SPLICE 2 THE REBIRTH TRAILER FREE

How often will an evangelist demand total life re orientation before conversion? Yet, surely this is to demand the impossible, for, “without faith it is impossible to please God.” (Heb 11:6). Take, for instance, the evangelical settings with which I am most familiar. Yet even for a church that desires to be reformed and reforming, an errant doctrine of repentance can easily slip in.

SPLICE 2 THE REBIRTH TRAILER FREE

For Luther and the reformers, the true grace of God is both free and effective in its generation of real repentance. A recovery of the biblical meaning of repentance meant a twin emphasis on the rejection of human merit and the embrace of total, life-long transformation. Yet it did so, not as the pre-condition of this life but as its inevitable consequence (“the whole life of believers”). On the other, by calling all of life ‘repentance’ he prevented its domestication into a ritual or single aspect of Christian discipleship. Luther’s doctrine of repentance was both humbler and grander than the penitential schemes of Rome. For him, and then for the reformation he spawned, repentance came to mark the entirety of Christian experience (“the whole life of believers”). On the one hand he opposed the notion of penance as a meritorious human work. In rejecting a ‘do penance’ understanding of repentance (dominant since Jerome’s mistranslation of Matt. Luther’s doctrine of repentance was both humbler and grander than the penitential schemes of Rome. For him, and then for the reformation he spawned, repentance came to mark the entirety of Christian experience.ġ517 hardly represents Luther’s mature thinking, yet even here he identified the doctrine of poenitentiae as foundational to the reform of the church.

Splice 2 the rebirth trailer