St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. I — John Shaqi
St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. IGore, Charles
Religion
St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. I
Gore, Charles
Bible. Romans -- Commentaries
instructed in her tradition, faith finds its function intellectually in
meditating upon and appropriating the full meaning of the mystery of
God, and spiritually in appropriating and digesting the powers of that
divine and human life into which baptism admits us, and in which the
sacramental feast and sacrifice continually makes us anew
participators. The Church with its sacramental gifts, and the personal
faith of the converted heart, are no more to be set in antithesis than
food and digestion, or the 'virtue which went out of Christ' and the
faith in Him which made men whole. The sacraments certainly do not
save us without conversion and faith, and faith which leaves us
voluntarily isolated from the visible communion of the one body is not
what St. Paul meant by 'justifying faith.'
'Ah, yet consider it again!' is what we are continually tempted to
exclaim to some of our modern controversialists who appear to be still
repeating the watchwords of the sixteenth century. For in fact the
famous controversial positions of the period of the Reformation were
{38} intensely one-sided, and have been antiquated by completer and
maturer study--not least in the matter of justification.
Thus Calvin's position on the subject was based upon and permeated by a
conception of God as predestinating and creating and internally
constraining some men to eternal life, and equally predestinating and
creating and abandoning other men, without possibility of recovery, to
eternal misery. Such a conception is utterly abhorrent to modern
consciences: and we shall have occasion to observe with how little
reason any conception of God predestinating man to eternal misery has
been attributed to St. Paul[39].
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