Ex-Church of Christ Support Board

I remember constantly being told that faith alone was not sufficient for salvation. I recently came across the parable of the Vineyards (Matthew 20:1-16 not in other gospels)where workers hired at the end of the day were paid the same as the ones who started work at the beginning of the day. I wonder if any CoC preacher ever touched that one??

Also I haven't heard of it but I am sure it has happened, people dying in the baptismal or while being baptized, anybody heard any stories about this?

I always found the coC's teaching on works and salvation to be an extreme example of double speak. My understanding of the doctrine was: Works don't save you but you can't be saved without works. A perfect example of wanting to have a thing both ways. They didn't want to validate their critics' claim that they taught works salvation but at the same time they wanted to preserve their "right" to judge people based on works. It is little wonder the coC membership is so neurotic.

Jesus also said " unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you". Oh no. What if you get baptized on a Saturday but due in a car wreck before taking communion on Sunday ?

Hopefully a universal supreme being (if one does exist and does care about what humans do) would have more pure compassion than to flush a new believer who didn't get all of the bases covered before passing on.

"unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you"

BH, are you saying that if someone is not taking communion they have no life in them, per this verse?

I always saw that phrase as being a metaphor for immersing onesself into following the Christ. I don't remember ever
hearing that taking communion is necessary for salvation, so another hoop to jump through every Sunday. But then this
verse would give credence to the Catholic beliefs on the matter of consuming the literal flesh and blood of Christ.

Ivy wrote: ↑Sat Sep 02, 2023 11:56 am

"unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you"

BH, are you saying that if someone is not taking communion they have no life in them, per this verse?

I always saw that phrase as being a metaphor for immersing onesself into following the Christ. I don't remember ever
hearing that taking communion is necessary for salvation, so another hoop to jump through every Sunday. But then this
verse would give credence to the Catholic beliefs on the matter of consuming the literal flesh and blood of Christ.

Yes.

Another thing is inference. If you have to drink his blood and eat his flesh to have life the necessary inference states that to be safe let the baptized person take communion right after his baptism just in case they get hit by a mack truck before sunday.

While I noticed problems with many other doctrines I never saw any contradicion with the requirement for obedience to God. (That one is pretty clear in the Bible.) The way I always understood the parable of the workers in the vineyard was that it was never too late. No matter what stage of life you were in you were always able to obey the gospel and be saved.

I don't see a salvation by faith only element to the parable.

Works and faith (as taught in the Bible) are inseparable. James 2 is clear about that. You can't have one without the other. If you have faith you will have works. Faith without works is dead.

I've always thought of it this way: what does it truly mean to believe? If you believe you will act upon that belief. If you believe your house is on fire you will try to put it out, call the fire department, get you and loved ones out, etc. The same is for Christianity. If you really believe you will dive into the scriptures and do everything God asks of you, repenting if you fall short along the way.

Let me assist with this a little bit.

In Hebrew, the word 'faith' is a verb. It isn't something you mentally assent to. It is the way you ACT, what you do, not what you say about your 'beliefs'.

James is often described as 'the most Jewish letter' because it literally is the most 'Jewish' approach compared to lot of the rest of the New Testament.

Who actually wrote it, I don't know. But that 'faith without works is dead' is spot on. It isn't faith, if it isn't 'action'.

I just read what Bart Ehrman wrote about the subject of faith vs works and my conclusion is that it is an argument that we cannot really resolve or even fully understand.

First this may have been referring to Gentiles converting to Christianity. They did not have to follow Jewish law since they were not Jewish. So was belief enough for them since there was no New Testament then? most could not even read if they had access to any of the letters of Paul and others which are just letters at that time, and they almost certainly did not have access to any of the gospels and even if they did they would have not been viewed as inspired, just something someone wrote. So the main thing they had to rely on were the oral stories of Jesus, which we can only assume were similar to the gospels, but may have been very different. It seems the gist of the oral traditions in terms of how people were to behave was to give up your life to helping the poor and telling people the end of times was coming and they needed to prepare for it.

Ehrman also gets into a discussion of the meaning of faith which has some similarities to what people have said here but he is not as emphatic (he is quite literate in Greek of the time the Bible was written). He discusses the issue of what it means to have faith (trusting) and do you really have faith if you don't act on it. Of course there is no answer.

So my take overall from what I have read the issue discussed in churches today is totally different than the one written in Paul's letters and in the book of James and Matthew, whoever wrote those. They were talking about whether people would be allowed to enter a new worldly kingdom, not salvation in heaven.

In addition Paula Fredriksen complicates the issue a bit more in that she says Jesus only had exposure to Jews, that was who he lived with and preached to, he really was interacting with Gentiles as that was not his world (other than the Roman rulers and soldiers).