Conspicuously enough, that’s precisely the traditional Eastern Orthodox exclamation and expression used at/for Chrismation (which is done in our Church exactly after Holy Baptism, as it was done in both East and West before the Great Schism — which means that it was done precisely this same way in St. Basil’s time as well). — So it’s a good thing we didn’t go extinct, otherwise Jason (and his favorite authors) would spread such untruths about us as well…

“If Abraham refused to be circumcised according to the command of God, would that make him agreeable or disagreeable with the almighty? If disagreeable, wouldn’t that make him a deliberate enemy of the His will? And if a deliberate enemy of his will, by refusing circumcision, doesn’t that mean he loses friendship with God? And isn’t justification described in some places in scripture as friendship with God? If so, then how can Abraham remain a friend of God, i.e. justified, if he has put himslef at emnity with his will?”

You haven’t lived a single day of your life without being a “deliberate enemy of God’s will”. Neither have I. It’s not as though we don’t know that behavior like pride, lust, and impatience are wrong when we do such things. We know that they’re wrong, and we do them anyway. Consider the example from Abraham’s life that I cited above. God’s promises to Abraham weren’t so difficult to understand that Abraham might honestly make the mistake of thinking that he should pursue the fulfillment of those promises by having sex with Hagar in order to impregnate her. And it’s not as though Abraham’s lies and his other sins were on matters he didn’t know to be inconsistent with God’s will. Similarly, David’s adultery, John the Baptist’s questioning of Jesus’ Messiahship, Peter’s denials of Christ, the many sins of the Corinthians, the Galatians’ unfaithfulness to the gospel, etc. were sinful forms of behavior that should have been recognized as such by the people engaging in that behavior, before they engaged in it. Mistrusting God is a sin that goes against the heart of the gospel message of justification through faith, and Jesus’ disciples are frequently rebuked for a lack of faith during Jesus’ earthly ministry. But it would be implausible to argue that they were unjustified or kept going in and out of justification during the course of Jesus’ ministry. In some of the cases I’ve cited in this paragraph, we’re told (in a variety of ways) that these people remained justified while they were in the process of committing the sins in question. Even where we’re not told that, their ongoing justified status seems more likely than not.

In the case of denying Christ, which you mentioned, Jesus is addressing circumstances in which no mitigating factors are involved. When mitigating factors are involved, such as in the case of Peter, we take those into account. Or when Paul condemns those who teach a false gospel, yet allows for the Christian status of the Galatians (including teachers in the Galatian churches) who had been involved in promoting a false gospel, he’s taking into account the qualification that he knew these Galatians had believed the true gospel earlier. Paul’s condemnation of the promoters of false gospels carries with it the assumption that there are no mitigating factors involved. Similarly, you would yourself add a qualification to Jesus’ comments by noting that Jesus will only ultimately deny the person who denied Him if that person doesn’t repent, dies outside of grace, etc. In other words, even from a Catholic perspective (assuming that you’re Catholic), the general principles Jesus lays out have to be taken in their larger context, and one principle can qualify another. The atheist who quotes what Jesus said about plucking your eye out or turning your cheek, without taking into account the qualifications present in the larger context, is misrepresenting what Jesus said in His historical setting. Similarly, atheists and other critics of Christianity often distort the book of Proverbs, for example, by ignoring the qualified nature of the book and its literary genre.

These are some of the many problems with the view that justification can be lost, and critics of the preservation of the saints (or eternal security or whatever you want to call it) often seem to underestimate such evidence. They’re so focused on the alleged evidence for their own position, that they tend to underestimate or not even be aware of large amounts of evidence pointing in the other direction.

Keep in mind that an analogy between justification and friendship is, like other analogies, partial. Justification and friendship aren’t identical in every conceivable way. Think of Jesus’ parables and the problems that are created if we assume that every detail of every parable is meant to have some theological significance or an identical parallel in the larger subject matter the parable is addressing.

You write:

“And likewise, with baptism, wouldn’t a person who hears the Gospel and believes it’s message, yet refuses baptism upon the prompting of the Holy Spirit/Church, for any potential reason (why anybody would do this is hard to know, but maybe on account of fear of persecution, for example), forfeit his status as justified at that time?”

But the Catholic position isn’t that justification is lost if you don’t get baptized. Rather, the Catholic position is that justification is normally attained through baptism.

Why would a person without faith want to be baptized for any good reason? And (focusing on non-infants and setting aside infant baptism for the sake of argument) why would a responsible Christian individual or church baptize a person who didn’t have faith? If the baptized person had faith prior to baptism, as ought to be the case, then why did he have to wait until his baptism in order to be justified?

If Abraham refused to be circumcised according to the command of God, would that make him agreeable or disagreeable with the almighty? If disagreeable, wouldn’t that make him a deliberate enemy of the His will? And if a deliberate enemy of his will, by refusing circumcision, doesn’t that mean he loses friendship with God? And isn’t justification described in some places in scripture as friendship with God? If so, then how can Abraham remain a friend of God, i.e. justified, if he has put himslef at emnity with his will? And likewise, with baptism, wouldn’t a person who hears the Gospel and believes it’s message, yet refuses baptism upon the prompting of the Holy Spirit/Church, for any potential reason (why anybody would do this is hard to know, but maybe on account of fear of persecution, for example), forfeit his status as justified at that time? It appears that is what St. Peter believes is the case when he says baptism now saves us, as an appeal to God for a good conscience! For does not Christ himself say that any man who denies him (Christ) before men, he will deny before the father? Is not denying Christ the thing that is happening when one denies baptism? How does one remain justified, therefore, who is being denied to the father by Christ himself. In such a circumstance it appears without a doubt that a person’s justified status *may* involve something he did or didn’t do, and, at the least, that obedience or disobedience is a necessary component of the increase or decrease of it’s grace.

In Christ,
Jared B.

“So Paul says that Abraham was justified by the faith he had before he was circumcised. What do you believe would have happened to Abraham’s justified status if he did not circumcise himself when God commanded him to?”

There would be consequences similar to what happened when he committed other sins, including ones recorded in scripture. Loss of justification wouldn’t be one of those consequences, however. But God knew what would happen and predicted the future and established the consequences for various sins in accordance with what He knew would happen. Sometimes He works through the disobedience of His people, as with Abraham’s fathering of Ishmael, and other times He works through their obedience, such as Abraham’s obedience in circumcising himself.

http://books.google.com/books?id=KqPgD9lEz64C&pg=PA139&lpg=PA139&dq=daniel+keating+justification+aquinas&source=bl&ots=ikJwmQAJAX&sig=qCTtAWvenOawUzKlShGNHx-DdJI&hl=en&ei=9kJGS9iIN5OwswO44rH2Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CCAQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=daniel%20keating%20justification%20aquinas&f=false

So Paul says that Abraham was justified by the faith he had before he was circumcised. What do you believe would have happened to Abraham’s justified status if he did not circumcise himself when God commanded him to?

In Christ,
Jared B.

“Jesus insists that her faith has healed her, but she wasn’t healed until she actually came into contact with Christ, which required some kind of action. This didn’t eliminate faith as the cause at all, so baptismal regeneration does not necessarily eliminate justification by faith either.”

What faith might be referring to (faith alone or faith in the context of some outward activity) is just one relevant line of evidence among others. Even if we were to accept your argument about Mark 5, baptismal justification would still be problematic for other reasons, which I’ve discussed above.

You’re concluding that the woman in Mark 5 was healed through more than faith because the text tells you so. I haven’t denied that faith could be defined in such a manner if the surrounding context justified that definition. What I’ve opposed is the assumption that more than faith is involved in contexts that don’t tell us so. A reference to faith without qualifications like what you’re citing in Mark 5 should be taken as faith alone, not faith accompanied by something else. The burden of proof rests with those who want a reference to faith to be taken as more than faith. The same is true in any dispute over terminology. We don’t begin with a default assumption that more than what a term normally refers to is involved. As I’ve explained above, we don’t have sufficient reason to conclude that baptism is meant to be included in the relevant passages that only mention faith.

But I address a more significant problem with your argument in an article I linked earlier, the one here. As I explain in that article, some of the healing passages in the gospels suggest that salvation, not just healing, has occurred through faith. I cited the same passage from Mark that you’ve cited, along with other passages. Jesus sometimes tells the people involved in these passages to go in peace, which would be unlikely to occur if something less than justification had occurred. Different translations render Jesus’ comments differently, but the same term sometimes translated as “healed you” can also be translated as “saved you” or “made you well”, for example. In the passage you’ve cited, Jesus refers to more than one benefit the woman has received. She’s to go in peace and be healed. She’s been “made well” both physically and spiritually (Mark 5:34). In Luke 17:19, the leper Jesus is speaking with is distinguished from the others. They were all healed, but Jesus tells the one leper that his faith has healed him and that he can go (presumably meaning that he can go in peace, as Jesus says in other contexts). In other words, more than healing is involved. If more than faith is involved in a person’s physical healing, as in Mark 5, the fact remains that Jesus is addressing both the physical and the spiritual, so only faith is mentioned. Faith is what the two forms of healing have in common. Touching Jesus’ clothing, to use the example of Mark 5, is relevant to the physical healing, but not her spiritual healing. As James Edwards notes regarding one of these healing passages (Mark 10:46-52):

“The word for ‘healed’ (Gk. sozo) also means ‘saved,’ combining both physical and spiritual dimensions. In Bartimaeus’s case the word is doubly appropriate, for ‘he received his sight’ and ‘followed Jesus along the road.’ The latter description designates the model disciple for Mark.” (The Gospel According To Mark [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2002], p. 331)

“Why do you believe Paul’s (or anyone’s) definition for ‘work’ is any ‘bodily activity’? Does not faith itself require ‘bodily activity’ at some level? If so, then wouldn’t faith be a ‘work’ under your criteria? Why should any Catholic (or anyone) believe that when Paul uses the term ‘work(s)’ he means ‘any bodily activity’, and how do you know? Is it supported by the Fathers?”

I’ve argued for different uses of the term “work” in different contexts, much as other words are defined differently from one context to another. Apparently, you haven’t read the whole discussion. I won’t repeat everything I said earlier, but you can find an overview of my position on how work is to be defined in the thread here, especially the comments section. I’ve written about the fathers’ (and other pre-Reformation sources’) views on justification here.

Take a look at Mark 5:24-34

So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”"You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ “But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

Jesus insists that her faith has healed her, but she wasn’t healed until she actually came into contact with Christ, which required some kind of action. This didn’t eliminate faith as the cause at all, so baptismal regeneration does not necessarily eliminate justification by faith either.

I fear that my previous must have been unclear, for I clearly do not believe that baptism (or any the sacraments of the Church) are merely symbolic representations of salvation. Clearly baptism is a symbolic action, but I learned long ago during my Anglican catechetical lessons that sacraments effect what they symbolize. Or as the old Prayer Book Catechism puts it: a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us; ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof.”

With others I have argued that baptism is a work of God. Let me suggest another way of looking at it: baptism is the Word of God, a word that is both audible and visible, verbal and embodied. “The word comes to the element,” writes St Augustine; and so there is a sacrament, that is a sort of visible word.” Every sacrament is a divine word that accomplishes what it promises: “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11).

Baptism, therefore, is not just a symbolic pouring of water that points us away from itself to something else: it is God speaking to us now and God accomplishing what he speaks. And this is the solution to the problem of faith with which you are struggling. Precisely because baptism is divine Word, spoken to us directly and personally in the form of first-person discourse, it summons us to faith, bestows faith, and sustains faith. The fact that it is a word spoken to us in the form of symbolic action involving material elements does not alter its character as divine Word. Baptism is the gospel simultaneously proclaimed and enacted.

Again I ask you to put aside the question of justification and focus instead on baptism and our union with Christ. Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, and Anglicans believe that baptism sacramentally but effectually effects union with the risen Christ and his mystical body the Church. We see this clearly taught in the New Testament and confirmed in the ancient baptismal liturgies of the Church, as well as the writings of the Church Fathers. Can you concede this belief as at least a plausible and reasonable reading of the New Testament? I do not ask you to agree with it. I simply ask whether you can see how the baptismal texts in the New Testament might be interpreted in this way. I’m not trying to trick you here. I find it helpful, though, to establish the connection between baptism and union with Christ before speaking of justification.

Fr K