The World's Christians. Douglas Jacobsen. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Douglas Jacobsen
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Религия: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119626121
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God by God’s own choice will eventually redeem everyone from sin and grant them eternal life. Whether they like it or not, everyone will eventually be saved.

      image Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German Catholic monk who broke with the Catholic Church and helped to launch the Protestant movement. Luther lived in Wittenberg, Germany where he taught at the local university. In the fall of 1517, he posted 95 Theses (academic assertions) on the door of the university church, inviting debate about several crucial ideas related to Catholic theology. His critique of the Catholic Church was not well received, and he was soon excommunicated by the Pope. Instead of being silenced by this act, Luther pushed forward, and his writings eventually nurtured a whole new Protestant religious option for Christians across Europe. Luther’s key insight was that salvation was obtained by faith alone without any human effort. The following excerpt, composed thirty‐five years after the 95 Theses, still exudes the confidence and joy Luther experienced when he first received this insight.

      Excerpt from the Preface to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans (1552):

       Faith is not that human illusion and dream that some people think it is. When they hear and talk a lot about faith and yet see that no moral improvement and no good works result from it, they fall into error and say, “Faith is not enough. You must do works if you want to be virtuous and get to heaven.” The result is that, when they hear the Gospel, they stumble and make for themselves with their own powers a concept in their hearts which … is a human fabrication and thought and not an experience of the heart, it accomplishes nothing, and there follows no improvement…

       Faith is a work of God in us, which changes us and brings us to birth anew from God. It kills the old Adam, makes us completely different people in heart, mind, senses, and all our powers, and brings the Holy Spirit with it. What a living, creative, active powerful thing is faith! It is impossible that faith ever stop doing good. Faith doesn’t ask whether good works are to be done, but, before it is asked, it has done them. It is always active. Whoever doesn’t do such works is without faith; he gropes and searches about him for faith and good works but doesn’t know what faith or good works are…

      Faith is a living, unshakeable confidence in God’s grace; it is so certain, that someone would die a thousand times for it. This kind of trust in and knowledge of God’s grace makes a person joyful, confident, and happy with regard to God and all creatures.

      Martin Luther, Preface to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans (1552), https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/pdf/luther_prefaceromans.pdf.

      Unlike Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Protestantism has no overarching church structure that holds the tradition together. Protestantism is a movement, not a church, supported and carried forward by a variety of denominations, congregations, missionary agencies, parachurch service organizations, and schools (ranging from grade schools to universities and seminaries). No one controls this varied assemblage of organizations, and their sheer number is overwhelming. In fact, Protestantism is so divided and unfettered as a movement that some Catholic and many Orthodox Christians find it difficult to think of Protestant churches as genuine churches at all. Instead they consider Protestant denominations to be something like Christian clubs.

      A different way to make sense of the Protestant world is to see each church as historically aligned with one or another of two institutionalized forms of organization, either the nation‐centered Protestantism that has flourished in Europe or the more free‐wheeling, start‐from‐scratch Protestantism that has flourished in the United States.