The Great Apostasy: A Timeline

[Just_A_Guy]

On 1/11/2023 at 7:40 AM, Genkijeff said:

Protestant Era of Great Apostasy  - I want to comment on the contention that "grace alone" doesn't emphasize the need for works enough. Every Bible-believing church I have been a member of has firmly believed that "grace alone" will never be without good works. The difference as I understand it is that we believe good works are necessarily the fruit of the Holy Spirit's work in our hearts. While we battle/struggle, it is because of the Holy Spirit not allowing any true believer to remain the way they are when they first believe. The point the early church made against the Jews who made works a condition of salvation was that salvation then becomes something you earn by keeping rules, not something you are given as a gift from God. Jesus said "Without me you can do nothing", so as we have a relationship with Jesus, He empowers us by the Holy Spirit to bear abundant fruit of the Spirit and to do many good works. 

I am learning that it may be more complicated than that.  Luther basically drew a caricature of the Jews as being unitedly over-legalistic (and hijacked Paul's writings to reinforce that caricature), because a) it was rhetorically and politically useful for him to equate those filthy, scheming, legalistic, Christ-killing Joos with the Catholic priesthood; and b) he was a bit of an anti-semite anyways.  

Modern scholars and archaeologists are coming to understand that first-century Judaism had a rich doctrine of divine grace; it's just that Jews of the era believed that the mechanism of extending that grace was through the Torah itself rather than some notion of Yahweh actually descending from His heavenly throne to live as a mortal.  The Greek words generally translated as "grace" and "faith" in English renderings of the the Pauline epistles, in the first century A.D. connoted the "generosity" (or "protection")  and "loyalty" that characterized the reciprocal patron-client relationship that was at the heart of the Greco-Roman economic and social order; and "justification" tends to denote the state of reconciliation that exists when both the client and patron are living in up to the terms of their covenant relationship.  Paul's trepidation about what he calls "the law" or "the works of the law" aren't really about the dangers of a conscious effort towards obedience or righteous living per se; they are about the Jewish notion that it was the Torah (literally, "the law") that was the agent of God's salvation. 

The faith/works dichotomy is a bit of a red herring, in this regard.  The litmus test for salvation is the covenant itself.  This Russell Nelson fellow, with all his talk of a "covenant path", just may be on to something . . .

 

Edited January 14, 2023 by Just_A_Guy