aiki
Regular Member
Yes, belief is a condition. I don't have any problem saying so.
My objection to your perspective has to do, not with salvation being obtained through belief, but with the idea that salvation itself is achieved in part through human endurance.
Imagine a man who has fallen ill with cancer of the colon. His oncologist informs the man that, if he doesn't have surgery to remove the cancer, he will die. The sick man must believe he is sick, as the cancer specialist has said he is, and he must consent to the removal of the tumorous cancer in his colon. But neither of these things in-and-of themselves do anything to save the man. Only when the man submits himself to the surgeon for surgery can he be saved from his cancer. And only by the work of surgeon - to which the sick man, being unconscious during surgery, can make no contribution whatever - will the cancer be removed. The surgery happens and the man is made well. His cancer is gone. He's been saved by the surgeon.
Now imagine that the surgeon comes to the man and says, "Only so long as you believe I've removed your tumor will you be free of it. If you cease to live like a person freed from cancer, my surgery will be undone and your tumor will reappear." Upon whom, now, does the man's freedom from cancer depend? Who saves the once-cancerous man from his tumor? The surgeon? No. His work is only so good, so effective, as the belief and conduct of the man from whom he's removed the tumor. If the man stops believing he's been saved from cancer, stops trusting that the surgeon has really saved him, and neglects to live like a man saved from cancer, his tumor will come right back. So, now, the man's cancer-free condition depends entirely upon him, upon his belief and behaviour, not upon the saving work of the surgeon. And so it is that the man is his own saviour, saving himself by his belief and action.
This isn't what happens in reality, though, is it? When the man is freed from his cancer tumor by the surgeon, he doesn't have to live like its gone in order for it to be gone. That would be a very bizarre circumstance! No, the healed man, the man saved by the work of the surgeon, doesn't have to pretend he's been healed of cancer; the stomach pain the cancer tumor caused, the blockage in his colon, the weight loss, nausea and general malaise the tumor produced are all gone since the tumor has been removed. The man lives like a man healed of cancer because he is a man healed by cancer, not in order to be a man healed of cancer.
So, too, with the healing from sin-sickness that the Great Physician works upon the person He saves. it is a weak, ineffectual work that he does if its success rests upon the response of the person to his work. If the "saved" person must "endure to the end" in order to be saved, then they are, by that endurance, become their own saviour. The Great Physician has only accomplished a partial healing from sin, a partial salvation, if the believer must contribute to their salvation by "enduring in the faith" in order to be saved.
I realize that your enormous investment in your perspective makes it impossible for you to properly consider what I'm pointing out to you. But the deep contradiction in your view is unmistakable to me and it astonishes me that you are so easy with the cognitive dissonance of it. It looks to me like you've so magnified one idea that you think you understand in Scripture that it has contorted and now stands in contradiction to the rest. As a result, you are espousing a two-Saviours soteriology, works-salvation, but appear unable to see that this is so, though it is glaringly apparent to others.
The inability to properly grasp Scripture isn't on my end, but on yours. You have the lens of your "endure to the end" presupposition so firmly and constantly in place that you cannot consider any verse except through that lens. Even if the verse contradicts directly your works-salvation view (Ephesians 2:8-9; Titus 3:5-8; 2 Timothy 1:9), your "endure to the end" lens prevents you from accepting that this is so. There is no man so blind as he who will not see.
??? Nowhere have I ever written, "Sanctification is optional." Nowhere.
The believer's sanctification is the consequence of their justification, both being fully accomplished by Christ in whom the believer stands.
1 Corinthians 1:2
2 To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, with all who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours:
1 Corinthians 1:30
30 But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption,
1 Corinthians 6:11
11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
(See: Titus 3:5)
Hebrews 10:10
10 By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
No man can be accepted by God except he is perfectly righteous (justified) and perfectly set apart (sanctified) unto God. But no man can, by himself, ever be either thing. He must obtain both his justification and his sanctification from Christ in whom he is accepted by God. (Ephesians 1:6) It is not, then, that a man saves himself by living out his sanctified spiritual position in Christ, but that he is already perfectly sanctified BY CHRIST, and thus is accepted by God and saved. Do you see how your works-salvation doctrine has twisted your understanding of the Christian life? I do.
Paul wrote in Galatians 5:24 that they "have crucified the flesh." He explained to the Roman Christians how in chapter 6 of his letter to them. United with Christ in his death, burial and resurrection, the Christian person is made BY CHRIST "dead unto sin but alive unto God." They were crucified with Christ that the "body of sin might be destroyed, that, henceforth, they should not serve sin." (Romans 6:6) And so it is that Paul wrote to the Galatians, "they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh." The Galatians in Christ, in their spiritual position in him, were already fully sanctified unto God and had only, by faith, to live in the truth of this fact.
And so, living sanctified lives didn't obtain for the Galatians their salvation, but was simply the manifestation of what they had already received from Christ in the Person of the Holy Spirit and who they had become as "new creatures in Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:17).
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