quote:
Originally posted by Aude Sapere:
Prove sola scriptura using the Bible, Billy. Why you will have to lose over half your vocabulary: "sinner's prayer," "eternal security," and my favorite, "Personal Savior." What does Personal Savior even mean? Do we not normally term Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ precisely that? Not My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," which sounds mighty selfish to me, much as the curious Rapture dogma does.
If it makes the Prissy Radical Protestants who cannot take a normative reading of the Holy Bible uncomfortable, then I am all for it. Too bad they cannot read a work in toto or with any form other than those of a parrot.
In other words, prophecy is not fortune telling!
One might reasonably conclude that "personal Savior" would be the opposite of "impersonal Savior," which sort of begs the question. If Christ is my Savior, how can he be anything but a "personal Savior." If He is "Savior," why try to embellish that exalted term with ANY adjective?
As to "sinner's prayer," that is the prime example I see of Bill's departure from any kind of sola scriptura. Neither the term nor any concept like it is found anywhere in scripture. If anyone disputes that, then I invite him or her to put up the goods. Show me where any person anywhere in scripture was told to say a "sinner's prayer," of the standard model proffered by certain evangelicals, as the kind of entreaty one must make to God in order to have forgiveness and salvation. Look through all the accounts of lost men and women being saved in the book of Acts and you will find there nothing even remotely resembling the "sinner's prayer." The first Christians ever were those who heard that great sermon by Peter in Acts 2 and who were
"*****ed in their hearts" and cried out "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" These were lost, convicted sinners. Did that apostle tell them to "say the sinner's prayer" or anything remotely like that? No way Jose'! He told them to "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for remission of sins!" Would they have been saved if they had not obeyed the command to repent? Of course not. Would they have been saved if they had not obeyed the command to be baptized? Of course not!
Did Paul say "the sinner's prayer" when he was encountered by the Lord on the road to Damascus? Was he told to pray? Uh-uh! He was told to go into the city of Damascus where "it will be told thee what thou must do." He was to find someone who would tell him
"
what thou must do". Oh! Then he must not have been saved on the road to Damascus; there was something else that he "
MUST DO."What remained for Paul to do? Was he lacking in that he had failed to say the "sinner's prayer?" Did God's appointed man, Ananias, tell Paul to say ANY prayer? Nope!
He told him to do the same thing Peter told those anguished Pentecostians to do. He told him to be baptized and he told him why he should be baptized. Acts 22:16: "And now, why tarriest thou, arise and be baptized and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord." No "sinner's prayer" there. Not in the scriptures I read.
Sola scriptura, Bill? Where, in your concept of "sola scriptura, do you find that "sinner's prayer?" Paul was saved without saying a "sinner's prayer." The 3000 at Pentecost were saved without it. There is no record of a "sinner's prayer" in the accounts of the conversion of Cornelius, of Lydia, of the Philippian jailer, of the converts at Athens, at Ephesus, at Corinth. Look all you will, Bill (and other adherents to the "sinner's prayer" counterfeit scheme of salvation), you will not find anyone, anywhere in the New Testament being told to say that ole "sinner's prayer" so widely enjoined upon the lost in our time. You will not find it, because it is not there; it is an extra-scriptural concept, a non-scriptural concept, a fabrication conceived by those who truncate and distort the salvation-by-faith concept to exclude from it the true meaning of faith. Thayer, the most notable of Greek scholars,defines the term "faith", in the koine Greek ("pisteuo") to include obedience when saving faith is under consideration: "a conviction, full of joyful trust, that Jesus is the Messiah--the divinely appointed author of eternal salvation in the kingdom of God,
conjoined with obedience to Christ." That obedience clearly includes baptism, as amply demonstrated throughout that book of conversions we call the Acts of the Apostles and as beautifully explicated in the first several verses of Romans 6. It nowhere includes that so-called "sinner's prayer," which unscripturally posits that baptism is not part of salvation.
Now--as to "Church Fathers"--a topic recently discussed here, I find it instructive to read what some of them have to say on major topics of their time. Justin Martyr, about 40 years after the death of the Apostle John, wrote to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, explaining some of the practices of the Christians in that very early time in the existence of the church. Among other things Justin Martyr wrote this:
"Then we bring them to some place where there is water, and they are regenerated by the same way of regeneration by which we were regenerated, for they are washed in water in the name of God the Father and Lord of all things, and of our Savior Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit; for Christ says, Unless you be regenerated you can not enter the kingdom of heaven; and everyone knows it is impossible for those who are once generated to enter again into their mother's womb." Clearly, Justin Martyr was alluding to the teaching of Jesus in John 3, where He taught that a man must be "born of water and of the Spirit." Justin Martyr clearly believed that the "water" of the new birth (or regeneration) was the water of baptism. In the writings of the early church Fathers, the concept of being "born again" or "regeneration" is never discussed except within the context of baptism. It took over a thousand years and a Calvin and a Zwingli to warp the concept of the new birth into a distortion that excluded baptism as an essential for salvation.
And that concept of "regeneration" embraced by the apostles of Jesus Christ and by the early church Fathers was not some notion that there was something magical in the water itself. In their concept of the new birth, they understood that baptism was that act of faith that accepted God's plan for the place and event where the sinner is promised the salvific benefits of the blood of Christ. "Therefore we are buried with him in baptism unto death; that like as Christ was raised up by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life."(Rom. 6:4) That walk in newness of life comes after baptism, not before, as clearly taught here.