Arsenios said:
Maybe it is all a matter of inner hidden beliefs...
Is it our beliefs that save us?
Or our deeds?
eg Given that it is God Who saves us...
It is the Savior who saves...not our efforts.
This is the remarkably long standing divide on this forum...
It is not an issue for the Ancient Faith of Orthodoxy...
We can even telll you WHY it is the Savior Who Saves us...
And this because we understand what Salvation IS...
And we see it occurring in THIS life par excellence in our Saints...
We are not saved from sin in this life, though we do overcome sin...
We are saved from the CAUSE of sin...Rom 5:12
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the cosmos,
and death (entered) by sin;
in this manner also death entered into all men,
upon which (death) all have sinned:
Death is the great enemy Christ came to earth to overcome...
By inducing Adam to sin, the serpent injected the poison of death into all men...
We are all born with this envenomation of death...
And because we are envenomated we are dead and dying...
We do not have the strength to live...
"For all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God..."
And born in God, we slowly succumb to the envenomation of death...
"Three score and ten, mayhems four score years..."
We could add: "For all shall die..."
If we were to live sinless lives, we still die...
The Theotokos, the God Birthing Blessed Virgin, died...
Only God CANNOT die, for He is hO ONTOS - The Existing One.
God came that we should LIVE...
He did not come that we should avoid sinning...
And God overcame death in His Own Body...
This is why His Holy Body, the Church, Baptizes us INTO Christ...
For therein we will live, finding the Life of Christ...
Joh 11:26
And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.
It is for this that Christ walked the earth as a man...
His very Death on the Cross was voluntary...
The Cross could not kill Him, for He had no death IN Him...
He gave up His human spirit - It was not taken from Him...
He desired to enter into the realm of death's power...
And He wanted death to willingly receive Him as a victim...
He wanted to overcome death by His Death...
And He did so...
But saying all that, and saying that only Christ can Baptize you into Christ, and that only Christ our Savior CAN Save us and DOES save us...
We have to also say that we are responsible for our Salvation BY Christ our Savior...
Because He will come again to judge the Living and the dead...
Whose Kingdom shall have no end...
Only death has an end...
And the Bible is very clear that He has a BASIS on which He shall judge us...
Both the Baptized and those who have never heard of Him...
And that basis is the deeds that are done by each person He created in His Image...
And each person is responsible for his own deeds...
We will be judged according to our deeds...
And it is only in this sense that we are INDEED responsible for our own Salvation...
And it is only in this sense that we are responsible for what we cannot Give ourselves...
And Salvation in this life is UNION with God in Spirit and in Truth...
The Mystical Marriage of man and God in this life on earth...
And THIS is the ultimate Mystery of human Life on earth...
Discipled by the Orthodox Church in the Ancient Faith of Christ...
For 2000 years now and counting...
Where even the passing shadow of Peter healed the sick...
2 Titus 1:8
...be thou a partaker
of the afflictions of the Gospel
according to the Power of God;
"And few there by who find it..."
I can try to love my neighbor and God as best as I can and TRY to have my actions show it. But what if I drive past the guy who is getting rained on and lives down the street because I don't see him and could have given him a ride? Am I unsaved because you only see me do one wrong thing? That's the problem with trying to judge who has faith and who doesn't by our actions. When looking at what we do and don't do, we will always fail at some point. That's why we look to Jesus who forgives all those failures. That's faith.
Arsenios
