I want to welcome you to another episode of Engage the Faith on theHistoricFaith.com. My name is Clark Ray and I manage this project here at Sattler College. And I want to introduce probably does not need an introduction at this point, but David Bercot from Scroll Publishing, who will be sharing an update on the commentary series that he's continuing with the Letter of Romans, as well as some insights on the topic of Augustine and his effect on the modern church today.
After that brief update and presentation, we will jump into a Q&A of questions that you've sent in over the last couple of weeks on this topic as well. And David, if you want to go ahead and get started whenever you're ready, I'll hand it over to you. Okay. Well, just a brief update on the Romans commentary. I started working on it last September, so it's nearly a year now. It still looks like a release date of December or January of this end of this year or beginning of next. I'm still working towards that.
It's ended up being a big project only because I have to not only explain what the early Christians believed about Romans, but counter what Augustine, Luther, and Calvin have taught, which is what nearly everybody has involved. So it's like two projects in one, so it's made it just an extra challenge. But it's also why there's such a need for a commentary that comes from the early Christian perspective. It's not going to be me at all. It's purely the early church and what they say.
The last month, I've been working on what will be the concluding chapter after I finished chapter 16 of Romans, I will talk about what happened. We will have looked at how the early Christians uniformly understood it all. And so the next question would logically be, why doesn't everyone believe this away, this way today? So we will then look at Augustine and how he totally changed everything for the Western world. And then later Luther and Calvin and the role that they played.
So that's what I've been focused on the last month or maybe longer than a month. And that's why I thought it might be good to talk about free will and predestination today because like I say, I've been just totally immersed in that subject now for four or five weeks. So I think with that, if you want to just ask the first questions, Clark, and we can just get right into it. Great. Sounds good. Thank you for joining us.
So the first question we have here, let me go ahead and put it up on the screen is from Bevin John. And he asked, " What is the difference between foreknowledge, predestination, and free will in the domain of salvation? How can I push back on the proposition that God's foreknowledge leads to God's election and God's election leads to God's regeneration? And God's regeneration leads to man's faith. " This presupposition would lead to the fact that Jesus then died only for the elect? It's a really good question.
Yeah, very good question. And we will be looking at it somewhat in length because it nicely ties in foreknowledge, predestination, and free will. The three are so intricately intertwined, you can't really talk about one from an early Christian perspective without the other. And in the course of this, it'll be answering some of the other questions, or at least touching on them, is why we're starting with this one. Now, I should comment at the beginning.
Now, Augustine, Calvin, and you know the Calvinists would make a very big point or declaration that God's predestination is not based on His foreknowledge. In other words, He does not predestinate us because He foreknew whether we would believe in Him. He foreknew whether we would walk obediently.
Their whole proposition is it has nothing to do with his foreknowledge that he arbitrarily, they don't use that term, but it's I don't know any other word to use that he arbitrarily predestined us not not based on foreknowledge. So what you're saying here and you're leading up, you know, to the elect, Jesus died only for the elect, it's leading to the Calvinist proposition. But like I say, the Calvinists would deny that this is how the whole thing works. So let me just get to the early Christian understanding.
And it's based on several scriptures. One of them is Romans 8:29. And I'll just read this from the Scriptures. It says, " For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son that he, that's Jesus, might be the firstborn among many brethren. " Okay, now somehow Augustine reversed those two phrases in his mind. He has it for whom he predestined, he also foreknew. I don't mean that he put that in the Bible.
I'm just saying that's how he, for some reason, understands this verse, which seems so illogical because Paul puts it in a very definite order. Whom he foreknew he also predestined. So the early Christians weren't afraid of the word predestination. It was just predestination based on God's foreknowledge. In other words, he knows before we're born, but to be more precise, he knew before the beginning of the universe verse, he knew all of us.
And he knew who would believe in him, who would obey him, who would persevere faithfully to the end. So because of his foreknowledge, he's already determined, he already knows who is going to be, who's going to inherit eternal life, who's going to be one of the brethren along with his son.
And he determined, although the verse doesn't say he determined our predetermined our salvation, it says he predestined that we would be conformed to the image of his son, that that was his plan, that we would be molded into the image of his son. And of course, his continuing grace plays a big role in that, but we also play a key role as well, the two working together. And Ephesians 1: 4 has a similar thought.
It says, " Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will. " Again, the thought being that not that he predestined our eternal destiny, although I think that would be true to say, but the verse is only saying he predestined that we would be adopted as the sons by Jesus Christ.
In other words, he laid out how he wanted to do it all and what reward he wanted to give to those who would believe. That whole thing was predestined. But again, it's to those whom he chose. And maybe some translations say those who he elected. And it's interesting because ever since Calvin and maybe ever since Augustine, but certainly ever since Calvin, people associate the word elect with predestination that it has something to do that's beyond our control, that it's God doing it.
Where Chrysostom quotes this very verse and says because he elected us or chose us, it shows that it's not arbitrary. It shows that it shows that God looked into eternity. And he had a basis for choosing us. It wasn't just some arbitrary, yeah, picking cards from a hat or something. Yeah, he chose us because he foreknew what kind of people we would be, what kind of response we would make to the prevenient or grace that preceded our salvation, he knew who would respond to that.
Now, Mark Otto, it wasn't submitted to this, but he asked this question previously. And it's a good question. He says he didn't see how foreknowledge does not imply causation. And some people struggle with that. I have to confess, to me, I never did. I could see there's a clear distinction. The early Christians don't have any issue, but I know I've talked to people who say, well, if he foreknew it, then that means he caused everything. So I'll give a couple of illustrations if this maybe helps.
Maybe not you personally, but discussions that you're having. I remember when I was a boy seeing the movie, you know, I didn't grow up Anabaptists and I think most of you didn't who are at least on the screen right now. The movie The Time Machine. I don't know if any of you saw that or have ever read the book by H.G. Wells. Anyway, in It This Man, I guess the book was written in the early 1900s. I'm not positive. I think it was written before World War II, but I don't know the exact timeline.
But it was the first part of the 20th century. Anyway, this man, the scientist invents a time machine, and he goes forward in the future. In the book, he goes way into the future beyond anything in our imagination. But let's just say he went to the present age, or I was born in 1950. So let's say he went to 1950, just went forward a little bit from when he invented it. And he, yeah, saw my birth, saw my childhood.
And he's sitting there in his time machine just watching my life, and he bumps it forward, you know, to keep watching me progress. He sees that I become a Christian, he sees struggles I have, he sees answers I find, and the directions I take on my journey, and he eventually sees my death. Now he wouldn't necessarily know where I stood with God, but he could see at least if outwardly I looked like I had remained faithful to the end. Now, that's science fiction, but let's say that were possible, okay?
Now the fact that he was there watching all this before I was born, and he knew how my life was going to turn out, how does that affect how I live? I mean, I guess if he gave me a written book telling me my life, well, yeah, I wouldn't want that. I mean, like that would be kind of shattering, you know? But if I don't even know that he knows it or whether I know it or not, it doesn't have anything to do. I mean, all he knows is how I lived my life. He didn't do anything to make me live it a certain way.
And it's the same way with God. The only difference is God could intervene. And when he looks at our life, he also knows how he interacted with our life. But the fact that he knows whether I choose to believe in him, he knows whether I remain faithful. How does that take away my free will? I'm the guy writing the script. He's just reading it many, many centuries in advance. But the book of my life, I'm the one who writes the script of it. I'm the one who determines if I'm going to believe in him.
I'm the one who determines whether I remain faithful to the end. Now, I'm not leaving out, again, God's grace and the big role that he plays in our salvation. I'm not minimizing or leaving that out. But the key thing of whether I am going to believe and whether I am going to obey is falls on me. God does everything to make it possible, but ultimately that decision falls on me. That's what we see throughout the totality of Scripture.
And Augustine came up with his doctrine of arbitrary predestination by taking primarily Romans 9 and a few select verses like the one that Richard Earhardt had asked about Ephesians 1:4. And that's a terrible way to approach Scripture. Scripture isn't a miscellaneous collection that we use that we mine to find verses that we like. And in those select verses, we build a theology from them. I mean, you take the whole thing. That's what impressed me about the early Christians when I first read them.
It took me a while to click into it, but I'd say no more than a couple of months. And I began seeing, wow, their explanations, whether it's salvation or the Trinity, life after death, whatever, their explanations fit the totality of Scripture. They don't have any verses that they have to hide. Don't go there and read that. Their explanations fit the whole thing. And so they didn't hide predestination, but they also saw the verses that said that it's based on whom he foreknew.
So the only reason we can be said to be predestined is that God already knows our destiny. But all the verses that show we have free will, that you know God tells us to choose whether to obey or not to obey. And that's the whole Bible. That's not just a few proof texts. It's every time he gives a command is a implied teaching that you can obey that command. Otherwise, he's playing games with us. The whole Bible is a charade. God is just toying with us like a cat toys with a mouse that it is caught.
Yeah, he tells us to obey. He even praises us knowing all along that he's not going to give us perseverance and he's going to throw us into hell. But he lets us you know think that we're walking along and all of that. And all along, he had predestined, nope, David's going to bound to hell. But I'm going to let him believe in me for a while. I'm going to let him follow me. And then the last minute, I'm going to pull out the rug on him, and he's going to disbelieve. And that's it.
Well, I mean, what kind of God is that? That's wicked. That's horrible. The irony is this was the god of many of the Gnostic sects. And Augustine, I don't have it. I should have brought it. But yeah, this was in the commentary that I had written. But he had been in the Manicheans, which was a Gnostic set. Augustine was in them for nearly 10 years. And so he was thoroughly indoctrinated in all of that. Now, when he first became a Christian, he embraced Orthodox Christian doctrine.
So he did not teach predestination at the beginning. It was some 20 years or so after he had become a Christian when he turned to these teachings. And so he had written a number of works against the Manicheans and he denounces this horrible God that they're teaching who, yeah, just he could do this and that to save us and he doesn't. And it's just a monster, he says, that you know they have created.
And then he turned right around and embraced that exact model of a god who, in some ways, is worse than the Manichean God. The Manichean god was bound where he couldn't help us because there were two opposing forces, the evil and the good. Where the biblical God is totally sovereign. So yeah, he could save every one of us. And to Augustine, well, no, he just chooses to save a few of us. And the rest he's going to punish eternally. And why should we be punished if we couldn't do anything about it?
Well, the answer is because. If God said we were to be punished, God is always just, so it must be just. Even though what you've just presented would mean it's not just by anything God has put into our brains, any concepts we have of rightness and justice that it violates every one of those. And yet, well, if God says it's just, then it's just, you know, and Calvin's thing is, well, in God's secret counsel, he has a reason for why he predestined us. But now it has nothing to do with anything we did.
It has nothing to do with foreknowledge. But there is a reason. Well, you just, of course, ruled out any logical reason. It's just your way of getting around the horrible implication, the horrible truth that you've created a monster god that no one could really love and who punishes people for something they can't possibly do anything about. So now one of the things I discovered in working on this, I mean, it's not anything new to me. I just haven't dealt that much into Calvin and Augustine.
But Augustine's theology came from a faulty Latin translation. The old Latin Bible that the early Christians used, the Latin-speaking early Christians, it wasn't the absolute best translation you can come up with. It had some errors in it. That's why the Pope had asked Jerome to come up with a new translation. I mean, I would say it's 90% fine, maybe 95%, but it has a few passages that are mistranslated. And one of them is Romans 5:12.
Now what the Greek says, what our Bibles would say is, therefore, just as through one man, sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death passed to all men because all sinned. Okay, so it says, " Death passed to us because we sinned. " And Paul doesn't explain how Adam sin affects us. He implies that it does. Sin entered through one man, and then everybody ended up sinning. It certainly implies that it has something to do with Adam.
I think I could say I believe in original sin, but not original sin the way Augustine defined it, which became then the way the Catholic Church defined it. But original sin in the sense of Adam and Eve sinned. And because of that sin, I am affected. I don't start out the way Adam and Eve started out. I am affected by their sin somehow. But Paul doesn't explain exactly how. And the early Christians had different theories. They had no dogma on it. Augustine was the first one to come up with a dogma.
It's this way, and if you don't accept this, you're a heretic. Now, this is how it reads in the Old Latin. I've told you how it reads in the Greek. In the Old Latin, it says, " Therefore, as by one man, sin entered into this world and death by sin, and so death passed to all men. Now get this part, in whom all have sinned. " Instead of saying because all have sinned, it says in whom all have sinned. The implication being Adam. In Adam, we have all sinned.
Now, even the early Christians who were Latin speakers like Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and Ambrosiaster, to name a few that just come to mind, Mark Felix. None of them came up. They would have read it the way Augustine did. I mean, in whom we have all sinned, they would have read that translation, but none of them came up with his theology. Even that translation doesn't make it clear what exactly that means. In Adam, we have all sinned. What does that mean?
Well, yeah, Augustine decided to tell the whole world what it meant, as if no one else was able to understand the scriptures before he came on the scene. And so he taught that we all inherit Adam's guilt, that we are guilty in Adam. That just as Adam and Eve were guilty, we are guilty too in Adam's sin. Now that's a radical change in Christian doctrine. Nobody, I mean, absolutely nobody taught that before Augustine.
And how a man could be so arrogant to think, I know more than all the Christians who lived during the 300 years before me, after the apostles. I know more than, say, Clement of Rome, who might have known Paul personally. If not, he was certainly alive during the time of the apostles, and he was there in the church in Rome. You would hope that they understood the letter to the Romans. If they didn't, what hope do we have of understanding it? And he certainly didn't teach that.
But Augustine, yeah, he had this idea that Christians in his age were getting more enlightenment than the people who lived before them. That in other words, it wasn't a matter of the faith being once for all handed to the saints, but rather the faith grows. We come to a better understanding, which is, that's the view the Catholic Church has adopted, that they keep getting more and more light as the centuries pass. So based on that, then Augustine said, yeah, we are predestined.
Absolutely not based on anything we can do. And he taught total inability. Somebody had asked that question. Maybe that's in one of, yeah, Bevin's third questions is total inability. Now, when I was a boy, this was total depravity. The T in TULIP stood for total depravity. I guess that sounds pretty bad today. And so, apparently, I don't know exactly what year.
Sometime during my lifetime, this has been changed to total inability, which maybe describes it better, but that we can do absolutely nothing, Augustine said. All we can do is be moved about like he didn't say this, but I mean, that we can be moved about like chess pieces on a board, that we cannot even believe. We cannot have faith. We cannot obey. We can do nothing. We cannot persevere. It's all God doing it. And you'd think, how on earth could one man sway the whole Western church?
And I say the Western church because the Eastern church never went along with Augustine on this. His influence on this was only in the West. So they ignored what he was saying. And since he wrote in Latin, probably most of them would have never even read it. But they certainly rejected it. So this is purely a Western phenomenon. So I've spent a lot of time this last month, last five weeks, six weeks, whatever, reading Augustine to see how did he persuade all these people.
Now he could not have done it without a state church. Changes like this can only happen when you have a state church. And so one man, if he gets the emperor on his side, which is what happened, he can pretty well then control everything else. When you have a free church like today, no, one person can be very influential, but there's going to be enough other voices. But in a state church, the other voices are going to be silenced. If they keep speaking, they're going to be put to death.
They're going to be banished where they can't be heard. They're going to be put in prison, whatever. And that's how Augustine was able to pull this off. But he had taught rhetoric, which is the art of writing and speaking. And he was extremely good. If he lived in our age, he would be one of these attorneys that you'd be reading about all the time in the press or the news, you know one of these great top attorneys that handles these big cases and can somehow pull them out. He was just such a clever arguer, debater.
And so if he was having to fight this debate, of course, it all came about. He was waging a theological campaign against Pelagius, who would not have represented mainstream Orthodox teaching of the early church. He maybe would have been right at the very edge of it. He would not have been viewed as a heretic, but he wasn't mainstream.
But we don't even know if what Augustine was saying, Pelagius was saying, if he was really saying that, because what we have are Augustine's claims, and it all depends on believing Augustine. You know, when all you know about someone is what their enemies are saying, you don't have a very fair picture. But now some of Pelagius ' writings have survived because they got mixed in with Jerome's writings and got labeled as Jerome. And so they got preserved. We have them today.
We have his commentary on all 13 or 14, whichever it is, of Paul's epistles, and including Romans. So we know what he said. And he certainly did not say many of the things Augustine accused him of in any of that. And so it's unlikely he ever did say it. But yeah, he downplayed, he was trying to emphasize our need to reform. He saw a very worldly church and he was emphasizing our responsibility and our free will. And maybe he went a little bit too, you know, too far one way.
I think he's still in the bounds of orthodoxy. Well, Augustine just swung totally opposite. And so the match came instead of it being between mainstream orthodoxy and Augustine's extreme predestination. It became his extreme predestination between Pelagius ' a little bit far-sighted views. But even then, if the battle had been, is it free will? Do we have free will, which the church had always taught? Or are we arbitrarily predestined?
I don't think he could have won, even with all of his skill, with all of his friends and power. But he changed the argument to are we going to get the glory for our salvation, or is God going to get the glory? Are we going to depend on ourselves to be saved? Or are we going to depend on God? You see, that's extreme. That's brilliant. It's wicked because of what he was doing, but it's brilliant. You know I mean, what are you going to say? No, I want to get the glory.
I mean, yeah, obviously, well, yeah, I want God to get the glory. Okay, well then we're predestined. Because if you say it's your faith, see, you're taking glory from God. If you say you've been obedient, well, now you're boasting, aren't you? You're taking away God's glory. Oh, yeah. OK, well, no, I want God to get the glory. If you say, I believed, oh, so you're depending on yourself to be saved. Oh, it's your faith, is it? I'm going to put my trust in God. So you're going to put your trust in yourself?
Yeah, you see? I mean, that's extremely clever debating. But it's extremely false. It's a false dichotomy. But it was very effective. And so he was able to persuade a lot of the bishops. But then when they had a hearing on this in Carthage, Pelagius wasn't there. Carthage was close to where Augustine lived. It was his home ground, where his friends were. And Pelagius wasn't there to defend himself. I mean, it's very easy to win a trial. You can be the worst lawyer in the world.
And you're going to win if the other side doesn't show up to defend themselves. And I don't know if Pelagius even was notified, but he couldn't get there. I mean, he didn't live in that part of the world. So yeah, they condemn him without him even being there to defend himself. And then Augustine very cleverly wrote to the Pope and said, now you're the head of Christendom. We've declared this in Carthage, but we want you because you're the head. We want you to put your stamp on this.
Make sure we have done it right. So he plays up to the Pope, and of course that's very flattering to the Pope, even though the Pope had played no role in this. And so he became Augustine's rubber stamp. Okay, I approved this. Now it's the Pope. It's everyone saying it. Well, it looked like kind of the end of the matter, except the Pope died a short time after that. And the new Pope who came in allowed Pelagius to come to Rome and explain himself.
And when he heard his defense, he said there's nothing heretical in this. And he rebuked the bishops in Carthage and said, you all jumped to a conclusion. You rushed into this. And so he overturned it. And that would have been the end. Except then Augustine and his friends went over the pope said to the Roman Emperor. And they had some ties with him. And they got him to lean on the Pope, threaten the Pope, whatever, to change his opinion and condemn Pelagius. So that's what happened.
Might won out over theology and the Roman Emperor ended up having the last word. And then, yeah, Pelagius is condemned as a heretic, banished, spends the rest of his life in exile off the scene. And so Augustine wins, and later his teachings are adopted officially by the Roman Catholic Church at the, I think, Second Council of Orange. So that's how the whole thing came about. Free will means, yeah, we have the ability that the fall affected us.
And I'm sorry, this is just a long discussion without going into the other questions, but I think you kind of have to take it all together and you'll see that most of the other questions are answered in this as we're going. We will get to them. So free will isn't saying we are not affected by Adam's sin. And when we say Adam, of course, it is Adam and Eve, but Adam being the head of the human race, you know, we talk about that we are Abraham's children.
That doesn't cut out Sarah as being a faithful wife and woman and that. But lineage was, at least in biblical times, traced through the male lineage. And so that's why it talks about Adam's sin, even though it's Adam and Eve's sin. But our lineage comes through Adam. It's the way they traced it. And the early Christians explained that, which I found very useful because I had wondered myself on that. But we don't know how exactly. Now, of course, he was thrown out of paradise.
And so all of us suffer that punishment. We do grow up in the same world to which Adam and Eve were banished, where we work hard and thorns and thistles come up and that we have to struggle for our existence. So we do grow up in that world that perhaps is more conducive to sin. Chrysostom argues that we inherit Adam's mortality, that we all die. And mortal beings, again, it leads makes you more susceptible to sin.
I'm not sure that I fully personally comprehend that, but a lot of people have found that very persuasive. Others had other theories, but somehow we do have a fallen nature. We aren't quite at the same spot Adam and Eve were before they sinned. But nobody taught in the early church that we have a totally ruined nature. Now, many of the Gnostic sects did. That was the term they used, that we have a ruined nature that cannot do good. And that's exactly what Augustine embraced.
In fact, when you read the early Christians, you would think they're arguing against Calvin and Augustine and Luther. And instead, they're arguing against the Gnostics, or sometimes they're arguing against the pagan Romans because the pagan Romans believed in fate, that everything is determined by fate. So it's very interesting. They're arguing against the pagans, against the Gnostics, only to have 300 years later, Augustine embraced the position of the pagans and the Gnostics.
And now that's called Orthodoxy when it's actually heresy. So our inclination is to not live perfect lives. We seem to be inclined towards sin. And that's where God works to help us. Jesus said, none can come to the Father unless the Father draws them. Now the Calvinists read into that, and Augustine read into it, that that means God arbitrarily decides to draw Clark, but he's not going to draw Boaz. He maybe is going to draw Mervin, but not Robert.
I mean, you know, he just picks and chooses who he's going to draw. Well, Jesus didn't say that. He just said we can't come unless the Father first draws us. But Paul in his letter to Timothy says that God, I think this is Timothy, maybe quoting Peter, that God desires all to come to repentance, none to perish, but all to come to repentance. He says something similar in 1 Timothy, and Peter says something similar. So I may be quoting, misquoting the two, or blending them together.
But anyway, so God wants everyone to be saved. The Bible is clear on that. So that means he must try to draw everybody if he wants all of us to be saved. But for some reason, most humans resist that drawing. God is drawing, but they resist it. They reject His drawing. And so most people don't come to faith. The Bible tells us that, you know, Jesus said, " Without Me, you can do nothing.
" So walking the Christian, living the Christian life, walking the Christian walk is not going to be possible without God's empowering grace, without His Holy Spirit dwelling in us. But it's a matter of our cooperating with His grace, cooperating with everything He does. He doesn't do it all for us. He gives us the necessary power if we avail ourselves. He will give us everything we need to bring us to faith, but we have to make that choice to believe or not to believe.
The illustration Origen uses, and I've not seen one better personally, is the illustration of a farmer. Now, you could say that everything he grows is from God, and that would be perfectly proper. And it would be right to, you know, thank God, the farmer should, at the end of the year, and he should be praying all throughout it. Because God provided the earth. He provided the seeds. I mean, the farmer may have got him from the feed store or something.
But ultimately, those first seeds came from plants created by God. God provided the sun. He provided the water either through rain or through the water that's in a river that is used for irrigation. He provides the nitrogen, the carbon dioxide, everything that you need. I mean, it would almost seem like the farmer doesn't have to do anything. But we all know, no, it's not that way.
If the farmer does nothing, there will be no field of crops, or it'll be a pretty poor yield, just whatever grows left over from the previous year. No, the farmer has to get out there and work and sweat and all of this. And he might think, I'm doing it all. In fact, non-believers, they do. They imagine they're doing the whole thing and they give no credit to God. And yet God has done most of it. Without God, the farmer couldn't even grow one single plant. And it's that way with salvation.
Without God, we could never be saved. The role he plays is bigger than our role. But he doesn't do it all. He doesn't do our believing for us. He doesn't do our obeying for us. He gives us everything we need so that we can believe, so that we can obey. We have that free will. But we make those decisions ultimately ourself only because God doesn't want a universe filled with robots. He wants to fill his universe with people who chose out of their own heart, out of their own self to love him.
He could have made us where all we could do was obey. And then he wouldn't have to deal with sin. But then he would have a universe of robots who serve him because they can't do anything else. One of the illustrations I use in the commentary a few years ago, I say a few years ago, I guess it was 20 years ago. Sony came up with the robot dog. I think it was called Aibo or something like that. And it was in production only for like three or four years. I mean, they thought this was going to be this great big hit.
I mean, there was a lot of publicity when it came out. I mean, this dog that can walk and crawl, he'll obey you when you say, " Come, fetch. " He could fetch something. He could, I think, maybe jump on your lap or curl up on your lap. He's not going to ever use the bathroom on the carpet. He's not going to bite you. I mean, it's like, wow, this is so much better than a real dog that, you know, chews on things and tears things up and all that. And like I say, after four years, they had to quit production.
I think somebody is maybe trying to bring it back now, but it's not going to ever be a big hit because people want a real dog that is attached to them because it wants to be attached to them, has real affection for them. Even if it means putting up with a lot of bad behavior that they have to work on, they would rather have a real thing. In the same way, we want real children who love us from their heart, not who are just robots who have to do what were said. So that's my monologue on it. Thank you very much.
Next question, Clark. I'm sorry. Don't apologize. A couple of people have written in said they appreciate the broad perspective to kind of start us off here. And I really appreciate that as well. One thing I want to say that I forgot to at the start is that if we have some time, we can take a couple of follow-up questions at the end. You can go ahead and submit them. We can't guarantee we'll get to them, but go ahead and send them via chat.
And maybe we could answer them in the future Q&A as well if we can't get to them. But we'll go ahead and keep moving here. I think, like you said, some of these have already been answered through the first question. So we'll read them and then you can just let us know if you have anything to add or if they've already been answered. So we have three questions here by Bevin John that you already responded to the first one. The second one is, how are works related to salvation?
Is salvation equals works plus is salvation faith plus works will follow or is salvation equals faith? How do you define work as presented in the epistles? OK. And Bevin, you're getting the we're starting with you. Your questions when I saw them, I thought, wow, this is going to encompass everything. If I answer the other ones, I'm going to end up re-answering them when I get to yours. So I might as well start with yours because it encompasses a lot of the others. And this I'm not going to spend a lot of time on.
The early Christian understanding is there are two phases of salvation. They don't ever express it in that terminology, but when you read them, it's obvious this is what they believe. So the initial stage does not depend on any works on our part. We might have them and that's good and fine if we have works before we come to baptism.
Now they would see baptism, not that it can save us in itself apart from faith, but that's kind of the defining crowning moment of the conversion, salvation experience that starts with belief, faith, repentance, conversion, a decision to serve Christ, and then you are baptized and then that's where your forgiveness of sins takes place. Now, you can be pretty wicked. Look at the Philippian jailer, the thief on the cross, all throughout Acts. I mean, people are baptized right away.
Some of those people, if they were Jews, they might have lived godly lives. The Philippian jailer, I kind of doubt he had a particularly righteous life. And yet that very night, Paul baptized him. I mean, about the only work you could save is that he brought Paul out of jail because of the earthquake and bathed his wounds. But I mean, that's not what saved the Philippian jailer. And Jesus so often, you know he would say, " Your sins are forgiven, your faith has saved you. " But he also said, " Go and sin no more.
" That's the second stage. So the first stage is Jesus saying, " Your sins are forgiven, and it doesn't require any prior works. It requires repentance and faith in who Jesus is. " So that part, and there are a lot of verses that fit that all throughout Romans. And see, what Luther particularly did was take those verses and say, " See, works play no role in salvation. " Because it says here, you know, we're saved, you know, apart from works. Well, yeah, that's the initial stage.
But then in the very next chapter, Paul makes it very clear that unless we die to sin, that we are going to be lost, that, you know, we can be cut off that tree that we've been grafted into. You know, as wild olive branches, we've been grafted into the tree, the rootstock of Abraham. But he said, we can be locked off if we turn back to sin. So Paul isn't teaching that it's faith alone, other than at the beginning, the initial stage of our salvation.
Faith alone meaning faith coupled with repentance and I think a decision that you are going to follow Christ, you know, some kind of belief in Him. Okay, so then the second stage is walking faithfully with Christ. Jesus ' words, " Go and sin no more. " So in the second stage or phase, yeah, it does depend on works. We're not earning it by our works. We're showing that we've appreciated this wonderful gift God has given us. And that, yeah, we're behaving, responding like we should, showing our things.
Now, that doesn't mean God's bound to give us eternal life in the end. It's still a gift. Nothing we could do on Earth would entitle us to eternal life. That's a gift. But it's a conditional gift based on, yeah, do we appreciate Christ enough that we are going to follow His commandments? Jesus said, " If you love me, you will obey my commandments. " So if we don't obey Him, it means we don't love Him. If we don't love Him, we're not very grateful that He died for us and gave us salvation to start with.
So God doesn't want to populate the universe with people who don't love Him, who don't love His Son. So that's where works come in. But if you don't understand the two phases of salvation, whatever you want to call them, the initial phase, the future phase, whatever. If you don't understand that, well, yeah, then it looks like you've got these contradictory verses.
And then what you do like the Luther or the Calvinists is particularly Luther, is you just take the ones that talk about faith without works, and you ignore and pretend the other ones aren't there. And theoretically, I don't know who, but theoretically, someone could take the others and preach that you know we somehow earn our salvation by our works and that God's grace doesn't play any role. And that would be playing with scripture as well.
I don't think there's anyone who actually teaches that, but people are accused of it. But yeah, when you take the totality, then the only way you can harmonize them is recognizing there's the two phases, which to the early Christians was kind of obvious. They didn't really puzzle over this very much. They never saw an issue between works and faith. They never saw a conflict between Paul and James. They don't try to harmonize them.
They never saw there was an issue because James is talking about the second phase when he says we are justified by works. And when Paul says we're justified by faith apart from works, he's talking about the initial phase. I mean, that to them was obvious and they never puzzled about it. Okay, so for time's sake, I think I've answered Bevin John's third question, Clark, earlier. So I'll let you move on from there.
Yeah, and I think you also answered Richard Earnhardt Earhart's first question as well on Ephesians 1:4. His first one, yeah. Yeah. So I'll go and read the second question here by Richard. Do the early Christian writings give any insight into the expression as many as were ordained to eternal life believed in Acts 13:48? OK, excellent question. And someone actually just asked me this not very long ago. And I looked it up in the early Christians just to see if any of them commented on it.
And I never found anything direct. There might be something there. It obviously didn't particularly disturb them or make them wonder. Maybe they were reading it a little differently in the Greek. I don't know. But based on what everything else they say about predestination, I mean, I can be, I think, 99% sure how they understood it. Again, those of us that God foreknew would believe that he's predestined us to eternal life. He's predestined that we would be adopted as sons and fellow heirs of Christ.
So some of us are appointed for eternal life, not based on any arbitrary appointment. Nowhere in there in Acts. It doesn't say as many as were arbitrarily ordained to eternal life, just as many as were ordained or appointed to eternal life. So again, God knows it's not a mystery to him. He knows how it's going to all end up. But we're writing the script. I mean, God didn't arbitrarily make those people believe, but he knew who would believe and who wouldn't.
And those people, like I say, it didn't come as a surprise to God, but that's purely through his foreknowledge. All right, thank you for that, brother. All right. So we're going to move on to our last two questions here. And like I said, if anyone has any follow-up questions, go ahead and post them in the chat. Next one is from Laura Eschenbacher. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. Let me put it here up on the screen.
How to explain that God is not cruel to someone or how do I explain that God is not cruel to someone who asks, " If God knows the choices we will make before we make them, then he is a cruel God because he knows we will choose hell and creates us anyway. " I'm guessing eternally is what she said. So very profound, very good question, Laura. I think, you know, when I looked at this, I thought, ultimately, it's a question about hell more than it is about predestination, although or about foreknowledge.
But it's a very proper question because the two are tied in together. And if hell is the way that it's been classically described, I would have to really ponder on that. I mean, I would not know the answer. But it would be one of those tough questions that I would have to just say, I don't know. It's disturbing, but I don't know. Hopefully, there is a good answer to that. But I don't know that hell is necessarily the classic description that has been given to it.
Certainly in the 21st century, there's a lot of Bible believing Christians who've come to a very different conclusion than what people had through so many centuries. And I'm not talking about liberals. I'm talking about very conservative Bible believing Christians who have weighed this. And there's just a lot of things that don't make sense and that aren't necessarily spelled out in the Scripture that we maybe read into the Scriptures. The early Christians had no dogma on it.
Most of them, I would say, had a fairly literal view of hell and it didn't seem to disturb them or anything with the character of God. And you know that's fine. I don't have an answer to that other than their normal way of interpreting Scripture was to take it as literal as possible. And so it's consistent with their hermeneutics. It's very consistent with it. Origen definitely questioned that whole scene.
You know, he made the comment that many people imagine things about God that they would not imagine about the worst human being possible. When he said that, I don't know that he was specifically talking about the doctrine of hell. I think he certainly had that in mind when he said it. And his view was definitely different. And nobody called him a heretic. He got no flack about it whatsoever during his lifetime. He got flack on the second part. He never did on the first part.
The first part was, yeah, the fire and this, we shouldn't read this literally, that what God is portraying is that we are going to go through punishment. And it's going to be, Jesus likens it to fire because it isn't going to be a pleasant process. But it isn't going to be God building fires and then tormenting us on it that he gets some kind of pleasure out of that. Both he and Clement of Alexander Alexandria said that God's punishments are always corrective, not retributive.
In other words, he doesn't punish us purely for the sake of retribution. He punishes us to correct us. In other words, to reform us. So Clement never took it further than that. Now that first part, like you say, I don't think there's ever been any council that condemned that, that the fire isn't literal, that the description there can be understood in ways other than literal torment and that sort of thing. And then the second part, Noelle, I don't think the second part itself got condemned.
It was somebody said that, or someone accused Origen of saying long after he was dead, of saying that he said Satan would eventually repent and come back to God. And Origen never said that. People accused him that in his lifetime and he flat denied that when he was alive, where he could defend himself. Anyway, that proposition was condemned at one of the councils, the one under Justinian.
But he never taught this as dogma, but he had the hypotheses that because God desires all will be saved and because God is almighty, He will be able to bring everyone to repentance eventually. The suffering they go through is purely their own doing that some will be much more stubborn than others and they will have to go through not God torturing them, but whatever the long process is that we don't have any way to understand, but they will eventually all come back to God. That is all humans who have sinned.
Now, that was, again, not a very widespread view. And I myself couldn't say I can feel that's what the overall view of Scripture is. There are some scriptures though that, you know, like I said, the one we quoted that God desires all to be saved, that He desires all to come to repentance. So during Romans, it says you know that all in Jesus all shall live. You know So you know there are some scriptures you could base that on. But let's just take the first part.
Even today, let's say that somebody you knew before they're born that they would commit a crime and would spend their life in prison. Should then would it be right to just blot out that life in the mother's womb before that person is born? Because they're going to spend their whole life or most of it in punishment living in a prison and having to undergo all the horrible conditions in prison. Well, you know, the irony is most prisoners would rather have life imprisonment than the death sentence.
Only a few prisoners elect that they would rather have the death sentence, which kind of surprises me. But in other words, even fallen humans would rather have a fairly miserable life, you know, locked up in a prison for the rest of your life than to be put to death. That to them is still preferable just to have even that kind of life.
So if hell is what Origen describes, and let's say it is eternal, let's say you don't eventually get referred that you repent and eventually get reconciled with God, that it might still be preferable to nothing. That people might still prefer a life in eternal darkness. I assume spiritual darkness cut off from God, living in far less than what they could have had. But that might still be preferable to no existence at all. So God maybe is still being very, very kind to them.
And then there was the other view from some of the early Christians that eternal punishment is eternal annihilation. That everyone is resurrected. Everyone will suffer some kind of punishment. But then at the end of that punishment, they will be eternally annihilated. So it won't be eternal suffering. So whichever way, the fact that God has His foreknowledge and yet He lets us be born, even though He knows we're going to end up not inheriting eternal life, doesn't make him cruel because it still might be better.
Those people might rather still have that than never to have lived. So that would be my answer on that. Someone may have a quote Origen, he always says, someone else may have a better answer. And so listen to him. So I will say that because that's purely off top of my head. None of the early Christians addressed that other than, like I say, looking at Origen. Thank you for that, brother. I think you already answered her flip question there that there's not necessarily a dogma on these things.
But I'll go ahead and read it here, and then you can kind of give feedback. On the flip of my first question, would be how to answer that question of since God is love and he knows everything ahead of its happening. He saves everyone. And in the end, we all go to heaven because of God's merciful love. I'll comment briefly. I touched on it. But now today, this would be the predominant view of, I would say, society in the United States. Most believe in life after death. Most believe in God.
Most believe they're going to go to heaven. So they would think, yeah, they may not necessarily believe all. They probably don't believe everyone will, but they kind of believe most will. If you're just, you know, if you're a good person, if you're kind of decent, yeah, you know, just about everyone's going to go. Now, definitely that's wrong. The early Christians, nobody taught that. Origen certainly never taught that. And the liberal churches, often that is their dogma. God's going to save everybody.
And Origen is so often called in. We'll see Origen taught universalism. But his doctrine was very different than that. I mean, he taught a very, very stringent Christianity. I mean, you read Origen. And I mean, he was very, very strict. He taught, you know, the necessity of obedience and all that. And he taught, yes, there is going to be punishment, that if everyone is reconciled, which he never taught his dogma, but he put it out as a hypothesis, it will only be through a long, hard trek.
And so you don't want to go that route. I mean, take advantage of God's grace and mercy now. So perhaps the answer is yes. I say perhaps. I don't embrace that myself, but perhaps in his love. But if so, it will only be after they go through the punishment that the Bible does talk about. We can't ever get around that. That is the historic faith. There is going to be punishment for those who are not saved, who do not inherit eternal life on Judgment Day. Now, what happens way off in eternity?
You know I'm happy to leave in God's hands. And if that is going to stumble somebody, well, a loving God wouldn't do this or that, then I'd say, okay, embrace Origen's view. I mean, it was considered acceptable to the early Christians. Very few of them embraced it, but it wasn't considered heresy. So yeah, if that helps you, and you're going to be stumbled by this other, yeah, I'd say embrace his view. I don't embrace his view, and I'm not stumbled by the other. But yeah, we all think a little differently.
But don't ever, you know, don't reject God thinking that, well, the only option is a God who's horrible or unloving. If you can't reconcile these other doctrines in your mind, then I'd say, yeah, take a look at what Origen had to teach because it's definitely a God I think we could all appreciate and love. Thank you very much, David. So we don't have any follow-up questions, and it's a little after 2:30, so we'll go ahead and wrap up. I think there's a lot there for all of us to chew on.
I really appreciate everybody taking the time to join us on a Thursday afternoon. I know that's not always the most optimal time of day, but I do appreciate you joining us. Thank you, David, for taking the time as well. Good seeing all of you. God bless you. Yeah, thank you. One thing I will say is to check out the giveaway this month on the historic faith. And then I just want to do a quick update here. We are still working on a mobile app.
We have a version of it working, but it's not quite up to the level of quality that we wanted at to be comfortable releasing it this summer yet. So that's going to be delayed a little bit. But we are looking forward to getting that out there to you. Thank you everybody that sent in questions and participated. It makes it possible for us to have this platform and to be able to get these messages out there. So we really appreciate all of you. I hope you all have a good rest of your week. Thanks for joining us.
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