(September 2, 2014 at 4:16 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: After hanging out at my parent's house yesterday and talking to my father, it re-occurred to me how unique Christians believe their faith is in comparison to other religions (even Catholics--my folks are evangelicals) because they genuinely think those are works-based systems of salvation whereas Protestantism proclaims heaven's gate open to anyone who simply "believes."
Except that there is nothing simple about it. I could easily conceive of myself going about all the rituals and traditions (the "religion part") as "acts" of faith but ACTUALLY believing all that biblical nonsense (the "relationship part")? Now THAT seems like hard work. At most I can only picture myself as miserably and hypocritically pretending to be sincere while deep down constantly reminding myself how silly and petty and UNTRUE the whole Gospel story reads and feels.
Also, what's this "faith is a 'free' or 'deliberate' choice" thing? I don't get that bit at all either.
Yes. Luther suffered a lot from worrying about whether he was a 'good enough' Christian. This is sometimes known as 'scrupulosity' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity). And so he focussed on those passages in scripture that talk about salvation through faith and down-played those that talked about the reward of works. But the irony then is that he created another kind of worry in place of scrupulosity; the worry about whether one has good and proper faith.
A bit of trivia: the early Calvinists thought that feelings were totally unreliable, and that saving grace would be evidenced by subsequent good works (the works being a result of, not cause of, salvation). The habit of a personal diary/journal started with these Calvinists as they used the journal to examine their lives for evidence of salvation.
Just on faith being a choice. Normal Christian theology is that no man can freely choose faith, because of something that has gone wrong with us. So faith is always seen as a gift. There are then two main camps on how this works: the Calvinists consider that the gift is only given to some, and that it is irresistible. The Arminianists consider that the gift is given to all, who can choose to accept or reject it.
