Monday, January 24, 2011
A Short History of the Protestant Reformation
Human beings are evil. Everything we do is evil. Any appearance of humans seemingly doing good things is an illusion. When a person seems to be doing something good it is actually God who is doing the good act. The person remains completely evil. There is no such thing as free will which would allow people to choose to do good or choose to do evil. We are all evil and have no choice about it. Since everyone is evil without a single ounce of goodness, justice demands that everyone go to hell and suffer for eternity. Jesus however was perfectly good. He did not deserve any suffering at all because he was perfectly good. However, he did suffer and die. Now comes the really tricky part. God can now pardon any sinner he chooses to pardon because his sense of justice has been satisfied by the fact that an innocent person has been punished. Since everyone is equally and completely guilty God has no basis at all for pardoning one person rather than another. So he grants this pardon to some people for no reason at all and withholds this pardon from others for no reason at all. Those whom he pardons are those to whom he gives the “gift of faith.” (This is where it all comes around full circle.) Being given the gift of faith means God has caused you to believe the tricky part! Faith is believing what I called the tricky part. How do we know this is true? It is true because this is what Paul says in his epistles, chiefly Romans. Now Christians had read Paul for fifteen centuries before Luther picked him up and nobody ever found this doctrine in Paul before. How do we know this is what Paul meant? Well, because this is the “plain and obvious” reading of Paul and being given the gift of faith means that you do find this in Paul. Not being able to find this in Paul means you have not been given the gift of faith and so are not among the lucky to be pardoned. Sorry about that. Maybe you will just get lucky later. As one of the blessed lucky few I’ll pray for you. As for me I’m feeling really happy and relieved that I will spend eternity in paradise because I do believe the tricky part.
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3 comments:
In case anyone is wondering, yes, this was tongue in check. However, I am serious about it as a brief summary of what the reformers were up to. Also living in the Bible belt as I do I can donfidently say that it is a pretty good depiction of what lots of conservative Christians think right now.
Thee seems to have summed up the narsty notion quite well!
I've been away from your site a long time, essentially because you haven't been putting out there. I hope to see more writings soon, to draw me back more often (though one might complain about my own recently fallow condition equally justly, 'tis just one part of a cycle...)
I have stopped posting on my personal Quaker site because after I accepting the postion as clerk of NCYMC a weighty Friend suggested that the clerk's having a site might mislead some people into thinking that the clerk's musings were the official position of NCYMC. I was feeling this myself before the Friend spoke with me about it so that just confirmed my feeling.
This isn't written in stone. I will mention it to other Friends and see what their take on it is. Maybe the clerk should have a blog. For now I will only make posts here and make comments on other people's posts on QQ.
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