In my experience some Catholics and Orthodox Christians focus too much on religiously proscribed good works. They will obsess about their prayer life or other pietistic externalities more than deeply contemplating the ethics of their actions. I can't say Protestants are immune to this, but one of the few positives of having less emphasis on tradition, is the freedom of the individual to respond differently to new circumstances.
In fact that is one thing I notice about mainline Protestants (Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians) is how much they value both ethics and compassion. It sort of betrays the notion you seem to have that Protestants are antinomian.
Go read the Baltimore Catechism. At one time penal satisfaction was taught in Catholic churches.
Mainline Protestant churches don't teach penal substitution either as a rule. I've rarely heard it in a protestant church.
Please explain the Jesus Prayer, then. If sinners cannot be drawn to God, why even bother praying? I really think its more helpful to say we are simultaneously justified and a sinner. Trying to reduce this to some simplistic transformational explanation of salvation really undercuts the eschatological nature of the Gospel as unconditional promise. It leads to people to under-appreciate how deeply they are compromised by their sinfulness and how much they need a savior. Not just in the past, but in the now.
That's not good news. If you preach that sort of thing at people often enough, they will just become discouraged or hypocritical.
Like I said, I've been around folks that preach that sort of stuff. It's toxic. I agree with Brennan Manning on this point, whenever people that fall short of our imposed ideals are excluded from the sacramental life and fellowship, it's a scandal against grace. But in Roman Catholicism this is de rigeur.
I agree we can grow in love for God, but only by focusing on what God has done for us, not on what we can do for God.
At the evening of our lives there will be some who had been relying solely on their self-assessed faith/trust, saying, “Didn’t we believe in you Lord; didn’t we even tell others about You? And He’ll say, “There will be many entering the Kingdom of heaven before you, some not even of our fold, who actually
did for the least among you, feeding the poor, clothing the naked, loving people. Those are the ones doing my Father’s will, rather than making excuses for why they can’t and/or don’t have to do it.”
Transformation is
everything in the Christian faith-it’s the very purpose of it. It’s why we come to believe in Jesus to begin with-because we finally realize we cannot do it on our own-we cannot begin to approach genuine righteous by our own efforts, apart from Him. And people know this generally, whether or not they agree with it theologically, which is a main reason why most Protestants “value both ethics and compassion.” We intuitively know that we’re expected to do the “right thing”.
But it involves our cooperating, our striving and persevering in attaining righteousness or holiness, without which no one will see the Lord (Heb 12:14). And
of course this entails our continuing to view ourselves as sinners, our humility, our being people who appreciate “how deeply they are compromised by their sinfulness and how much they need a savior”-Catholics are perhaps accused of
overemphasizing this truth in fact.
But that’s the whole beautiful point of it: it’s not either/or; it’s both/and. God
will accomplish turning sinners into saints prior to heaven as scripture says they must be, because although sinners must begin to turn to Him now, while still in their sinfulness, His purpose isn’t to leave them there but rather to sanctify them unto salvation. In the end it’s a matter of the human
will; once we’ve come to put God above all else, above lesser, created things, loving Him with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength IOW; then we’ve arrived at the justice we were made for.
And how can we fault such a goal, to do the right thing, to simply be who God created us to be? This is completely impossible without grace, without God, and yet totally possible
with Him. We cannot, we
must not, deny humanity this purpose, this target. As long as we’re still attracted or captivated by lesser things than God, and by sin, we won’t even have the desire much less the capability of seeing God’s face, of contemplating Him in His immediate beauty and glory and be captivated/enthralled by
that. Again it’s a matter of the
will, God forming and refining it, we going along with the plan, stumbling at times, falling, getting back up, succeeding in fits and starts, working out our salvation with He who works in us, not without a degree of fear and trembling, until we fully come to truly value and reach the prize. And we can absolutely know and trust that He’s in and behind it all the way.
God’s purpose is to restore man to the heights from which he fell, not leave him wallowing in the mud. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been much reason to let man fall to begin with, let alone to experience all the pain and suffering he’s endured down through the centuries, only for God to rather arbitrarily stop concerning Himself with sin at some later date. God’s in the “business” of perfecting His creation, and all of human history is part of that plan. And when the time was ripe within that history Jesus taught, suffered, died, and rose again in order to bring light into the world, a light which has the purpose of reconciling man with God, of bringing man into that same light, so that he may be fully found, meaning ultimately to know and be fully known.
We can reduce Christianity to being a sort of get-out-of-hell-free-card, for those who believe, but we’ll gut a large part of the faith in the process. Again, God’s purpose wasn’t to create a bunch of sinners and then later save some of them and condemn the rest. His plan is larger than that; He made His universe in a “state of journeying to perfection” as theologians have put it, with creation, itself, participating, by playing
it’s part, whatever that may be, in its own perfecting.
