I grew up going to church but I’m not religious now and I never really understood this part.
Please, no answers along the lines of “aha, that’s why Christianity is a sham” or “religions aren’t logical”. I don’t want to debate whether it’s right or wrong, I just want to understand the logic and reasoning that Christians use to explain this.
The theological answer, as I learned it, is most clearly spelled out in James 2:14-26, often referenced through the phrase “faith without works is dead”. The short version is: faith in Jesus will save you, not good deeds. However, if you have faith in Jesus, then that faith will manifest itself through good deeds. If someone proclaims their faith but doesn’t act lovingly, then they don’t actually have faith and won’t be saved. So a Christian should be a good person not because being good will save them, but because being good is a result of genuine faith.
TLDR: He doesn’t forgive anyone who sins, he forgives those who repent. Repent not meaning “feeling sorry” as many seem to explain, but actually meaning “to turn away” which means changing fundamentally as a human being. From a bad person to a good person.
Someone who doesn’t change and act good most of the time isn’t repentant, so isn’t forgiven. So basically, you prove it with your actions and how you live your life, not with just words only. By this measurement, Republican “Christians” aren’t repentant and so aren’t forgiven.
Not a Christian anymore, but I used to be for a very long time. Sidebar: “You will know a tree by it’s fruit” AKA you’ll know what kind of person someone is by what they do. Anyone who’s even skimmed the bible (especially the new testament) would easily understand that most conservative “christians” aren’t Christian at all, but rather like the Pharisees (phony religious types) that Jesus constantly argued with and condemned.
Other note: Sikhs actually live the way Christian claim to. I could easily make a “hard to swallow pill” meme which said: “Sikhs are better Christians than actual Christians are.”
Seems to me this is a protestant thing, i grew up Catholic and repentance was a major part of it. You don’t change and become a better person? Then no absolution for you.
Depends on the protestant branch, I’d heard repentance defined as “turning away from sin 100% and leaving it behind” but that kind of theology gets mixed up in “faith not works” and the idea that if you haven’t immediately asked forgiveness for every little time you mess up you’re going to hell until you do. Swear while falling down the stairs, then die in your living room? Hell.
Of course there’s also the opposite which is “once you accept Jesus there’s no possible way you can ever not be saved” which doesn’t match up with free will in my opinion.
Romans 6:1 “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”
This is typically the best reasoning behind the idea of eternal forgiveness. You can rack up points on your sin bill. But it’s contrary to the overall goal of someone who is following the teachings of Jesus and Paul.
I was raised in a very religious environment. And while it’s taken me many years to rid myself of the scars that caused me emotionally. I still have answers from time to time. And if it helps someone be a better person, I’m happy to share what I know.
Questioning an aspect of a belief structure is important for personal growth. And I hope that some of the comments here help you get what you need.
I come from a protestant tradition that says you can’t ever be good enough to be saved. Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life and acted as a substitutionary sacrifice on our behalf to make us righteous before God. All the work of salvation is done through Christ. If salvation required anything other than faith to save ourselves (e.g. being good), then his death and resurrection would be meaningless. So once we are made righteous by God through faith, God begins the work of sanctification (being made holy and more Christlike). We don’t believe this will fully happen in this life but is a process that we go through as we walk with God.
TLDR: It isn’t about doing good things to be saved but rather we’re saved and slowly begin to orient our lives around doing good things.
You won’t be forgiven no matter what. If you carry on sinning, there is no more forgiveness. The only thing you can expect is to be thrown into outer darkness forever where you will be mourning and regretting your decision.
Put it this way: you drove drunk and killed someone. You’ve been given the death penalty by the judge. But a person called Jesus steps in and says “I’ll take his place. Let him go free”.
Would you ever drink drive again after someone died in your place to give you a second chance? Surely not! You would be sober, very grateful and even yet to help other people not make the same mistake.
It’s the same with sin. Jesus paid a HEAVY price to redeem you. Don’t spit in his face by carrying on with the same sins. Instead be grateful and find out how you should live instead.
Read the 10 commandments in Exodus 20. And also read the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) to see how Jesus further explains and practices these.
The goal is to become holy like Jesus
Hope that helps.
Good ELI5 answer. The “push” to do good comes from the feeling of thankfulness that you don’t have to take a death penalty from a wrongdoing, someone else is taking it instead.
Another take: Imagine when a friend takes you for a dinner treat, you’d be thankful for them that they paid for your food (and the food is not necessarily free, someone actually paid for the food). You’d at least try to be nice to him, as a gesture of thankfulness, and you wouldn’t want hurt their feeling after they took you for a treat. Deliberately or not.
In Jesus’s time, there were three different sects of Judaism.
One of them, the Sadducees, allegedly believed there was no life after death and that God didn’t care at all about what people did or didn’t do.
Their answer to your question of following the law is perhaps the most interesting.
They believed that what was put forth as laws were a gift to humanity and that following them inherently led to a better life in the here and now.
While I don’t personally see all of the laws put forward as beneficial, there are certainly instances where that makes a lot of sense.
For example, look at the full version of one of the commandments:
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
- Exodus 20:12
Would following a commandment to take care of your parents in their old age (‘honor’ here comes from the word for burden) benefit you by setting an example such that when you are old that you too would be taken care of?
This was almost like social security in antiquity, much like the Sabbath was one of the first labor laws preventing working anyone more than 6 days in a row.
There’s something called the overjustification effect, where when you introduce external reward systems for something intrinsically rewarding people over focus on the external and forget the internal benefits. I think a number of religions have serious issues with that.
There’s even a certain irony in Job, named ‘persecuted’ in Hebrew because even though he lived a good life he experienced suffering which it explains by the intervention of Satan, today in the most common language among believers being the exact same word as “to do a task with the expectation of a reward.”
Maybe we’re too focused on the rewards.
Now see a post like this makes me wish there was Lemmy gold. Thanks!!
I’m atheist, but I’ve been interested in religion in general for quite some time.
From what I know, it’s that you have to genuinely have remorse for the bad things you’ve done and then Jesus will forgive you. It your remorse is fake, Jesus won’t forgive.
Catholic here. Despite God’s forgiveness, Jesus never said salvation is guaranteed. As he said, “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven”. And that’s just for the rich. There are other passages that emphasize the difficulty of gaining eternal life in Heaven, " the way is narrow", “you must take up your cross”, and so on. Christ’s death and resurrection made salvation possible in the first place. We couldn’t even have a hope of it without His help. He also gave us the way that we must follow to gain salvation now that it’s possible: belief in God and Christ, and following His commandments, given through the Church.
To put it in another way, we all have a relationship with God. That relationship was damaged through original sin in a way we could not repair on our own. God still has always loved us, but without Christ’s sacrifice, He could not forgive our betrayal through sin and therefore we remained separated from Him. Once Christ bore the burden of our sin and overcame it, that repaired humanity’s relationship with God overall and God is willing to forgive any sin, past or present, that we commit against Him. As long as we do not commit a serious sin, that relationship will stay intact. Two people in a relationship may do little things that annoy or lightly anger the other person, but we’ve all got stuff that aren’t “deal-breakers” with each other. But a serious sin done with full knowledge and of one’s own free will, which in the Catholic Church we call a mortal sin, is a “deal-breaker” that once again severs our own personal relationship with God and threatens our salvation. It’s basically a betrayal of God’s love. God has these rules and morality and such because He loves us so much He wants the absolute best for humanity and the world. Sin does damage to that, and mortal sin does damage to that in a big way. God is always willing to forgive, but in order for that to happen we have to show that we are sorry for breaking that relationship and promise/resolve that we will do our best to try not to do it again. We have to reconcile with God just as two people in a strained or broken relationship have to reconcile with each other. In the Catholic Church, we believe that reconciliation happens in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where we confess what we did to a priest, who is in the person of Jesus at that time, and make that resolution to not sin again. The priest then offers a penance as a way to basically “make it up” to God, or as a theologian I heard once say, “clean up the glass and repair the window we broke”, and the good relationship with God is restored. Basically, yeah, God is always willing to forgive if we ask for it… But that doesn’t mean we still can’t break that relationship. I’d always be willing to forgive a best friend if they were to betray me, but if they actually did that, I’d still be mad, and if they don’t respond to my calls offering that forgiveness, well, there’s not much more I can do to fix the relationship with my friend at that point if they don’t want to be forgiven.
This is an excellent summary. Thanks for the insight.
I am no longer a Christian, I came from a super fundamentalist bent of Christianity. The idea of choosing to not sin even if you know your sins are forgiven has to do with love.
“For God so loved the world he gave his only son for our sins” etc
So the pastor tells us that we know we are a real Christian who is really saved by our “good fruits”, that is, the good things we choose to do and the bad things we choose not to do. So by choosing not to sin, you’re proving to yourself that God is real and that God really saved you, because, as everyone knows, it’s impossible to be for even a moment anything but absolutely selfish without God’s help.
Most Christians aren’t that Calvinist though. That was the church I grew up in.
Imagine Jesus as a director of a company that accepts all sincere applicants. The director assumes responsibility for all the mistakes his employees make, but he doesn’t assume responsibility for people who only claim to be employees. People who purposely commit crimes get fired and applications by people who apply with the purpose of commiting crimes get rejected for not being sincere. (That’s not to say someone who once was fired can’t reapply if they’re actually sincere about it, but since God sees into people’s hearts and minds, you can’t trick him.)
The simple answer is that the “you have to be good” Christians are not the same people as the “Jesus forgives no matter what” Christians. Beliefs and doctrines vary wildly throughout Christianity, and different Christians often believe contradictory things. This isn’t helped by the fact that the Bible itself, being a collection of many books by many authors, contains contradictory viewpoints. This allows believers to focus on the elements they like and ignore the ones they don’t.
Once I decided to treat religion seriously (I’m an athiest) and understand it is a major part of society, history, and the lives many (possibly most) people in my life I tried to do some research and understand what Christianity really was. I essentially came to the same conclusion, and just the idea of what God is varies wildly.
The thing I always wonder now is whether Christians (or religious people in general) really know, or even think about, just how different their beliefs might be. Even if they call themselves by the same thing (Christian, Catholic, protestant, etc)
The few times I’ve tried talking to friends about this I’ve gotten the impression that they don’t even understand or have never thought about this. I’ve just come to understand that there’s no one answer to any belief system. You have to ask an individual, and they might not even have any answers because they’ve simply not considered it before.
My general understanding is that you’re forgiven if you choose to accept Jesus. (Note that I am not christian, but was raised as such.) You are not required to accept salvation. Actions, by themselves, mean nothing; you can be a fantastic, moral person, and work all of your life to help other people, and without accepting Jesus you’re still damned. OTOH, if you have truly accepted Jesus, then ipso facto you’re going to work tirelessly to help people; actions are a natural consequence of the belief. Therefore, someone that acts contrary to the teaching of Jesus is not saved, because they do not have true belief.
For a real world example, Jimmy Carter would be a person that you could say would be saved (…if any of this was real); his effort demonstrates the faith he claims. OTOH, looking at all of the televangelists, you could quite reasonably say that their daily lives contradict the teachings of Jesus, and therefore no professed belief can ever result in their salvation.
You have to be truly sorry for your sins and make an honest attempt at not doing them again. That being said if you sneak in a really sincere confession right before death, then by the book, you should go to heaven. This is a loooot like Christians last rights, the sacraments they use on the dying.
Fun fact anyone can preform last rights for a Christian should they request it. Reason being that people don’t always get to choose when they need their last rights so holy men may or may not be around.
Isn’t it last rites?
You don’t…not really. It’s like a child leaving their parents house - you “can” now do whatever you want: good luck with that.:-)
Another take: the whole “being good” part is Santa Claus, not Jesus. The whole “acting in a well-behaved manner” is more what parents tell their kids that Jesus wanted (oh uh…yeah, it’s JESUS that wanted you to be quiet in your room at 8pm, totally), while what Jesus actually said essentially translates to: fuck hypocrites, imma leave you behind when I’m in charge beotches!
I mean that seriously though - like to pick just one example:
If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar;
(1 John 4:20)So hating gays is…a choice one could make I suppose, but if you say you are a follower of Christ at the same time, then Jesus calls such people “liars”.
The real question is: if Jesus says one thing, but a particular church/pastor/priest/pedo says something else, which one defines the “religion”? Just like everything else in the world, truth gets mixed in with fiction, and sold as a package to control the masses - e.g. Orwell’s Animal Farm, like overthrowing The Man was a good thing, but then who they picked to replace him… urg:-(.
