Does the Lord's Prayer contradict sola fide?

[Bill the Cat]

But Free Grace theology has a wooden interpretation of Scripture that condemns both Calvinism and Arminianism:

http://www.faithalone.org/magazine/y2006/06so1.html

Quote
You can remember the two types with the letters RA, which stands for the element Radium, or for the disease many have, Rheumatoid Arthritis. But in this case it stands for Reformed and Arminian. The type of Lordship Salvation most people are most familiar with is found in the writings of men like John MacArthur, John Piper, and R. C. Sproul. I call this Reformed Lordship Salvation. It is Reformed because these men believe the five points of Calvinism which grew out of theReformation. COP for the Reformed person means this: No one is absolutely sure that he has been chosen by God or that Christ died for him. The only way to be sure you are born again is to persevere until death. Therefore, according to Reformed Lordship Salvation, if at the moment of death you are not persevering, you haven’t lost everlasting life, for that is impossible. Rather, you have simply proved what you thought was the new birth was actually a Satanic deception.



The second type of Lordship Salvation is Arminian. Arminius was a follower of Calvin who thought the system needed to be modified to include free will. So for him, if a person failed to persevere in faith and good works, then he would lose eternal life. Since it was a choice of the free will to receive eternal life from God, it could also be a choice of the free will (through rebellion or sin) to give it back. COP for the Arminian Lordship Salvation person says that if at the moment of death you are not persevering in faith and good works, then you will go to hell because you lost everlasting life at some point along the way. While that may sound like a big difference from Reformed Lordship Salvation, it really isn’t. Whether you lose everlasting life or prove you never had it by failing to persevere, you end up in the lake of fire. The end result of both forms is the same. Commitment, obedience, and perseverance (COP) are required in both systems for a person to ultimately receive everlasting life.

So what?

[footwasher]

So what?

So is your interpretation of Scripture wooden or full orbed, exclusivist or taking into account the totality of the teachings?

Like this person has, who was once a Free Gracer, like Obsidian:

http://www.monergism.com/thethreshol...freegrace.html

Quote
The meaning of the John's first epistle has been fairly uniformly understood throughout the centuries. However, this epistle presents a problem for the "free grace" theologian. The problem is this: John appears to be stating plainly throughout the book that there are tests which reveal whether one is a child of God or not. Some of these tests include: whether we love the brothers (2:10, 3:10, 3:14, 4:7), walk in the light (1:7), keep His commandments (2:3-4), walk in the same way in which he walked (2:6), continue on in fellowship with other believers (2:19), confess the Son (2:23), practice righteousness (2:29; 3:10), confess that Jesus has come in the flesh (4:2), listen to the apostolic teaching (4:6), receive the Spirit (4:13), confess that Jesus is the Son of God (4:15), believe that Jesus is the Christ (5:1), and overcome the world (5:4). Notice how some of these tests are doctrinal, and others are behavioral.

These terms pose two problems for "free grace" teachers. First is the problem of John’s behavioral tests to provide one with assurance of salvation. One of the "free grace" tenets is that it is always wrong to point a believer to behavioral tests to determine if they are really believers (whereas 1 John is full of such behavioral tests, as has been pointed out above). In fact, according to these teachers, one may truly believe and be a child of God, yet never pass any of these tests.

[Bill the Cat]

I let the words say what the Word says

[footwasher]

I let the words say what the Word says

Well the Word says that believers obeyed Christ's commands primarily because they wanted to live, not just because they loved Him or wanted to lay down their lives for their fellowmen:

Romans 8:13 for if you live according to the flesh, you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

Which is why they thanked God for sending Christ:

Romans 7:25Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

[apostoli]

It occurs to me that sola fide is a total denial of the testimony of A.John & A.Paul and Christ himself. As A.James put it "faith without works is dead". The question then arises, can one accumulate merit in the eyes of God? I think not! And I treat such an opinion as a two edged sword. The fictitious faith of our modern day sadducees, pharisees & scribes, the very self righteous (Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, the majority of fundamentalists and so forth) is a dead faith as is well evidenced by our daily newspapers...

Imo, something has been lost between Luther's justified rant against Rome's excesses, and the equivalent modernism of current protestantism...

[Rushing Jaws]

What Jesus instructed is to be understood as under the Law as opposed to being under grace.

## The Scofieldian answer, I believe.

[Rushing Jaws]

1 Corinthians 1:2To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ--their Lord and ours:


1 Corinthians 6:11Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.


If the Corinthian church was sanctified, why would Paul ask them to master their bodies?

## Simples - in order that they might become the holy people God had made of them, and called them to be so that they might be what in God's eyes they were already. Sanctification is completed Divine act, that is made effectual in people's lives (so that from their POV it is a life-long process), that will be completed "in the day of Jesus Christ". IOW, sanctification is - like so much else - eschatological & Messianic. Sanctification is a Divine work, something partly realised in men's lives now, & something to be fulfilled only in God's good time. That's why it is also a calling, & a duty, & a gift of grace.

[Bill the Cat]

It occurs to me that sola fide is a total denial of the testimony of A.John & A.Paul and Christ himself. As A.James put it "faith without works is dead". The question then arises, can one accumulate merit in the eyes of God? I think not! And I treat such an opinion as a two edged sword. The fictitious faith of our modern day sadducees, pharisees & scribes, the very self righteous (Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, the majority of fundamentalists and so forth) is a dead faith as is well evidenced by our daily newspapers...

Imo, something has been lost between Luther's justified rant against Rome's excesses, and the equivalent modernism of current protestantism...

Only strawman versions of those you accuse.

[Tyrel]

An old acquaintance of mine who is now a Catholic seminarian posted a blog post asserting that the Lord's Prayer contradicts the idea of salvation by faith alone because it holds that forgiveness of others is a condition for one's own forgiveness.

I am curious what thoughts others here have on this.

http://catholicdefense.blogspot.com/...asses-how.html

As a Catholic who is a convert from evangelicalism (though through a somewhat circuitous route), I find myself in adamant agreement with your Catholic friend. However, I am also skeptical of how much apologetic traction one can really get out of taking any one passage (even a passage of the Lord's Prayer) and reflecting on it's correct intepretation. Since the passage is interpretable in a variety of ways, the only way to make a compelling case for the Catholic reading is to put it forward as the most reasonable interpretation given things like i) all other relevant passages, ii) the historical testimony of the Christian Church from her beginning, iii) systematic theology, iv) philosophical reasons for preferring the Catholic doctrine of justification to other competitors. I think the cumulative case for the Catholic doctrine is incredibly strong, but I am skeptical of the usefulness of an argument which takes only part of the evidence into account (much less takes only one passage into account). Anyway, those are just some knee-jerk thoughts.

[Obsidian]

As a Catholic who is a convert from evangelicalism (though through a somewhat circuitous route), I find myself in adamant agreement with your Catholic friend.

Catholic confession is not even to God anyway. And the forgiveness that the priest bestows has nothing to do with whether the individual has forgiven others.

[Tyrel]

Catholic confession is not even to God anyway. And the forgiveness that the priest bestows has nothing to do with whether the individual has forgiven others.

The Catholic understanding of the sacrament of confession is that one is confessing to God through Christ. The presupposition is that the Church is the body of Christ, so that to go to the Church is to go to Christ (for just as your body is you, and not merely something which belongs to you, so also Christ's body is him - although it isn't the whole of him, anymore than your body is the whole of you). There is, in Catholic Theology, a view of the Church which is deeply Christological; the Church is the extension of Christ's person, presence and ministry in the world. It is invisible, but it is also visible (because it is incarnational), just as Christ himself is incarnate. Therefore, at least on the Catholic understanding of the sacrament of confession, one is confessing to God. It makes no more sense to a Catholic to hear somebody saying that you would do just as well to pray to God privately in your room (instead of going to meet Christ in the confessional) than it would make for somebody in the first century to declare that Jesus was the Christ, but that, instead of going to meet him and ask him directly for forgiveness, we should simply pray privately in our rooms. Which is the more direct way to meet Christ?

The only good objection here from a non-Catholic perspective could be that Christ did not mean to institute the sacrament of confession (despite appearances to the contrary, given passages like John 20:22-23), and so the Catholic isn't really meeting Christ in a sacramental way in confession. However, that at most means that the Catholic is wrong about confession - it wouldn't change what Catholics believe confession to be, which is an encounter with the risen Christ through the Church which is his body and which he intended would continue his ministry of forgiving sins (a ministry he entrusted first to the Apostles, and Catholics believe he entrusts it to all those who, through the laying on of hands, have received it from the Apostles and/or from others who have received it ultimately from the Apostles).