Charlie, > However, the Bible is pretty clear about > the requirement for Salvation: accepting > Christ, the Son of God, as your personal > savior.
There is nothing in the texts about "accepting Christ as your personal savior". This is a stitched together point of view that is a recent creation in the 20th century. I do agree that there is a verse about "no man comes to the Father but by me", but I disagree that the verse means that we can make up a "magic words" formula for people to say whereby we can know that they are "coming to the Father" and we can see them do it. A lot of the recent evangelical stuff came to being entirely so evangelists and missionaries could have an official head count to present to their backers for how many conversions they were getting. Since belief is internal, they came up with a way of making the conversion into an external event that they could track, and that's where the "magic words" stuff popped up. I submit that we do not know exactly what was meant by the "no man comes to the Father but by me" statement. When you pair that up with the "other sheep have I which are not of this flock", which was said to a Hebrew audience, and add to that the fact that Jesus was known to have visited other countries during the "missing" years, we honestly have no idea what the purpose was in all of that. I submit that the very basis for a claim of exclusivity for entry into heaven by organized Christianity is suspect. We can state how WE believe WE are to go to heaven, but it is high time we quit making statements about whether persons believing in other religions will get to heaven. I do not see how we could possibly know that. There is (1) our business, (2) other peoples business, and (3) God's business... And this issue is clearly in category #3. So lets all put that in our pipes and smoke it for a while... - Kris www.shamrocktrails.com, www.mcstyles, www.emryldlife.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
