There's another poster on this forum, The Strategos, whose academic specialty is the difference between religion and magic, chiefly in the context of Coptic stuff. You may want to shoot him a PM in addition to asking in this thread.
Ask a Theologian III
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I think a large number of Arminians believe in total depravity but reject unconditional election. Arminians, as I understand it, don't believe in works based salvation, so it would not make sense for them to believe that God would rank people based on their actions. They believe salvation is a free gift of God, and all we have to do is accept the gift (Ephesians 2:8-9). So the only "condition" that matters is did you or did you not accept God's gift of salvation. A totally depraved person could see that they are completely sinful, and that they need salvation. Perhaps even their motives were wrong when they accept the gift, but that does not mean they would be unable to accept it.
I don't think that is a modern phenomenon at all. People often ask Jesus what they must do to be saved in the gospels.
Mark 10:26
The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?”
Luke 7:50
Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
Luke 13:23
Someone asked him, “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?”
Luke 18:26
Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”
Luke 23:35
The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s Messiah, the Chosen One.”
Here is a verse from each gospel where Jesus talks about how to be saved, or not saved.
Mark 16:16
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.
Luke 8:12
Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved.
Matthew 24:10-13
At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.
John 10:9
I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.
Ephesians 2:8
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith
Romans 8:24
For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all.
Paul also does reference salvation as a future event as well, but that is because there are three phases to salvation that Paul talks about, Justification (past), sanctification (current) and glorification (future).
I think one can look at Jesus's teaching on the Kingdom and see that it is related to salvation.
In John 3:1-15 Jesus seems to use "The Kingdom of God", "Eternal Life" and "Heaven" interchangeably. He stats that to receive these things you must be born again. Salvation, as I understand it, is being saved from hell and inheriting eternal life.
In Matthew 24:12-13 (quoted above) Jesus says that "the one who stands firm to the end will be saved" is the "gospel of the Kingdom". I know there are other passages that make the Kingdom of God seems like something else, I think it best understood as God's "rule" or "reign". So if it is in reference to entering someones heart, that would be establishing God's rule in your heart, if it is on reference to earth, it would be establishing God's rule on earth. It could also obviously be used in reference to heaven, as that is where God's rule is established. So when Jesus talks about inheriting the Kingdom of God, I think he is talking about salvation.
GhostWriter16
Deity
I don't understand what you mean by that doctrine (I've never heard of it), but that's not what I mean (And again, I may not be right, that's just what I think it means based of limited knowledge.) What I meant was, if someone continually, repetitively sins, he knows he is sinning, he does not repent, and he feels no guilt, the believer in Eternal Security would say "Well, as long as he was saved once" while the Perseverance of the Saints believer would say he was never saved since if he was, he would feel guilt.
Now, obviously in practice we can't really know if the Person is aware of his Sin, so in practice it is nearly impossible to ever know for sure someone claims to be saved and is not, and as a believer in Perseverance of the Saints, I admit this, since we cannot know the state of their heart. But that's another issue.
Well, I don't think anyone I know would accept Total Depravity as you explained it (Maybe a few) but I don't think that that is necessarily the correct interpretation (I'll ask you to clarify in a second). Most people I know hold to some form of Perseverance of the Saints. The rest of Calvinism... until a couple of years ago most people I knew did not believe it, but a lot of them (Not all, but many) changed their views (There are still numerous things about both sides that bother me, so I still have no view.)
I think this is incorrect. I think (Correct me if I'm wrong) that Total Depravity merely means that man is unable to choose God on his own, or do good on its own. This is different that everything is sinful, which makes no sense. That said, saying that our HEART is always sinful might make sense.
For instance, if I help an old lady, is that Sin? Even if my reasons are selfish, no its not, the fact that I am selfish in my heart is the Sin, but my action was not a sin. Note that it was not good either, for doing good is only possible if it was done for Christ.
I see zero reason to assume John the Baptist's message was incorrect.
If Jesus did not tell a given sinner to repent, that does not mean that was needed for Salvation. God loved the sinner, yet hated their sin. And Christ said "Today Salvation has come to this House" to Zacchaeus only AFTER he repented.
It seems that this person, based on Pelagian, would be damned, at least, I don't see any way around it.
That said, I want to ask a couple of questions about Pelagius concepts of Sin so I can understand better.
1. If you know something is Sin and still do it, but do not deliberately choose it with the mindset that it is Sin (After Baptism) are you damned? For instance, say someone is tempted by a woman when he is already married, she seduces him, and they have sex. The man already knows the appropriate Biblical condemnations against adultery and knows it is sinful, but he does not have this in his mind when he does it. Is he damned?
2. If Pelagius says that something is only sin if you know it is Sin, or if you think it is and do it even if it is not normally a Sin, isn't Pelagianism basically reletivistic, basically you can do what you like and reach Salvation as long as you can convince yourself there is nothing wrong with it?
3. The key to Pelagian theology is "After Baptism" if you Sin, you lose your Salvation. What if you are baptized at infancy before you even believed, then you sin before actually placing your trust in Christ. Would Pelagius say you are damned or not?
4. You spoke earlier about the people who deliberately saved Salvation until near death. Why would any Pelagian NOT do this? Also, why would Christ set up a system of Salvation that essentially rewards putting off his command (Baptism) until the last minute, and purposely making it harder for those who follow his command immediately.
I don't know much about this, but as I understand it, limbo was a medieval development of Augustine's belief that some people (notably unbaptised babies) are justly consigned to hell but only the very lightest version of hell. So they will suffer, but not so much. Peter Abelard, thinking this a bit harsh, amended it so that unbaptised babies don't suffer at all, although they don't enjoy much happiness either - they're just somewhere in between. So Abelard is often credited with being the first theologian to speak of limbo proper. The idea was later extended to include other categories of people, such as virtuous pagans, as in Dante.
As I understand it, magic - speaking anthropologically - is when a person tries to influence events at a higher level by manipulating objects at a lower level. For example, in sympathetic magic you try to control a person by fiddling about with their nail clippings or a doll that looks like them, or whatever it may be. In the Neoplatonic magical tradition (deriving from Iamblichus), there is a hierarchy in nature from the highest beings to the lowest beings, with intermediate ones in the middle. The ones in the middle share some of the nature of the ones at the top and also some of the nature of the ones at the bottom, so they are complex. The ones at the top and the ones at the bottom, despite being at opposite ends of the hierarchy, therefore have an affinity in that they are more simple. So you can affect what happens at the top by acting upon the ones at the bottom. Hence the use of base or simple substances to try to control the divine realm.
So magic is in effect a sort of technology, at least in theory - it's done by doing things which you hope will affect other things, via a natural mechanism.
In religion, by contrast, there's no manipulation of elements - you achieve things by asking a god to do it for you. That's not to say that a religion can't contain magical elements, and of course it's a traditional criticism of Catholicism that many of its rituals and practices are effectively magical rather than devotional. But there's still a big conceptual difference between the two.
Augustine did not believe that Mary was born free of original sin. The belief that she was is the doctrine of the immaculate conception, which was medieval. However, Augustine seems to have thought that divine grace permitted her to lead a life in which she never did perform any sin. (When Pelagius gave examples of people he thought had lived sinful lives, Mary was the only one that Augustine was prepared to accept.)
Well, the Pelagians! One might add to that the communities associated with Matthew's Gospel and the letter of James - perhaps. But "salvation by works" is one of those things that no-one wants to say they believe - it's always a stick used to beat others with. Even Pelagius talked about faith and grace.
Is that necessarily so? There's a difference between saying that God chooses whom to save on the basis of what they have done, and saying that it's what people do that saves them. It seems to me possible for someone to believe that our actions do not save us, but that God nevertheless chooses whom to save on the basis of actions. For example, perhaps God chooses to save all those people (and only those people) who have worn a green pair of shoes. Now it wouldn't follow from that that wearing a green pair of shoes is what saves you; it's simply what defines the group of people whom God saves. In fact, there's an influential interpretation of Paul that argues that it is this view, rather than the view that your actions are what save you, that he opposes when he talks about faith and works. And when Paul says that those who have faith will be saved, he (similarly) isn't saying that it's faith that saves you - rather, it's simply that those who have faith are those who will be saved, not that there's a (direct) causal connection between these properties.
Those are good points (although if we're talking about the historical Jesus rather than the concerns of the authors of the Gospels, I would dispute the Mark verse as being barely canonical, let alone authentic, and the John one as being probably inauthentic). But I still don't think it's a defining issue in the New Testament, the way that it is in the Reformed tradition. Of the five points of Calvinism, four are about salvation. Compare that to the Nicene Creed, which doesn't mention salvation at all, but instead has some brief statements at the end about the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the dead. Now of course a Calvinist would say that those are references to salvation. My point was simply that that's an interpretation; the word "salvation" doesn't occur in that text or in many similar ones, and to reduce complex and varied ideas such as forgiveness, resurrection, eternal life, the kingdom of God, and all the rest to the simple and undifferentiated heading of "salvation" is to lose something.
Paul didn't write Ephesians. The Romans verse is interesting - it's actually in the aorist tense, which is temporally vague, being past or present. You are right, though, it is not future (or at least not explicitly so). Perhaps I would have been more accurate if I'd said that Paul never refers to salvation as something that is past. I'd say that your distinction between the three phases that Paul talks about sounds about right, but what's the evidence that Paul thought that these were three phases of salvation?
The meaning of the kingdom of God passages is of course dreadfully disputed, because there are so many categories of them that no single meaning can make sense of them all. Sometimes the kingdom is external to people, sometimes it is internal; sometimes it is coming in the future, sometimes it is already here; sometimes it is something one enters, sometimes it is something inside you. I think you are right to say that the concept overlaps with that of salvation, at least some of the time. But I wouldn't say it's the same thing. I think the John passage you cite reflects later Christian reflection on these different concepts and shows people trying to assimilate them to each other; I don't think this reflects Jesus' own use or understanding of the term "kingdom of God".
Messalianism was a movement in fifth-century Syria. The Messalians (apparently) believed (among other things) that the presence of the Holy Spirit could be consciously felt, and that this was a litmus test of whether the Spirit was in you or not. If you could feel him, he was there, and if you couldn't, he wasn't. It's certainly rather an obscure heresy but quite an interesting one. (They were also accused of believing that going to the toilet was a way of expelling sin from your body.)
Right, I understand.
Sinfulness is a matter of intent, surely. If you do something that in itself is good (such as helping someone), but you do it from sinful motives (as the doctrine of total depravity states), then surely your action is sinful - because whether it is sinful or not is determined entirely by the intent - isn't it? Of course it's not sinful in itself, considered as the kind of act that it is, but you are performing it with a sinful intent.
That's how I understand it, anyway. But then I don't know much about Reformed theology (as already mentioned), so perhaps that's not how it's usually seen. Certainly if you can make a strong distinction between the sinfulness (or otherwise) of the intent and the sinfulness (or otherwise) of the act then one could say that not all acts are sinful, even though all intents are.
No doubt, but I don't see what that has to do with what I said - I didn't comment on the rightness or wrongness of John the Baptist's message.
That's true, but I'm not sure it makes much difference to what I said; the point is that Jesus isn't represented as telling Zacchaeus, or most people, to repent. The impression given by the Synoptic Gospels is that, if repentance was part of Jesus' message, it was a pretty minor part.
I think pretty much all moral theologians would hold that if you commit a sin that you know is a sin, then that counts as a sinful act whether or not you're consciously thinking of its sinfulness at the time. Why wouldn't it?
What you describe is actually very similar to Aristotle's explanation of acrasia or weakness of will, which is where somebody does something that they know to be wrong (or against their own interests). This was a problem to Greek philosophers as it was a basic tenet of theirs that everyone does what they think is best, and that if someone does something wrong it is because they mistakenly believe it's the best thing to do. And yet common experience tells us that people do things like eating cream cakes whilst saying "I know I shouldn't eat this!" Aristotle explained it by saying that, although the person knows that they shouldn't do it, their desire to do it temporarily overpowers their knowledge, so at that moment, they actually don't know it's wrong (at least not consciously), no matter what they say. However, the person is still responsible for their act, to the extent that they had the power to resist their desire.
The view you ascribe to Pelagius isn't exclusive to him - it's what most Christian moralists would say. As I said, it is usual to say that the sinfulness of an act is determined by the intent with which it is performed. That does not lead to relativism because it can still be the case that there are absolute and universal moral laws. If you intend to break the moral law, then you act sinfully; if you intend to keep the moral law, then you do not act sinfully. That's distinct from whether you actually do break or keep the moral law. So there can remain clear and universal standards for whether a person is behaving sinfully and also for whether their actions are right or wrong. Relativism would involve denying both of these.
Now there are traditions within Catholic moral theology that allow for a certain amount of "excusing". The Jesuits taught, in the past, an ethical theory known as probabilism, which basically states that, when you're unsure what the right thing to do is, you are not acting sinfully provided you make a choice that has a good chance of being the right thing to do. This is so even if an alternative choice seems to have a better chance of being the right thing to do. Critics of the Jesuits (of whom there were many) said that this effectively meant that people could do anything they wanted provided they could think up some feeble justification for it, and indeed it seems that perhaps some Jesuit thinkers did verge on that. In practice, of course, the theory was intended to provide a realistic moral standard that didn't demand the impossible of people - in other words, it was precisely the opposite of Pelagianism.
But neither Pelagius nor a Jesuit probabilist nor any mainstream Christian moralist would think that you can do what you like as long as you convince yourself that there's nothing wrong with it, because how could one do that? Could you really, say, murder someone and convince yourself that it's the right thing to do? Well, perhaps - in fact the Memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner is all about someone who does precisely that, and uses Calvinist theology to rationalise it, to boot. But someone like that is reasoning in such a warped way that, even if they are genuinely ignorant that their act is sinful, that itself is culpable ignorance. In other words, to get oneself into a state like that would itself be an egregious sin.
I don't know. Pelagianism generally didn't see much point in infant baptism, because Pelagians didn't believe that there was any inherited guilt that needed removing. Pelagius himself approved of infant baptism, not to remove sin but to allow entrance into the kingdom. It seems to me that in the case you describe, there wouldn't be much hope for the person in question. But I don't think that Pelagius or any other ancient Christian would have conceived of this case, because they didn't think in terms of salvation/damnation being about "placing your trust in Christ", at least not in a way that distinguished that from baptism or church membership.
When I say that, I don't mean to imply that they didn't think trust in Christ was important or that they couldn't understand the concept of someone trusting in Christ without being baptised, or vice versa. I mean that this just wasn't the way that they typically thought.
Quite - I don't think it would make sense not to, for a Pelagian.
It's not about "setting up a system of salvation" - salvation works the way it works! The early Christians took baptism extremely seriously. They thought it should not be done frivolously or quickly, because it was so important. Look at Tertullian's treatise on this subject, particularly ch. 18. He points out that you don't get married at the drop of a hat but wait until the right time. It's the same with baptism. Now he's not arguing for delaying baptism until the last minute, but that practice arose from the same concerns. Of course, there would be a risk in doing that, because what if you died before you'd got around to being baptised? The early Christians certainly thought baptism necessary for salvation. I think the general attitude was that God would want people to get baptised at the appropriate time, and that delaying it excessively was a bit cheeky. So Gregory of Nazianzus, as a young man, was caught in a storm at sea and prayed that if he was delivered, he would get baptised - having presumably intended to hold off for as long as possible. That pretty much sums up the attitude.
GhostWriter16
Deity
Whatever happened to "He who does not make his heart like a little child will never see heaven"
Also, where do they get the doctrine of infant baptism anyway?
Also, did Augustine ever describe what he felt the levels of Hell would look like?
Interesting. And why was this considered heresy? (NOTE: I'm not agreeing with them, I'm just curious.)
I think those who accept Total Depravity (Of which I am one) would argue that while we have a choice in what we do, we cannot make ourselves have a Godly intent, and if your intent is selfish (Which it invariably would be if not for God) is a Sin.
I don't see why it wouldn't, but from a Pelagian perspective (Sin after Baptism cannot be forgiven) it might make sense.
OK that makes sense.
Did whether the Baptism was chosen or forced matter to the Pelagian?
Also, what would be the point of baptism if there was no Sin. Wouldn't a Pelagian say if somehow you lived your life with no Sin (If you go by a Pelagian based definition of sin, this is certainly possible if you die before you can even speak) you would enter the Kingdom anyway, since you had no Sin?
Seems too legalistic a method to make any sense to me.
Did Pelagius himself get baptized at death?
I think it makes no sense, but I get you.
I suppose this is possible, I never heard of this belief. I think the one I stated is much more common.
Do historians consider Luke and Mathew to be more true to Jesus and his teachings than Mark and John? If so why is this?
I think he did.
I will have to get back to you on this one.
Man, I can't even use the gospels to talk about Jesus. This goes back to my other question, could you give me a summary of each gospel in terms of how historians view it?
Go to post #4 of this thread, and look up
"The Gospels and our sources for Jesus"
The authorship of the Gospels is linked there.
"The Gospels and our sources for Jesus"
The authorship of the Gospels is linked there.
Did you read the link to the book by Tertullian that I gave? He talks about that.
It seems to have emerged by the end of the second century. The reasoning is very simple: a desire not to exclude children from the church. Children born to Christian parents should be members of the church; baptism is the means of entry into the church; so children should be baptised to include them. Moreover, if baptism is necessary for salvation, then children should be baptised to ensure that they can be saved.
It's interesting, I think, that the strong view of baptism that early Christians had led them into two directions at the same time - baptising early and baptising late.
Have a read of this (book 21 of The City of God).
I suppose because it was thought that there is no sure sign of who has the Spirit and who doesn't. That's what the parable of the tares is all about.
I don't know. One would think it would, since the whole point of Pelagianism was that you can't be forced into good or evil; but I don't know if this issue was addressed.
I would guess so, but a Pelagian would say that no-one had ever actually managed this. Although everyone has the ability to avoid sin, in fact everyone does sin and therefore requires baptism.
We don't know enough about Pelagius' life before or after his controversy with Augustine to say.
Most of them think that all of the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are much closer to the historical Jesus than John. This is for a whole host of reasons. I suppose the main one is that the Synoptics on the one hand, and John on the other, present very different versions of Jesus' teaching. In the Synoptics he speaks in brief sayings and parables, talks mainly about the kingdom of God, seems quite eschatologically focused, and refers to himself as the Son of Man. In John he speaks in great long discourses on particular topics in a very repetitive style, talks mainly about himself (or at least about the Father and the Son), says hardly anything about the kingdom of God or eschatology, and calls himself the Son. It seems pretty unlikely that Jesus should have taught in two such very different ways, and taught two such very different sorts of things, and that one tradition should have been recorded by one set of texts and the other should have been recorded by a different text, without much overlap (i.e., if Jesus' teaching was really that varied, we'd expect to see it fairly represented in both traditions rather than divided between them). Add to that other striking differences, such as the different timescales and ordering of events in the two traditions, the different disciples who are prominent, and the different sorts of miracles (exorcisms are important in the Synoptics and entirely lacking in John), and historians reckon that the Synoptics and John can't both represent Jesus with equal fidelity. Almost all of them conclude that the Synoptics are much closer to the historical Jesus, at least as far as the reported teaching and actions go, and that John represents a much more developed and distinctive tradition of reflection upon Jesus.
(I've already addressed this anyway - have a look at the index at the start of the thread.)
As for Mark, I don't think he's considered notably less historical than Matthew or Luke. There was a time when scholars thought that Mark must be the most historical of the Gospels, because it was the first to be written - but of course, earlier texts aren't necessarily more historically accurate (maybe Matthew and Luke had access to better information than Mark did). Where material appears in Mark as well as the other Gospels, it's usual to cite the Markan version, since the other two take it from Mark, and also since Mark usually gives slightly longer and more interesting versions (Matthew, for example, incorporates almost all of Mark's stories into his Gospel, but shortens them, presumably because he has lots of other stuff he wants to fit in as well). Where material is common to Matthew and Luke but not Mark (Q material, which Matthew and Luke probably both got from a now-lost source known as Q), it is usual to cite the Lukan version, since Matthew is thought to have changed it more when incorporating it into his Gospel. For example, Matthew tends to arrange his material much more thematically than Luke does, and he seems to alter some of it to make it fit together. Luke, by contrast, tends to bung it all in without messing with it, and it's thought that he preserves the original form and order of Q more accurately. (Of course, none of this is certain, but it's what careful study of the text seems to suggest to most experts.)
Scholars almost unanimously think not, though, and again for a variety of reasons. Now of course they may be wrong, but at the very least, one cannot assume Pauline authorship for Ephesians or the other letters where the authorship is disputed.
Of course you can, but that doesn't mean you can take it for granted that everything in the Gospels is an accurate depiction of Jesus. To use the well-worn illustration, if you're going to talk about Socrates, you'll have to use Plato and Xenophon (who depict Socrates as a character in their dialogues and are the major sources for him) to do so, and what's more Plato and Xenophon give us a good idea of what Socrates was really like - but nevertheless, not everything they tell us about Socrates is accurate. Time, selective memory, and deliberate bias all work to distort the picture of Socrates that they present - but not to such an extent that it becomes unrecognisable, or that we cannot carefully unpick later elaboration from original material and get at least a good idea of what the "real" Socrates was like. Similarly, we can learn a lot about Jesus from the Gospels, but that doesn't mean that everything in them is accurate. And we can, to a great extent, work out what's likely to be accurate and what isn't - if not with total certainty then at least to a tolerable degree. The Gospels are the same as any other text in that regard. I know that when it comes to the Gospels everyone - whether religious or not - seems to lose all historical perspective or sense of nuance and assume that they must be completely accurate in every single respect or totally unreliable and useless (I suppose because most people want them to be one or the other), but this isn't the case with the Gospels any more than it is with any other text.
As El Mac said, I've done that already - have a look in the index.
This is what happens when I try to answer these things on four hours' sleep. Yes, of course I meant that Pelagius thought Mary was sin-free, not sinful.
GhostWriter16
Deity
I don't remember you giving me that link.
Other than Mark 16: 9-20, (Which, IIRC, was added later in the Second Century) is there anywhere that says water baptism is necessary for Salvation?
I read through the first 20 pages or so and found nothing. Where is it found?
If there is no original sin, and you died before you were old enough to understand what a Sin was, you would obviously have never sinned. You would have to be stupid to not get this. What the heck is Pelagius talking about now?
_random_
Jewel Runner
Would St. John Chrysostom have agreed with him on this point?
Post 724, final paragraph.
I don't know if the passage you mention is actually second century, although it's certainly an addition to the original Gospel.
The treatise of Tertullian that I linked to says it quite clearly.
If by "anywhere" you mean "anywhere in the Bible" then John 3:5 and Romans 6:3-4 would seem pretty close.
But of course, ancient Christians - like modern ones - weren't necessarily restricted in their beliefs merely to those which can be found in the Bible.
This page is, as far as I know, as much as Augustine says about the nature of the punishment in hell, i.e. that he thinks it's physical.
Pelagius isn't talking about anything - I was just saying what I thought a Pelagian response to your comment would be, not citing any particular known text. If you want to know what ancient authors said about particular things, you have to be content with the textual evidence that we have. I see your point now and I agree that Pelagian theology does seem to suggest that unbaptised babies - if they haven't sinned - would not be damned, at least on the assumption that babies aren't capable of choosing to sin. Whether that's a flaw in Pelagianism, I don't know. But as far as I know Pelagius didn't address this issue, at least not in the writings of his that we have, so it's not appropriate to criticise him for it.
Also, I don't know why you feel the need to say things like "You would have to be stupid not to get this" - that is not a feature of civilised discussion.
I don't think Chrysostom addressed the point explicitly, although this passage from his homilies on John is often taken as an expression of the view that Mary was not sinless.
GhostWriter16
Deity
It says being born of water and the Spirit. I've always thought that being "Born of Water" meant being born from the womb, and then the Spirit means being born again in Christ. I've never heard it interpreted any other way, and though I don't want to say dogmatically that this is obvious (As I've been proven a fool several times already by doing so
) I really don't see how this ISN'T common sense.I fail to see how Romans 6 says anything about that.
Yes, of course, the Catholic Church can say what it likes. But I'm talking about the Bible.
Also, I'd say the thief on the cross annihilates any theory of Baptism by water being needed for Salvation.
I don't remember why I said that, but I do remember I was addressing Pelagius, not you.
GhostWriter16
Deity
I think Pelagius has far worse things to worry about than me insulting him TBH.
Ajidica
High Quality Person
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But is it okay to deride somebody even if they are dead? Would you be okay with me constantly refering to Christ and the 'comsic telepathic Jewish zombie'? By your logic it shouldn't matter as Christ has far more important things to worry about.
GhostWriter16
Deity
Is Pelagius God?
It says being born of water and the Spirit. I've always thought that being "Born of Water" meant being born from the womb, and then the Spirit means being born again in Christ. I've never heard it interpreted any other way, and though I don't want to say dogmatically that this is obvious (As I've been proven a fool several times already by doing so
It's certainly a reference to baptism, just as John 8 is about the Eucharist. I have to say I've never heard of any other interpretation! To take "born of water" as a reference to natural birth seems very strained to me - what a peculiar way of referring to natural birth that would be.
Early Christianity was an initiatory religion, similar to the mystery cults. Baptism was a really, really big thing. When you see references to water in early Christianity, they are generally references to baptism. When you see references to water in connection with salvation, new life, or initiation, they are definitely references to baptism.
It talks about how those who are baptised into Christ are baptised into his death. According to Paul, it is through baptism that people are united to Christ and can share in his death, and it is through sharing in his death that people gain the ability to share in his resurrection.
Fine, but you didn't say so.
"Annihilates" is rather combative language, don't you think? Anyway, there are at least three obvious replies to that that I can think of off the top of my head. First, the thief couldn't be baptised since he was being crucified, and perhaps the intent to be baptised is enough in cases where actual baptism is impossible. Second, since the thief had faith, he could plausibly be seen as a martyr, and in the early church, martyrdom was considered a second baptism "of blood". In the Tertullian treatise to which I linked he says that martyrdom can take the place of baptism. Third, the people around Jesus during his lifetime, such as the apostles, may be considered special cases, which Tertullian also says in that treatise, in which case the fact that some of them weren't baptised shouldn't be taken as evidence that baptism is optional for other people.
I understand that, but it's still excessively antagonistic. Comments like that say far more about the speaker than they do about the target.
That's irrelevant, and a case of bad debating technique. Ajidica was saying that you seem to think it's OK to insult people from the past as long as you don't insult people from the present. He pointed out that insulting Jesus wouldn't be acceptable, so insulting other people would be equally unacceptable. Whether any of these people are God is completely irrelevant to that - unless you're now saying that it's OK to insult anyone who isn't God. Which isn't in line with the forum rules.
By the way, the Nestorians certainly thought that Christ was God (whether they thought that Jesus is God is another matter, of course).
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