Godschild Wrote:
FtR Wrote:I don't think it's possible for someone to deconvert while still accepting that God is real. I'm not saying that they go from believing to claiming that he, a deity, doesn't exist at all, but rather that the Christian deity can't be shown to be real.
I don't know of any cases myself where the unbeliever still holds the belief that a particular deity is real. That's an oxymoron.
Why, Satan and the fallen angels knew God, they still know He exists, they have rejected who He is, not His existence. All the Christians in my church know God is real, they do not need physical sight to believe, through the Holy Spirit we see God as plain as we see the church building when we enter the parking lot. Faith in God leads to believing ie. knowing. Once a person truly experiences God that person knows God exists, once a person knows God exists that person can never truly deny He doesn't.
Not a oxymoron, rather a rejecting of who God is. I do not know many who have rejected who God is, it's rather rare, even to the point of being extremely rare. This is why I can know that those who say they were Christians and say God is not real, never truly believed He does exist.
Gc Wrote:
FtR Wrote:This is what I meant by subjective. Your experience will be different to mine. Not only that, but only you know what you have experienced and how you experienced it, no one else. So with that being said, how can we even begin to establish a way of knowing if someone was ever (or even is) a Christian? My experience was unforgettable because literature has never made me weep before, yet there I was Bible in one hand and wiping tears with the other. But as I said, it's all subjective so there's no concrete way of knowing for sure if e.g. I was a Christian. Isn't it most logical to just leave it up to the individual to determine that?
Maybe you need to talk to a group of Christians and see what they have experienced through the Holy Spirit. I can tell you that if you were to ask people in my church you would hear many comments, yet there would be a similarity between each person. So for those I know as Christians they would not reject God, they have experienced Him through the Holy Spirit. As for my church God and our experiences are not subjective, indeed they are real and our experiences are much the same.
Leaving it up to the individual is not what Christ wanted, you need to remember, Christ formed the church so that those who are believers will share in their experience with God.
Gc Wrote:
FtR Wrote:I can see why believers would testify to all this, but I guess my problem with it all (or rather the unsolved problem within Christians themselves) is the never ending debates over the right interpretation. This is definitely a problem because in the eyes of some Christians certain experiences of other Christians have to be discredited as being from God and therefore it's mere nonsense, or as my church calls it 'religious baggage'. A big one of these is speaking in tongues. I've had Christians friends persuade me either for or against speaking in tongues as being 'legit'.
As for things like speaking in tongues, these things must conform to scriptures, this takes deep study with the Holy Spirit guiding one to the truth. These differences make up the many denominations, as long as each believe in salvation through Christ the Son of God then we must consider them Christian churches. Remember the Church is the bride of Christ, and as biblical speaking, the bride is to serve the Groom and the Groom to provide for the bride. Want a hint to speaking in tongues, it's plural.
FtR Wrote:So I guess the greater picture here is that if we don't have a crystal clear definition of Christianity itself, then people's claims of God working through them can go either way as being genuine or false, because there's no real way of comparing it to the Bible.
It is the unbeliever that has a problem with the definition of Christianity, not the Christian church. Yes there's a way to determine what the scriptures say about how God works through them, allowing the Holy Spirit to guide one through scripture to reveal the truth. This however leaves the unbeliever without the ability to understand the deep meanings within the scriptures, the Holy Spirit will reveal salvation to the unbeliever, but will not work through them to understand the scriptures and the way they work in a believers life.
God loves those who believe and those who do not and the same goes for me, you have no choice in this matter. That puts the matter of total free will to rest.
