hedrick
Well-known member
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Yup. But it's a goal, not a prerequisite. Jesus teaches that God will forgive us as long as we forgive others.
The problem is that Scripture doesn't say this. Paul says our faith is accepted as righteousness. He doesn't speak of Christ's righteousness as being imputed to us. Our doctrine of atonement needs to start with that. We can't assume a doctrine of atonement and use it to dictate what Scripture says. I maintain that the atonement wasn't done to make it possible for God to accept us, but rather that it's something he uses to unite us with him and renew us. See Rom 6.
That separation is interesting. In the Reformers, there actually is no prerequisite for God accepting us. He just does, for no good reason. (Although not all of us, an issue that probably needs separate discussion.) Our faith is something he makes happen, and is a means to uniting us to Christ. N T Wright claims that justification isn't acceptance by God, but how we recognize that someone is God's. Hence faith is how we know someone is God's. God has already accepted them. That makes some sense in the context of Paul's argument in Romans. To my knowledge, no Jews actually thought being circumcised was what made you God's people. God chose Israel, a people who Jews acknowledge he had no real reason to choose. Circumcision was the sign of being chosen. Wright's position actually does a pretty good job of explaining what is going on. Jesus' teachings seem to be addressed to people who are already God's people. He talks about how to live, and gives examples of being held accountable for that, but he simply assumes that God loves us and will go to absurd lengths to rescue us if we go astray. (Think of leaving the 99 sheep.) He doesn't talk about something we need to do before we can be accepted. Of course people who have gone astray and need to repent, i.e. to come back.
So in some strict sense everything is sanctification.
The question about non-Christians isn't whether they've done what they need to do to be saved. Nobody has, can, or needs to. It's whether God might consider some people who don't believe in him still to be his, and thus whether what they hold in common with us is a sign of that. The problem is that many of us have the feeling that some of our non-Christian friends have more in common with us, including more of what Jesus said mattered to him, than some Christians.
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