Greenville, SC

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The following report is a continuation of yesterday’s story and comes to us from team leader Caleb with our team in Greenville, SC:

We met a man who used to work with Ernie, one of our evangelists. When I tried to offer him a pamphlet, he wanted to start a discussion, arguing that it’s complicated. He asked questions ranging from baptism to the authority of Peter and the apostles. At the end of the conversation, we could tell that this man is trying to ascertain a proper understanding of Scripture. However, there’s a lot of confusion because he follows Sola Scriptura. Once we got to that point, I challenged him to tell me where the Bible teaches that explicitly. (There’s never a satisfactory answer to that question.) He believes things like water baptism is only a work of man and for repentance, but salvation comes only through a separate baptism – the baptism of the Holy Spirit and Fire. He had a Christology that I told him was more like the early heresies than the majority of Christianity – even “Bible Alone” Christians. For instance, he at first argued that there is a God, who is called Father, who is truly God and that this God dwelled within Jesus, who is a human, but that Jesus is only the “son of God” in the sense that he was born human. He argued against us when we tried to point out the first chapter of John – that the Word was with God and was God – he said you can’t from that passage say that Christ is God’s Son in the Eternal sense because it says “Word” and not “Son”. At the end we both acknowledged our fundamental differences: He is Bible Alone – we are not, He doesn’t trust human authority – we do because that’s the way Jesus Himself set up His Church, and finally he asked me to explain how one can be saved. I told him to believe in the right faith (I quoted The Creed), repent (more than just feeling bad about sin, but actually turning away from it and making amendments which if anyone was honest requires tremendous amounts of work even with the help of God’s grace), be baptized (we already established that to us this means by water and with the Trinitarian formula as Christ commanded) and remain in Christ until the end (praying, receiving God’s grace in the sacraments, staying one with the Church Christ founded, and repenting if we fall into sin). He didn’t like having to be dependent on the Church (human authorities) nor did he believe one can lose their salvation. In the end, we agreed to disagree. Ernie got his contact info and he’s certainly going to be praying for us, so maybe we should pray for him too. God’s will be done.