceness" in their own minds, but alas only in their own minds. Mainstream Christian theology tends to bring out their ugly side.
Belief in salvation through Christ means one is a Christian.
This is the one thing, not all the OP wrote.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Way
This is true. No need to complicate the issue. Anyone who has trusted in Jesus Christ for salvation in response to the gospel message is a Christian. . . has been born again . . . has been eternally saved from the penalty of sin.
Lest anyone miss the humor here, Katzpur believes the unstated theme of every one of Irkle's posts is "I hate Mormons" - which doesn't stop her from following him like a dutiful puppy.
Funny, I never said a thing about you hating Mormons. Was that what this thread was about? I apologize for missing the point.
An atheist poster who had previously been a Christian described years of praying, fasting, church-going, witnessing and doing all the things a devout Christian is supposed to do. Alas, it all collapsed and he’s now an atheist. I remarked that this isn’t an uncommon path – i.e., when you scratch the surface of a gung-ho atheist, it’s not uncommon to find he was once equally gung-ho about Christianity.
Another poster, a believer, stated that Christian faith is no different from the everyday sort of “faith” we exercise when we trust a ladder that seems to be sturdy enough to hold us. I remarked that Christian faith is very different – ontologically different, meaning “a completely different animal.”
Throughout many threads on these forums, it seems to me that atheists and believers alike often miss or misunderstand the one genuine Christian essential, the sine qua non of Christianity.
Participating in all the rituals of Christianity, even with complete sincerity, is no guarantee. In the 18th century Denmark of famed philosopher/theologian Soren Kierkegaard, the Evangelical-Lutheran Church was the official state church. Everyone was ostensibly a Christian, knee-deep in the trappings of the religion. Kierkegaard questioned whether it was even possible to become a Christian in such an environment. He described faith as "a leap into 70,000 fathoms of water."
Nor is being a Christian mere intellectual assent to the doctrines of Christianity. As the Letter of James states, even the demons believe. When I regularly attended Southern Baptist churches, one of the most common admonitions was against mere intellectual assent to the Gospel. One doesn’t "prepare" until the Gospel seems more "reasonable" than "unreasonable," then step onto the ladder of “faith.”
The one Christian essential is a genuine encounter with God. The Christian model is that God calls the individual, the Holy Spirit convicts the individual of the truth of the Gospel, and the individual with the grace of God and the assistance of the Holy Spirit responds in faith.
The faith response is all-consuming. It involves the entire being of the individual. It’s a response that is possible only with the participation of the Holy Spirit. It’s truly nothing like trusting a ladder not to break.
When this encounter occurs, the Christian journey begins. The truths of Christianity unfold and blossom – intellectually, yes, but much more than intellectually because the individual has literally been born anew. He sees with different eyes, hears with different ears.
Ostensible Christians who’ve never had genuine encounters with God will always occupy a house of cards. Their Christianity will always be weak and fragile, no matter how sincere or devout it may seem to them and others. They are the most prone to rigidity, to debating the fine points of doctrine and insisting they are correct.
Unbelievers will never grasp the effect of a genuine encounter with God. They simply can’t. Those who have had such an encounter are literally different animals. What seems irrational or foolish to the unbeliever is now Truth to the believer. It’s Truth at a much deeper level than mere intellectual assent.
I don’t believe those who have had such an encounter are ever in real danger of falling away. As Jesus said, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of my hand.” I also believe a correct understanding of the genuine essentials of doctrine - which are pretty basic and largely uncontroversial across the entire spectrum of Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism - flows from a genuine encounter.
I described my own born-again experience at 20, which was so unanticipated that I began to question it almost immediately. It launched me on a long and twisting quest. Decades later, I realized it had been the encounter with God it had seemed at the time. My faith arose in a flash, a mystery to me even as it was occurring and certainly nothing like intellectual assent. I had never really been in danger of falling away.
God calls people at all ages and in all sorts of circumstances. I don’t know of any way to induce such an encounter, other perhaps than through prayer. It does seem to me that God calls whom he will when he will, which makes me sound like a Calvinist. I only know it isn’t a matter of “trying to act like a Christian,” no matter how sincere one may be, or trying to “convince myself that belief is reasonable enough for me to respond favorably.” Both of these approaches are fundamentally misguided.
Has the thought ever crossed your mind that
God called them for the purpose of them falling away?
You know like He did Adam and Eve? You must certainly know
that God Knew before He commanded them to not eat of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that He was
pronouncing the curse of sin and death upon them? It is
not like He did not know what He was doing to them.
Katzpur is a legend of Christian niceness in about 99% of the posters minds here, I would guess. Her and MissHepburn are in my humble opinion the two nicest posters in the R&S area. As I have related before, I watched Katzpur take abuse in a 200+ post thread from a number of Mormon baiters ( 4 or 5) and never respond in a mean or unkind way. That particular thread was finally shut down by the mods due to the abuse heaped on her , and she never went after any of them in return.
You, on the other hand...seem to be one of the one or two most similar to Mystic , highly impressed by your belief in your own brilliance
Lest anyone miss the humor here, Katzpur believes the unstated theme of every one of Irkle's posts is "I hate Mormons" - which doesn't stop her from following him like a dutiful puppy. The humor is how quickly her façade of "Christian niceness" crumbles. In their own weird way, Katzpur and Mystic are two peas in a pod - legends of "Christian niceness" in their own minds, but alas only in their own minds. Mainstream Christian theology tends to bring out their ugly side.
You have to be kidding.
Not only is Katzpur one of the nicest people on this forum, I suspect she is off the forum as well.
Katzpur, along with her husband, regularly spends some of her free time visiting prisoners as part of living the Christian life. Somehow it is very hard to picture Irkle doing anything of that nature. I doubt you would find that incarcerated men are as impressed with your bloated sense of superiority as you yourself are and therefore you would not get much satisfaction from such an activity. Or do a prisoner much good.
I wonder if Christ is as impressed with Irkle as Irkle is.
One of the best sermons I ever heard was one of the shortest.
"How can you be more like Christ? Can you walk on water? Heal the lame or the blind? Change water into wine? No, you cannot do any of those things. The only way you can be like Christ is to do as he did, and humble yourself."
What makes you think that Job was even a real person, and not merely a (literary) creation of the writer?
Does it matter? The lessons of Job stand regardless.
I was surprised to learn that Christians, even fundamentalist ones, believed that Job was real and the events in the book of Job were believed to have taken place. It is not necessary to think that to meditate on the meaning.
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