Eternal Security is a True Christian Doctrine

Prosperity Gospel My primary difficulty with your arguments Pro is that at there root I believe they slip into the fallacy of prosperity gospel. Most any of the scripture talked about your explanation was more or less the same “that had nothing to do with the next life, with salvation or your soul. That was about this life and how god blesses us through the rest of it.” Let’s look at Peter for a second. You seem to agree that after the resurrection peter repented and turned back to Christ and would count as one who built there house with “gold, silver, and costly stone” that should test against the fire in this life. In fact if there is any follower of Jesus who could claim to have built upon the solid foundation with good solid material its Peter “the Rock” upon which Christ chose to built the rest of his church on. So Peter ‘s ‘house’ should have stood against the fire and he should have enjoyed the blessings of God, according to your arguments Pro. In reality though, that did not happen. Peter was crucified upside-down. In fact, none of the apostles had blessed peaceful deaths. Paul was beheaded, Barnabas was burned, Mark was dragged to death, James was clubbed, Thomas was speared to death, and Luke was hanged. For all the good costly stone they lived there lives with upon the foundation of Jesus name how did they prosper in this life, what good did it do them? The Fact is, these martyrs reward is in heaven, as we know it was not on earth. If you don’t believe that then your theology teaches the gospel of Karma and spits on the graves of all those saints I just listed by forgetting about they were martyred. An accurate theology has to remember the people who received no reward in this life, and the wicked that have received no justice in this life. Richard Dawkins is an atheist that used to be Christian. Did you know he has money, fame, influence? I’d say he’s pretty blessed for a man that built a crappy house on good foundation. To take a phrase from Peter Kreeft from the same book you quoted “a case for faith”; “we live in a relative bubble of comfort” and in that bubble of comfort its easy to forget about the woman who’s child died because it would not rain, or any of the suffering and death happening to believers in other parts of the world, not blessed with our freedom, security, and our luxuries. John Templeton and C.S. Lewis You bring up Templeton’s brief emotional cry that he missed God. That this shows he still has that same foundation of Jesus in him, he’s still saved. Since we like to read the same books perhaps you have read the works of C.S. Lewis. Unfortunately I can’t remember if it was in his work “the abolition of man” or “mere Christianity” but in one of those books C.S. Lewis writes about the logic of faith. He said as an atheist he used to think faith was a dumb idea, simply throwing what reasoning would tell you when it says something you don’t want to here. But since then he no longer thought such. He said faith is the very act of reason in that your going to consistently believe in God in spite of whatever your whimsical emotions incline you to think. He said as an atheist there were times he greatly doubted there was no God and it kept him up at night. And as a Christian the doubts still come that there could be no god. This is normal for any Christian I’ve ever met. But because we have faith our beliefs don’t change on the whims of doubts. I believe Templeton was having one of those moments of doubt in his interview with Stroble, and that kind of doubt is not deferent from the doubt atheist that have never been Christian go through from time to time. Double Crucifixion and Time You argue that Jesus would need to be crucified twice a believer could fall from saving grace if they should ever seek to come back again like Peter. I do not think so or he would need to be crucified for me as well wouldn’t he? All of my Sins I have committed were done after his death and resurrection were a done fact. But his sacrifice did not just redeem the sins committed in the past by those who lived in his time; they cover the future sins committed by me personally as well. His sacrifice stretches across time and this is why they cover my sins at all and my sins I commit after accepting his salvation. So if I can be saved at all, then peter could come back after falling away. The word eternal and etymology vs usage You say the scripture say’s eternal and thus there is no room for doubt as to how long that means. The Greek word used for eternal is Aion or Aionios. Aionios is often considered to mean eternal with no end because of its etymology. How the word translates if you break it down. But as John Wesley Hanson argues at the start of this article http://www.tentmaker.org... an ounce of Usage is worth a pound of etymology. And there is good reason to believe from other Greek literature that when the word Anionios was used it was meant to indicate time with an end of some kind. The life of a man was often called an Aion, the time since creation was an Aion. Unless it was speaking of God himself in Greek literature it never seemed to mean eternal in the sense we think of it. No one includes yourself? You state that when the scripture refers to “no one can snatch them from his hand” that this includes yourself. I think your reaching with this. When it refers to those who are in the lords hands as ‘Them’ then I think its apparent there third party to who the passage is talking about. There is the ‘no one’ and there is ‘them’ and there is God. Your defense that salvation cannot be discarded is that it would make god a liar somehow. I do not see how that is so. Should Richard Dawkins find himself in Hell after he dies god would not have lied about anything. This goes back to how contracts work. Let’s say I have contract with you that I’m going to buy your car. The contract between us say’s your going to give me your dodge viper and the contract say’s I’m going to give you 12,000 dollars. Now what if I don’t give you 12,000 dollars? Do you turn into a liar when you don’t give me the Viper? No that’s absurd; the contract between us became null and void when I did not cough up my end of deal. Let’s say I come up with 4,000 dollars down and you give it to me but I don’t make any more payments on the remaining 8,000. Are you liar when you repo the viper after 2 years of my not paying for it? No, I’m the one that lied, and I’m the one that caused the contract to void. Greater than God Theologically this rejection that cancels the contract does not make one stronger than God. You said you’re not arguing predestination, after all salvation can be rejected initially. Well on the same grounds that we understand our power to reject Christ initially still applies later on and there’s no reason to think it does not. Our free will does not mean God is not all powerful. This is God’s chosen system of how things will work, and he has chosen to leave us free to deviate from his desire. The fact that he does not choose to do some things and chooses to do others does not mean he has no power to perform the other actions. This is simply his way, his actions defined by his character and not his sovereignty. And so we have free will. That same will as I stated in the previous round is still present in us after salvation. You did not respond to what it means in this debate that we still sin after the Holy Spirit is within us. I know of no Christian who claims after the Holy Spirit came in them and Jesus became there savior that their wills were so changed to god that they quite deviating from it and quit sinning. To say that we cant reject the saving grace after accepting it is to say we no longer have will that can act against gods, and to say losing salvation because of this will calls into question gods power would call into question gods power because of our wills before salvation.I await my opponents response.