7cworldwide said:
After reading through some of the discussions in GT today, I think we may need to step back a bit and look at the big picture... Ordo Salutis (the order of salvation)...
I found this to be rather helpful:
http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/topic/ordosalutis.html
Does anyone here have any other good insights, resources, links, etc. to share on this topic?
Blessings,
Lane
There are a few quotes on the Augustine thread, that show Augustine understood regeneration to preceed faith.
Here is a letter from pope Boniface II to Caesarius, Bishop of Arles after the 2nd Council of Orange that demonstrates that the Western Church at that time was monergistic.
I stumbled across this several years ago while researching another topic in the Divinity School library, over at Duke University.
It makes Roman Catholics and other semi-pelagian synergists end up grasping at straws to explain it away.
Book Title: Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters translated by William E. Klingshirn, Liverpool University Press 1994
Letter to Caesarius from Pope BonifaceII, 25 January, 531, on the Council of Orange
We received your letter though our son the priest and abbot Arminius...For you inform us that some Gaelic bishops, although they admit that other good gifts originate from God's grace, assert that our faith in Christ is from nature rather than grace. They maintain that from the time of Adam, faith for mankind has been a matter of free will, and that not even now is it conferred on individuals by the bounty of Divine Mercy. You request that in order to remove ambiguity, we confirm by the authority of the apostolic see, your creed in which you confess that on the contrary, true faith in Christ and the beginning of all good will, according to the catholic truth, is inspired into the limited senses of individuals by the intervention of God's Grace. Many fathers and above all, bishop Augustine of blessed memory, as well as our predecessors in the apostolic see, have discussed this matter so extensively that no one should doubt any more that faith indeed comes to us from grace. For it is both a certainty and an article of catholic faith,
divine mercy intervenes for us when we are not yet willing to believe, so that we would become willing; it remains in us when we are willing to believe and it follows us so that we remain in the faith, as the Psalmist says, "My God will intervene for me in His Mercy"(Ps. 59:10)
For this reason, we are very much surprised that those who believe the opposite are still so weighed down with the residue of an ancient error that they believe that people who come to Christ, not by the gift of God, but by a gift of nature. Moreover they say that the goodness of nature itself, which is known to have been perverted by Adam's sin, is the source of our faith, rather than Christ.
They do not realize that they are contradicting the Lord's saying, "No one comes to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father."(John 6:44) and they do not follow the Apostle's saying, "looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."(Hebrews 12:2)
Since this is the case, we cannot discover why they assign belief in Christ to the human will without the grace of God, when Christ originates and perfects our faith. For this reason, congratulating you with all due regard, we affirm that the statement of your faith written above conforms to the catholic regulations of the Apostles and fathers.
As for those who, as you indicated in your report, wish to attribute other goods to grace, and put faith in second place, we are compelling them by your own belief to be increasingly forced to ascribe faith to the gift of grace, apart from which there is nothing good that anyone can performin God's eyes, "for whatever is not from faith is sin."(Romans 14:23)
i wish they had a smiley pulling his hair out because that is how I have felt in GT this week!
