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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 12/2/2003 4:04 AM (GMT -6) |   | FAITH -- "What is it." the student asked.
For a school assignment (at a Christian school) my son interviewed me on "what I thought faith was." Here's thoughts...
Faith is the FOUNDATION that results from our response to the Person of God -- to God's Person, and not just thoughts regarding ideas about God. And Faith is the EVIDENCE of things that otherwise might be unseen. (Hebrews 11:1) Faith is a personal relationship, and it is built upon. And all the while the reality of that personal relationship with God is known. The Word is a Person.
Something that makes Christianity different from Islam is this: that while Islam has s written message from Allah, Christianity has the "Word made flesh (John 1), who dwelt among us, and who is present by His Spirit in his Church, in their hearts and with them as they gather.
I hear too much about Luther's adding the word "alone"—allein—in Romans 3:28. That warps what faith is. (Luther violated soli scriptura when he added to the Epistle.) It distances us from God. It makes US into something different from what God created us to be. (Creation, fall, redemption.)
Faith is the FOUNDATION that results from our personal response to the Personal God. But it is only a foundation. Foundations are built upon. And WE are what God is building. And our nature is to worship God of our free will.
As Florevsky says: "Synergism does not mean that two energies are equal. Rather it means that there are two wills-one, the will of God which precedes, accompanies, and completes all that is good, positive, spiritual and redemptive, one that has willed that man have a spiritual will, a spiritual participation in the redemptive process; the other is the will of man which must respond, cooperate, "co-suffer." In 12:9 St. Paul exhorts us to "cleave to the good." And in 12:12 he exhorts us "to be steadfastly continuing in prayer." Such a position certainly does not exclude monastic and ascetical spirituality but rather presupposes it."
And as we "work out our salvation" faith is also that "EVIDENCE of things unseen." As we "respond, cooperate, 'co-suffer" to what God ALONE "precedes, accompanies, and completes" BY the Father, THROUGH the Son and IN the Spirit, faith is also that EVIDENCE KNOWN personally, of God's Person working in us to develop FRUIT. The fruit of the Spirit is God's uncreated energies working in us to develop something that is eternal. Eastern Theologians even go so far as using the word "uncreated" with regard to the "eternal life" God develops in us. Obviously we do not ever, ever become part of the Trinity. But BY GRACE we participate IN CHRIST in the divine "perichoresis"/co-inherence of the Trinity. We become "god"/divine BY GRACE (share of the life of the vine by being grafted on through adoption IN CHRIST) while only Christ is God (capital-G this time) BY NATURE.
Faith is the FOUNDATION that "taps" us in to the eternal life of the true vine. And faith is also the EVIDENCE that we continue to be "tapped in" while the Spirit "works in us to will and to do of his good pleasure" -- WITH our "response, cooperation, 'co-suffering."
Faith is not some idea drummed into our short and long term memory. Faith is not a "dare." Faith is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in whom "whomever believeth shall have (BY GRACE, NOT BY NATURE) eternal life."
Thanks.
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Matthew Timothy Short
Huh?
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 635
| Posted 12/13/2003 2:28 AM (GMT -6) | | 2Pe 1:3-9
According as His divine power hath given unto us all things that [pertain] unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
And beside this, Giving all diligence,
Add to your faith virtue;
And to virtue knowledge;
And to knowledge temperance;
And to temperance patience;
And to patience godliness;
And to godliness brotherly kindness;
And to brotherly kindness charity.
For if these things be in you, and abound, they make [you that ye shall] neither [be] barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins.
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 12/13/2003 5:03 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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