Way Of Salvation Or Lecture Co

Author : Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield
Publisher : Theclassics.Us
ISBN 13 : 9781230217567
Total Pages : 28 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (175 download)

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Download or read book The Plan of Salvation; Five Lectures Delivered at the Princeton Summer School of Theology, June 1914 written by Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield and published by Theclassics.Us. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... II AUTOSOTERISM There are fundamentally only two doctrines of salvation1: that salvation is from God, and that salvation is from ourselves. The former is the doctrine of common Christianity; the latter is the doctrine of universal heathenism. "The principle of heathenism," remarks Dr. Herman Bavinck,2 "is, negatively, the denial of the true God, and of the gift of his grace; and, positively, the notion that salvation can be secured by man's own power and wisdom. 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name.' Gen. 11: 4. Whether the works through which heathenism seeks the way of salvation bear a more ritual or a more ethical character, whether they are of a more positive or of a more negative nature, in any case man remains his own saviour; all religions except the Christian are autosoteric. . . . And philosophy has made no advance upon this: even Kant and Schopenhauer, who, with their eye on the inborn sinfulness of man recognize the necessity of a regeneration, come in the end to an appeal to the will, the wisdom, and the power of man." It was quite apposite, therefore, when Jerome pronounced Pelagianism, the first organized system of self-salvation taught in the Church, the "heresy of Pythagoras and Zeno."3 It was in effect the crystallization in Christian forms of the widely diffused Stoic ethics, by which the thought of men had been governed through the whole preceding history of the Church.4 Around the central principle of the plenary ability of the human will, held with complete confidence and proclaimed, not in the weak negative form that obligation is limited by ability, but in the exultant positive form that ability is fully competent to all obligation, Pelagius, no...