Wondering Why?

Wes,

You said,

Although I believe people in the Wesleyan and Nazarene Church are saved, some of their pastors and evangelists are in your above named category.

They believe you can be saved one minute and unsaved the next minute because of wilful sin. This is rather radical from my view point.

 

Wes,

Yes, they believe in the atonement 100%. They not only believe in it, but they also teach that Christ died for all sinners.

Most of the pastors teach the people that they can fall out of grace, with just one violation of the Law or known sin. They do teach Christians to immediately confess their sin.

My cousin, Rev. Harold Berrian, is the District Superintendent of the Kentucky District of the Church of the Nazarene.

 

Reminds me of some Baptists, except the Baptists would say "you must have never really been saved!"

 

Hi Ray;
Maybe somebody forgot to show them this;
Rom 6:14 For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.
May Christ Shine His Light On Us All;
Mike

 

Wes, Outwest,

A creative thinker and writer; I like what you said! Plus it is a perfect analysis of the denomination.

 

Open theists are hyperarminians.

 

Open thiests are those who believe that God knows "only what can be known." Since the future has not yet happened, God cannot know the future. It is the ultimate end of free willism. Since God's knowledge is determinative at least in terms of certainty if not causation, if God knows the future, then man has no true free will. In order to maintain some semblance of integrity in their system of free will, they posit that God doesn't really know the future, that he is finding out about the future right along with the rest of us.

 

Greg Boyd is probably the most well known spokesman. He is in the Baptist General Conference and teaches at Bethel Seminary I believe, though I could be wrong on that. He wrote a book entitled God of the Possible.

 

I really don't understand how anyone thinks that God's knowing of all future events must be anything more than God permitting. If I had the ability to look into a crystal ball and see Larry get hit in the head with a tennis ball, does that mean I threw the ball? I know that is not a perfect analogy but it makes the point. Foresight is not causitive or even determination for anyone expect God himself. Since His lives above time and space He sees all happenings at once, but our choices within time determine what it is that He sees, eventhough He saw it before time began. That is impossible for our minds to wrap around and really its all speculation, but I see no biblical reason to assume that because God knows all things in the future that He must have caused it.

 

The point is this: When God knows something, no matter when or how he came by that knowledge, it renders the known thing certain. For the sake of the tennis ball, if God knew in eternity past that I would get hit with a tennis ball, then I will certainly get hit. There is no other alternative.

I think the "living above time and space" is a bit misguided. Events happen in time even though God knows everythign all at once. That does not change the time-space-mass continuum.

The causation issue is one of primary vs. secondary causation. God is the primary cause of all things (cf. Rom 11:33 -- all things come from him). He is not the secondary cause of all things. This means that God is not implicated in the sin of man in any way.

But that is a bit off topic so we should probably not get into more.

 

No, it has nothing to do with clock watching in the least, neither do I think God is constrained by time. He certainly is not, but we are, and the personal God of the universe works inside time. Part of knowing all things is knowing the time and sequences of events. God would not know all things if he did not know the timing.

Do you really want to derail your own thread? If so, that is fine with me. But we can reserve it for your started topic if you wish.

 

Ha ha ha ha.... oh boy I haven't laughed that hard in a long time !! Arminians conservative? Ha ha ha.. all those kooks out there that are Holy Spirit laughing and barking like dogs and everybody on the heretical CBN t.v. are all Arminian based ! Oh boy ... ha ha ha ha..

Yeah .. the Calvinist, who are pleading to go BACK to the Greek and the ways of the Puritans... ALL of the preachers who have WARNED the church that Arminianism would lead to a destructive path of liberalism.... ha ha ha... that's funny !