The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum Gospel truth

Perhaps Pilprim perhaps. Conveying thoughts on here is not easy for me at times. I am not for one instance giving credence to darryls presentation. Like I said, all heresey as a shred of truth in it. Belief does manifest regeneration, just not what he considers must be believed.


I agree Pilgrim. my point was just to say this thinking of Darryls has been around forever. There is nothing new under the sun as the inspired solomon said. Not one era is not been blackened by experiantial theology. Or fruit inspectors as you call them. This was a common thinking in New England puritanism. I know the thought was good, but it always has a tendancy to lead to pure subjective thinking. AS soon as I see a questionairre, i will run. As soon as I have to give acount of my conversion experience to prove my regenerancy I will run. I know this can digress into something other than this thread, but I believe we must not shy away from stating that "proving" regenerancy started from the beginning. And has been around ever since. Look at the Cambridge Platform:

a personal and public confession and declaring of God’s manner of working upon the soul is both lawful, expedient, and useful’, and citing I Pet. 3:15 insisted that, ‘We must be able and ready upon any occasion to declare and show our repentance for sin, faith unfeigned, and effectual calling’.10 In this way the signs of grace which the earlier English Puritans had treated as means to personal assurance of salvation became the necessary evidence for convincing one’s fellow-Christians and persuading them to admit one to the church covenant.

This is exactly what Darryl would like to employ.

Then what would ensue is another form of the "half-covenant"

Here is a segment from an article actually on this site:

This theology was Reformed in that it wished to stress at every point the divine initiative in man’s salvation, but it was also primarily an experiential theology and excessively introspective. When the churches required a narrative of spiritual experience they were requiring that the convert describe the work of God in his life in such a way that it might be recognized as unmistakably the work of God. That in itself may not be wrong. But certainly where New England piety did become imbalanced was in forgetting that the divine initiative will be found primarily in the facts and proclamation of the Gospel and only secondarily in the individual’s experience. Given the faithful proclamation of the Gospel the miracle of human response might perhaps have been left to the Spirit in a rather less carefully defined sense than the New Englanders allowed. In New England the divine initiative could not be real unless it were sought out and located in the depths of the individual conscience in a process of intense introspection. The lesson it is difficult not to draw from the Preparationists’ attempts to map out this process is surely that the earliest workings of the Spirit in the regenerate heart will normally be elusive. There must be something at fault in an experiential theology which depends upon tracking them down.


http://www.the-highway.com/Early_American_Bauckham.html

This is exactly what I speak of when i mention excessive puritan introspection. Which alligns itself with Darryls thought process

I am nto throwing out the baby with the water here, just certain that this error in new england has been around and will always be around