| Poster | Thread | twayneb
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Joined: 2009/4/5
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Joplin, Missouri
| | Re: | | Quote:
So at the coming to Christ, you said 'baptized into Christ, but you did not mean the baptism of the Spirit? So you talk about two baptisms not including the dip.
Your summary of what I am saying is correct. This is how most pentacostals are going to see it. Baptism into Christ = the rebirth, regeneration, salvation...pick the term you like best. This is a real baptism of which water baptism is a picture. This will answer your last question. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is separate from this. Baptism into Christ IS necessary for salvation. In fact, it is by definition salvation. Baptism of the Holy Spirit is separate from this and is NOT necessary for salvation. This is the classical pentacostal view.
I have never called myself a finished work pentacostal. This issue is what split Azusa Street in the end. A man named Durham began preaching the finished work doctrine. Parham was originally a Methodist (Wesleyan) and a lot of his distinctives were a form of Wesleyan holiness with its second blessing and entire sanctification and sinless perfection ideas. Seymore also believed this way. I grew up with these being taught to me, but I do not believe them to be Biblical.
American pentacostalism then had a large split. Many of your smaller, independent pentacostal churches still follow the Wesleyan tradition. They have three experiences that follow in strict order in their teaching. Salvation, then Sanctification as a distinct second work of grace. Then, because of entire sanctification, a person is clean enough for the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit and the third experience is the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. The problem with this is that the progression is nowhere found in scripture and certain historical passages in Acts violate this order.
The second group followed Durham's lead. These are more of your mainline pentacostal groups such as the Assemblies of God. They do not hold to Wesleyan holiness and see sanctification as a progressive work of the Spirit in the life of a believer. I see this view scripturally more than I do Parham's view. So I guess you might call me a finished work pentacostal if it simply means that sanctification is an ongoing work in the life of a believer.
Here is my perspective, I guess. At least it has been my personal experience and I think I can fairly plainly see it in scripture.
Salvation: Comes through repentance and a very real baptism into Christ (the old man of sin dying with Him and being resurrected to new life). We receive the Spirit of God and can now fellowship freely with God through Christ. We have God's righteousness imputed to us and stand before Him righteous.
Sanctification: When we repent of our sins, we are obviously turning from it and submitting ourselves to God. This is our act of consecrating our lives to Him. So, in a sense, we separated ourselves from the world and its ways and separated ourselves unto God and His ways. In this sense, we initiated sanctification, but He does the work of sanctifying us and gives us the power to grow in our sanctification. From this point onward, we are walking out our salvation, ever increasing in holiness (the outward expression of the work of salvation). God continually exposes areas of our lives that are not completely His and causes us to grow, becoming more and more like Him.
Baptism of the Holy Spirit: The work of pentacost that we see three other distinct times in Acts as separate from salvation. This baptism gives us the power of the Spirit. With this comes an increased power to live a Holy life. With this also comes the potential to having God use us in the supernatural gifts of the Spirit as given in 1 Cor. 12.
The Wesleyan ideas have, in my experience caused great harm in the lives of people that I have known. My own grandfather questioned his salvation as he neared death because he did not see sinless perfection in his life. His brother has been plagued by the same questions. Parham's followers taught entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace almost to the degree of teaching sinless perfection. When cornered with their own shortcomings they would back pedal a little bit and say, "Well, you have to be striving toward sinless perfection." But that never really made sense to me.
Hope this helps.
_________________
Travis
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|  2024/2/15 15:28 | Profile | twayneb
Member
Joined: 2009/4/5
Posts: 2256
Joplin, Missouri
| | Re: | | I just looked up "finished work pentacostalism" on Wikipedia. Surprised, but there is a pretty accurate article on it. It will give some of the American Pentacostal distinctives that I heard preached about as I was a youngster growing up. We were the Parham pentacostal group. We heard it preached that, because of their finished work doctrine, the Assemblies of God, just up the road 60 miles in Springfield, MO, was actually off spiritually and that we should not fellowship too much with them. They were seen as genuine Christians, but as ones who had their theology all goofy and that could corrupt our "pure" teachings. So I can attest to the fact that what I see in this Wiki article is correct based on what I was taught 40 years ago.
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Travis
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| | 2024/2/15 15:38 | Profile | rbanks
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Joined: 2008/6/19
Posts: 1330
| | Re: | | Brother Travis, I have enjoyed your posts over the years, now more than ever.
I love what you have posted on this thread explaining such much truth from scripture. I agree with your position very much. God bless you brother! |
| | 2024/2/15 16:41 | Profile | brendaM
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Joined: 2024/1/19
Posts: 304
North Eastern UK
| | Re: | | Travis
It helps a great deal thank you and I hope that you are willing to continue this discussion as it is extremely helpful for me in my apologetics training. I know it is from God as I did not want to get into this area :)
//The Wesleyan ideas have, in my experience caused great harm in the lives of people that I have known. My own grandfather questioned his salvation as he neared death because he did not see sinless perfection in his life. His brother has been plagued by the same questions. Parham's followers taught entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace almost to the degree of teaching sinless perfection. When cornered with their own shortcomings they would back pedal a little bit and say, "Well, you have to be striving toward sinless perfection." But that never really made sense to me.//
I fully understand this and commiserate with those who have been damaged by it. The Holiness Movement never swept my country like it did in America so it was quite a while before I began to learn about the damage that had taken place by fake sinless perfection proponents.
I believe that a lot of this problem has been in the cross over in this teaching from the east to the west and lack of understanding what the ECF taught.
The fact that there has been so much chaos, must be expected when something so important takes place, that is, something that so damages the power of Satan in this world. There is nothing like the perfect Christian who makes him shake in his shoes, because he is barely able to deceive them whereas the 'sinning Christian' is no problems at all for him.
I know believers myself (in the UK) who have learned the truth, or what I call being enlightened or illumined, and have been seeking for the blessing for a long time and I am talking about over 15 years or more, and I can see how people could perhaps have lost heir faith through it. They are Pentecostals by the way. I have some insight about this but will not say what it is for now in case I switch you off.
But so far the main problem in what you say is refuted by Ephesians 4:5 One Lord, one faith, one baptism. You are saying that there are two. Baptism into Christ and baptised by the Holy Spirit. Travis, it is the Trinity that is acting in all things. I would like to see how the Finished Work Pentecostals see the Trinity.
Thank you for your information about that denomination by the way and wiki which I read. However I don't think wiki was right on this:
//Wesley drew on the idea of theosis to suggest that sanctification would cause a change in motivation that if nurtured would lead to a *gradual perfecting of the believer.* Thus while it was physically possible for a sanctified believer to sin, he or she would be empowered to choose to avoid sin.[8] Wesley's teachings and Methodism gave birth to the holiness movement, which sought to propagate the Methodistic doctrine of entire sanctification (Christian perfection). Most advocates within the holiness movement, in accordance with Methodist theology, taught that sanctification had both instantaneous and progressive dimensions.[9] They taught the availability of entire sanctification, which was a post-conversion experience. In this "second definite work of grace", the inclination to sin was removed and replaced by perfect love.[10]//
I have studied Wesley quite a bit, and came to the conclusion that, although he got his doctrine of entire sanctification, (which does not say that it is a gradual perfection), from the early church fathers, for some reason he misread some of them, perhaps because he did not have as full as access to their writings as we do now, or some other reason.
I do absolutely think that he did not get to the full stage of Theosis or union with Christ from much of what he said. I think he also recognized that others in Methodism did like Fletcher whom he said was the holiest man alive or something like that. It makes a big difference in discernment.
So I don't start with Wesley, but go back to the source that is, the early fathers interpretation of the Bible added of course to what the Holy Spirit teaches me to my spirit on scripture..We do have to have a foundation like this.
Now, you say that Durham taught the Finished work but I read that:
"Durham wrote in his magazine, The Pentecostal Testimony:
I ... deny that God does not deal with the nature of sin at conversion. I deny that a man who is converted or born again is outwardly washed and cleansed but that his heart is left unclean with enmity against God in it ... This would not be Salvation. Salvation ... means a change of nature ... It means that all the old man or old nature, which was sinful and depraved and which was the very thing in us that was condemned, is crucified with Christ.[18]"
Faithsaves.net/welsh-revival/
Well Travis I will stop here for comments. |
| | 2024/2/16 3:26 | Profile | brendaM
Member
Joined: 2024/1/19
Posts: 304
North Eastern UK
| | Re: | | ps //I ... deny that God does not deal with the nature of sin at conversion. I deny that a man who is converted or born again is outwardly washed and cleansed but that his heart is left unclean with enmity against God in it ... This would not be Salvation. Salvation ... means a change of nature ... It means that all the old man or old nature, which was sinful and depraved and which was the very thing in us that was condemned, is crucified with Christ.[18]"//
Faithsaves.net/welsh-revival/
Just to add, how can we be crucified with Christ if we still sin? All of these differences are just taking the benefits of being born anew, and spreading them out instead of seeing them all together as scripture shows.
Saved - born again - crucified with Christ - united with God - entirely sanctified - baptized by the Spirit.
Satan convinces men that they are in this state when first coming to Christ but reality shows it is wrong.
Then he adds into the mix confessors of ES who were fake or rather deceived. |
| | 2024/2/16 3:43 | Profile | twayneb
Member
Joined: 2009/4/5
Posts: 2256
Joplin, Missouri
| | Re: | | Quote:
But so far the main problem in what you say is refuted by Ephesians 4:5 One Lord, one faith, one baptism. You are saying that there are two. Baptism into Christ and baptised by the Holy Spirit. Travis, it is the Trinity that is acting in all things. I would like to see how the Finished Work Pentecostals see the Trinity.
It is important that we read Ephesians 4:5 in context. Paul is dealing with the subject of unity, not the subject of baptisms. He is saying that we need to love one another and forbear one another because we are baptized into the same Christ and have the same Holy Spirit. This is not a prooftext for whether the baptism of the Holy Spirit is separate from salvation. This verse does not speak to that issue at all. It speaks to our COMMON baptism and our common Lord. It gives the reason why you and I, though we disagree and discuss scripture, must still view one another as genuine believers and love one another.
Quote:
Thank you for your information about that denomination by the way and wiki which I read. However I don't think wiki was right on this:
Wiki is notorious for having errors since it is essentially crowd-driven. But what I read agrees with the stories I heard growing up. I did hear only the Parham side of the story since that was the group I grew up in. But the Wiki article seemed to jive with all of the stories I was told as a young man. My Great Grandfather held many tent meetings with Parham's son and daughter-in-law and he was the primary source of the information I heard. You may have more accurate information about the Wesleyan side of things.
Doctrines morph over time. Case in point, Parham was a Methodist and simply added the Baptism of the Holy Spirit onto what he already believed. So Americans who are "classical" pentacostals have a three step or three tiered view of salvation, sanctification, and then the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Parham taught that one was not actually born again until one was fully sanctified by God. Salvation was, to him, only justification from past sins. Sanctification, in his doctrine, dealt with and defeated the sin nature. Only when this was done did a person have a new nature and was truly born again. (I disagree with this view). So I hope you can see how, under this teaching, a person who continued to battle the flesh would always struggle with whether or not they were actually a Christian. My grandfather struggled with this.
We have this tendency to wrap a particular group's doctrinal distinctives up into a nice, neat, little package and then say that we don't agree with the wrapping paper. But the reality is that these distinctives change over time and not every person in that group believes what we think they believe. You alluded to the finished work doctrine and it seems like you could not see how Durham preached it. But Durham's view was only a step in the direction of what is now called finished work. He probably did not believe all that more recent finished work proponents believed.
And in this is part of the problem. If a person sees all pentacostals in light of the current charismatic and NAR movements, then one will think that all pentacostals are something like (I will use an example from your part of the world here) Emma Stark. She is an absolute nut-job and, in my opinion, probably hearing from demonic, familiar spirits. But the danger is to lump all pentacostals into one group when nothing could be further from the truth. The only thing I have in common with the modern charismatic movement is that I believe in a separate work called in scripture the baptism of the Holy Spirit and that things like tongues and the gifts of the Spirit have, since the day of pentacost, been something that God does among the church.
This modern day signs and wonders movement that thinks everyone should constantly be operating in all the gifts is an error, and a huge one at that.
One can study theology and be well versed in all that they read and hear of the "moves and groups" that exist. But that information is collected by men and it is a given that their own opinion and bias will be read into it. This is not to say they are bad in any way. It is simply the nature of being human and we must always take it into account.
You and I may not agree. My goal is not to argue and be proven right. My goal is to simply put the information that I have out there and study the scripture in a deeper and deeper way.
Blessings.
_________________
Travis
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| | 2024/2/16 17:42 | Profile | twayneb
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Joined: 2009/4/5
Posts: 2256
Joplin, Missouri
| | Re: | | Quote:
Just to add, how can we be crucified with Christ if we still sin? All of these differences are just taking the benefits of being born anew, and spreading them out instead of seeing them all together as scripture shows.
Guess I would answer that with a question related to a passage of scripture. Paul tells us, believers, to be not conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind. To be conformed to the pattern of this world is to sin. To be transformed is to be changed from something and to something. From what are we transformed if it is not the propensity we have, as humans with human flesh, to give in to temptation?
Now we must bring this closer to home. If you are a person who has been completely sanctified, and if you have been crucified with Christ, do you still find yourself needing to come to the Lord and say something like, "God, i am so sorry. I just gave in to that temptation. I just behaved in a way that I know to be sin. Please help me to change. Transform me. Thank you that I am forgiven by the blood of Jesus."
If you have had this happen, have you not, then, answered your own question?
These things write I unto you that you sin not. But, if any man does sin, he has an advocate with Jesus Christ the righteous.
_________________
Travis
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| | 2024/2/16 17:48 | Profile | brendaM
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Joined: 2024/1/19
Posts: 304
North Eastern UK
| | Re: | | Travis
Yes I see that the context is that of brotherly love, now that we are in the same Spirit but it does say one baptism. We come into oneness through one baptism.
Eph 4:13 says: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:
verse 16 From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.
So it is saying that it is in perfection or ES that shows us that we are not meant to all agree on everything and that each of us forms part of the body whereby God gives different insights to different people as we are not made to function alone, and anyone who has been through the wilderness experience knows how hard that is. Before we reach perfection, we think that differences (not on the basics) is a problem and we try to resolve them by making others see things as we do, and if they do not, we will break fellowship. Hence over 40,000 Protestant denominations.
Travis I can barely believe my fortune (gift) of being able to listen to someone who was so closely involved in the Holiness Movement!
You say that doctrines morph over time. Yes as time goes on, and error increases along with the downfall of the civilization of man towards the end of all things, men become more and more deceived and head towards the doctrines of demons. If you look at history from the perspective of those outside of westernism or really Americanism, you can see the downfall from the time the RCC split form the true church and then was split ad infinity instead of it returning to the true church. You can clearly see the spirit of revolution forming through from that in France increasingly so.
But more so can you see it over the doctrine of ES or Thesosis, how it left its roots and became dispersed. This dispersion is how satan works, scattering things so that no-one can tell the truth. But they had the faith that was handed down from the Apostles in the early years even amidst the error and it can be found and it is very simple - good v evil. No progressiveness, that is satanic.
I take your point and thanks for that, that we must not put everyone in one basket and I am appreciating that not all Pentecostals are the same. I have noticed that the 'far out ones' seem quite emotionally unstable as in any group. The Spirit is perfectly able to over come this in ES and I have myself as witness having been severely abused in childhood. It is also wonderful to have the discernment to separate mans' words from what is the truth. |
| | 2024/2/17 5:12 | Profile | brendaM
Member
Joined: 2024/1/19
Posts: 304
North Eastern UK
| | Re: | | //If you are a person who has been completely sanctified, and if you have been crucified with Christ, do you still find yourself needing to come to the Lord and say something like, "God, i am so sorry. I just gave in to that temptation. I just behaved in a way that I know to be sin. Please help me to change. Transform me. Thank you that I am forgiven by the blood of Jesus." If you have had this happen, have you not, then, answered your own question? These things write I unto you that you sin not. But, if any man does sin, he has an advocate with Jesus Christ the righteous.//
Well John does say 'if' not when. No that does not happen to one who is ES. If they fall into sin then they are not easily restored and in fact only God can do it it is so serious as we read in Hebrews. We have in fact put Christ back on the cross.
Once we have been delivered by the blood of Christ from the old creation and are new creatures, deliberate sin is so terrible for that person that they will not consider and in fact have no desire for it, and Jude tells us that God keeps us: 24 Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.
We have no excuse. |
| | 2024/2/17 5:22 | Profile |
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