Is Christianity for everyone?

[Father David Moser]

I am starting a new line of discussion to pick up on the topic broached by Owen in the Kant/Subjectivism (http://www.monachos.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1695) line.

Quoting the words of our Lord in Mark 2:17 "It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners." he then posits that there must then be "righteous" who are not in need of Christianity.

Alec replied concluding:


Is the Lord saying that there are "healthy" who do not need His healing and "righteous" who do not need His call? Neither the apostles nor the fathers would answer yes to that question, I think we would all agree, so I suppose we must conclude that the Lord was simply using a figure of speech, and that we would not do well to force these verses to carry a weight too heavy for them.

And Owen responded:


I'm not convinced that it is just a figure of speech. I think there are very many naturally righteous persons in the world, regardless of their doctrine, whose salvation is assured. I fear that because I profess faith in Christ, that I will be judged by a higher standard. Moreoever, there are many who are, in a sense, sinful because of circumstances, who God takes great pity on and his mercy on them is abundant.

In this case, I would point to the words of the Apostle in Romans 3:23 that "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God". This would then seem to contradict Owen's assumption that "there are very many naturally righteous persons in the world, regardless of their doctrine, whose salvation is assured" and that our Lord, in making the statement about not calling the righteous was speaking in a manner to rouse to life the awareness of the sinfulness of the "righteous" to realize that despite their outward technical righteousness, they were themselves sinners - they themselves were indeed sick and needing a physician. This is similar to the way that our Lord spoke to the crowd who had brought the woman caught in adultery when He affirmed the law of Moses that she deserved the penalty of death, but then turned and said, "He among you who is without sin must cast the first stone." Then He stooped and wrote in the dirt. There is one tradition that tells us that what our Lord wrote in the dirt was the initials of those who would stone the woman along with their sins so that each saw clearly before his eyes his own failings and so dropped his stone and left in shame.

So I see this passage as a means by which our Lord sought to arouse an awareness of sinfulness in the so called "righteous" in order to bring them to repentance and salvation.

Fr David Moser

[Owen Jones]

Yes, of course, our Lord very well may have intended to mean the "technically righteous," i.e. the Pharisees, and that is the context. However, there is just as easily a double meaning. For the Pharisaic doctrine is that the sinner is damned, and the righteous are saved, as the above post indicates. What Christ is doing is voiding the technical schema of the Pharisees. Let's not make the same mistake of taking Christ's words and turning them into a technical distinction.

[Alec Lowly]

Re yours 1199, Owen, true, but I am still left wondering by what standard one would define "natural righteousness" and how such, however defined, would assure salvation regardless of faith or doctrine.

A.L.

[Owen Jones]

I don't think it is something that can be defined. You have to know a particular person and point to that person. That's the definition. A person you know.

[Alec Lowly]

It's clear from this answer, Owen, that you're not much interested in pursuing this discussion, and that's OK, of course.

Just for the record, though, let me say that this answer won't do. My subjective conviction that So-and-So I "know" is a "good" or "righteous" man doesn't amount to much, as there's no way I can read the depths of his mind and heart -- I cannot even know all of his actions.

Now God certainly knows whether So-and-So is good or righteous. And that's what really counts. What I may think of So-and-So may have more to do with my righteousness, such as it is, than with his.

A.L.

[Owen Jones]

I could have substituted the word Christian. You can't really give an exact definition to it. But you can point to people who are and have a desire to be like them. That's what I meant. It was a point made in all seriousness, not to evade the question.

[patrick oshana]

I think owen has a great point and it is biblical romans chp 2 verse 13 to 16: for not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of god, but the doers of the law will be justified;for when gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these although not having the law, are a law to themselves,who show the work of the law written on their hearts,their conscience also bearing witness,and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them.

[Owen Jones]

"All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God". This would then seem to contradict Owen's assumption that "there are very many naturally righteous persons in the world, regardless of their doctrine, whose salvation is assured"

Our doctrine of righteousness, our doctrine of perfection, our doctrine of sin is a dynamic one. There is no absolute pure state of righteous perfection, or a state of total, abject, complete sinfulness. We say that Christ is perfect, yet He says that not even He is Good. So we need to avoid absolute technical definitions.

What is the spirit of the text? I'm not convinced I know for sure. But I think that is what we should be striving for. I can understand the priestly aversion to anything that anyone might conceivably used as an excuse to avoid repentance. And that is how any merciful doctrine can be abused. However, I am somewhat consoled by the fact that I can be saved by the righteousness of my spouse. And I think unbelievers can be saved by the prayers and sacrifices of the Church. And I see nothing in our Lord's doctrine that suggests that there is something fundamentally amiss when the believers comprise a small remnant. It appears to me that that is pretty much how the whole thing is supposed to work. If anything, when Christianity becomes socially acceptable and popular it loses its spiritual substance. If we are called to replicate the witness that Christ made (makes) then we are called to be despised and ridiculed and treated as irrelevant by the world. But it does not logically follow that the world is condemned, and that only a very small remnant has any hope of salvation.

[Byron Jack Gaist]

Dear all,

This seems to me an important discussion. Patrick oshana differentiates between "hearers" and "doers" of the Law, which is a point taken up also in the parables. Owen is right to point out that merciful doctrines can be used as a way to evade repentance, but that will never change either the need to repent or to seek Divine mercy. Falsehood can be used on literally anything.

There are many reasons outside the realm of conscious control why a person may not become a Christian, yet I find it hard to believe that God, the philanthropos, would overlook them. They may be a better human being in many ways than many nominal "Christians". Say someone is a good and saintly person, a family man, a good neighbour and citizen, a kind friend and loving husband; but he comes from a long line of Muslim imams, and feels loyalty to his ancestors. This loyalty may not even be conscious, he just wouldn't dream of converting to another religion. Yet he prays fervently for the whole world. Will Christ shut His Divine ear to this man's prayers? Perhaps. I can't base my argument on an emotional appeal alone.

What about the OT saints? King David, the prophets, Righteous Lot? Did they know God as Trinity? (that's a genuine question, perhaps they did). Yet surely they are in heaven now.

I would veer therefore towards saying there is such a thing as "natural righteousness", but it is for the Lord to define this ultimately, like everything else in the Divine economy.

In Christ
Byron

[Fr Seraphim (Black)]

For myself, I am grateful that Father David, took this new thread.

In the midst of Great Lent, yet already approaching the Sunday of St. John Climacus, to be discussing Kant...personally, I find it a little off the mark.

Nor do I think I misinterpreted Owen's remark about 'in between' in the previous thread, with all due respect to Matthew.

No one is assured salvation, before repose. That is heresy.

Perhaps, my views are simplistic and I confess to not being an expert in Kant.

Nevertheless, perhaps we can keep our focus on Christ, His words, His commandments, the multitude of paradoxes inherent in His words, yet so beautiful in their meaning.

If Christ says He is not good, is this His human nature speaking, as on the Cross, when quoting the Psalm, He says, 'why have you forsaken me'?

Please forgive my simplicity.

I am not up in my reading of Kant, not do I feel I need to be. Kant is not in my Patristic library. If he is in yours, what can I say?

My Spiritual Father, always stressed, due to the unknown limits of our human life here on earth, to READ only those texts which inspire PRAYER.

Nothing in the Kant thread inspired prayer, rather it inspired, good or bad, back and forth discussion that has very little to do with Great Lent, or Life in Christ.

[Owen Jones]

I do not know anyone here who has said that salvation is assured for anyone -- at least from our perspective. So I don't know where the heresy is. Although many Protestants I know believe that. If I suggested that, I was only intimating it from God's perspective, that He can guarantee the salvation of a righteous person. OF course, righteousness in and of itself is no proof of salvation. If one is heresy hunting, of course it is easy to find fault in virtually anything that is uttered.

It is good advice not to read anything but spiritual readings during Lent. But regarding the material on this site, I think that is a moderator decision. The world does not come to an end during Lent, and perhaps if someone is troubled by a philosophical problem it is a legitimate exercise to explore it, even during Lent, or even especially during Lent, if it will lead to some greater spiritual awareness.

Unfortunately, it seems that many of our thought processes are conditioned by post-Cartesian philosophical influences on the culture, rather than the Patristic mind, so I think it is helpful to identify these. Among these are the tendency to divide and reduce reality into subjects and objects, whereas our true theology deals with what is in between. And when we explore the Fathers, we discover that they were cognizant of this fundamental basis of our nature, that it is in-between two realms. That we serve an mediatory function, according to Maximos, is because we inhabitant an intermediate realm. This understanding of human nature overcomes the problem of a subject/object dichotomy that is foreign to our thinking and creates an unsurmountable set of intellectual, moral and spiritual problems.

Regarding Christianity not being for everyone, the purpose of the statement is not to suggest that Christian truth does not apply to all beings, that we should not evangelize in obedience to the Great Commission, or anything like that, but simply to state the obvious, that there is nothing in the Gospel to suggest that success is measured in numbers. If anything, it is just the opposite. What I sense is a kind of angst among many Christians who do not quite appreciate the iconic purpose of the Church, and somehow feel that the plurality of religions, beliefs, cultures, values and ideologies somehow suggests a kind of crisis that, in order to overcome it, we have to objectivize Christianity and to subjectivize non-Christian stuff. There is no "objective" proof of the truth of Christianity apart from the demonstration of the faithful life. Theology is not about subjects and objects.

[M.C. Steenberg]

In the above, Owen wrote:


It is good advice not to read anything but spiritual readings during Lent. But regarding the material on this site, I think that is a moderator decision. The world does not come to an end during Lent, and perhaps if someone is troubled by a philosophical problem it is a legitimate exercise to explore it, even during Lent, or even especially during Lent, if it will lead to some greater spiritual awareness.

As an aside to the main focus of this thread, I would just note that this is very much in line with the outlook I've always taken with the forum, and in which the Community has blossomed. Indeed, it is during Lent - if one takes it seriously - that the condition of man in the intellectual climate of 'the world' becomes even more pronounced, since one is engaged in the struggle of asceticism to re-appropriate the image in our own lives. Questions of the challenges posed to this living-out of the Gospel life by the thought of the modern world - especially in those areas that often challenge the ways in which the Church teaches and thinks - are all the more relevant during this time, since it is against these that one 'does battle' in the working out 'with fear and trembling' of one's salvation in the Church and in this world.

It is all very much a manner of how one approaches such discussions.

INXC, Matthew