Questioning Paul?

[Nails74]

Predestination - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Calvinism: A Christian belief system about salvation

I attended a Presbyterian Church USA in Macon GA for 7 years and predestination was never preached. In adult Sunday School we discussed it as part of Calvin's original theology but the consensus was dismissal.

Nails74, the rules for this forum state that we are not supposed to be discussing theology among. If you want to discuss Paul and disagree with what I said, you need to start a thread, or point us to an existing thread, in General Theology.

I will abandon the thread, but I'm not sure how you can make the hasty generalization that

most of Christianity doesn't hold to predestination/election

 

[Harry3142]

Yada Yah-

The Scripture that is cited most often in order to defend the theology of predestination is Romans 9ff. But that portion of Scripture actually extends from Romans 9:1 to 11:32, and was used by St. Paul to explain to Gentiles why Israel as a nation had not accepted Christ. In that era each city had its own patron deity, which all the citizens of that city worshipped together. Even though Rome itself was an 'open city' when it came to religions, there Jupiter, as head of the gods, was to be given recognition.

But when the Gentiles looked at Judea, they did not see this recognition shown to Christ, and that confused them. So St. Paul explained that as a nation Israel had not been called to accept Christ so that the gospel could get out to the Gentiles. Otherwise we would have had to find it wrapped up in the trappings of Judaism.

As for St. Paul's attitude toward the law, he wrote quite plainly that the law was good in Romans 7:14-24. But along with saying the law was good, he also said that due to his own inherent weakness, a problem that affects all mankind, he law could never keep those laws as they should be kept.

What he described is now known as Paradoxical Intention. That term was applied to it by a psychologist who recognized that all mankind has a quirk in our nature, namely, that the harder we try to do something, the faster we fail to accomplish what we are trying to do. St. Paul described this quirk in himself when he tried to keep the laws and commandments of Torah, but it applies to literally everything we humans try to do, whether it be keeping the law or blocking out unpleasant memories.

 

[hedrick]

I am still assessing this, but he appears to say it is a curse or passe. I'm hoping that you're correct, given the high regard Messiyah gives it.

His comment about being a curse was meant in a very specific context. Look at Gal 3:10. The law itself is holy, as he says elsewhere. (Rom 7:12) The problem comes when you think your salvation is contingent on keeping the law. "all who rely on doing the works of the law are under a curse." (Gal 3:10, NET). Note the qualifying clause. The curse applies only if your justification come from keeping the Law. But he denies that.

Jesus says in Mat 5:18 that he came to fulfill the Law and not to abolish it. But the thing to notice is that this is followed immediately by his exposition of the second table of the 10 commandments, and in it he pretty much ignores the letter of the law, emphasizing its spirit. He most certainly is not teaching the kind of justification by works of the Law that Paul was opposed to.