Implications
Michael Fink writes:
Apostasy is certainly a biblical concept, but the implications of the teaching have been hotly debated. The debate has centered on the issue of apostasy and salvation. Based on the concept of Gods sovereign grace, some hold that, though true believers may stray, they will never totally fall away. Others affirm that any who fall away were never really saved. Though they may have "believed" for a while, they never experienced regeneration. Still others argue that the biblical warnings against apostasy are real and that believers maintain the freedom, at least potentially, to reject God's salvation.
McKnight says that "apostasy ought not to be used as a continual threat so much as an occasional warning of the disaster that Christians may bring upon themselves if they do not examine themselves. As a warning, apostasy can function as a moral injunction that strengthens commitment to holiness as well as the need to turn in complete trust to God in Christ through his Spirit." Some argue that the desire for salvation shows one does not have "an evil, unbelieving heart" leading to apostasy. As Fink puts it, "persons worried about apostasy should recognize that conviction of sin in itself is evidence that one has not fallen away."
Read more about this topic: Apostasy In Christianity
Famous quotes containing the word implications:
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)