“Brothers, truly my heart’s pleasure and supplication to God on behalf of Israel is for it to be saved. For I testify to them that they have zeal to God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of Law for righteousness to everyone that believes” (Romans 10:1-4).
Tolerant Calvinist: Paul, your prayer is perfectionistic, simplistic, anti-pastoral, and puerile. Wow. What an uncharitable and ghastly mural. For I, like SO MANY zealous and well-intentioned persons, was for many years a stranger to what the Bible teaches about the sovereignty of God and His saving grace. Yes, I was relatively ignorant (yet still fuzzily knowledgeable) of God’s righteousness revealed in the gospel. That clearly being the case, I was NOT necessarily unregenerate (as your perfectionistic prayer implies) since God is NOT dependent upon the perfection of my knowledge and submission to His righteousness in bringing about salvation.
Would you be so galling to say that you and the other Apostles preached that the salvation of sinners includes perfect and complete knowledge of, and submission to the sole ground of salvation right from the start?
That being said, I now realize in hindsight that my (partial) ignorance of Jesus Christ as the end of law for righteousness stemmed primarily from my own prejudice. BUT my prejudice was amply reinforced by what I was taught. So though I had a cranium half-empty of enmity against God that propelled me to establish a smidgen of my own righteousness, that did NOT necessarily preclude the reality that I was imperfectly submitting to God’s righteousness at least at some level.
Would you so unlovingly, impatiently, and imperiously assert and demand that the light of the knowledge of the redemptive glory of God is seen and known in the face of Jesus Christ by every regenerate person, with absolutely no exceptions?
“Because [it is] God who said, Out of darkness Light shall shine, who shone in our hearts to [give the] brightness of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
Tolerant Calvinist: Wow, Paul. It seems that you would have us zealously ignorant ones to believe that God births no children, but only mature adults. That is absurd on a level that I cannot even begin to understand.
“For the Word of the cross is foolishness to those being lost, but to us being saved, it is the power of God. …But a natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is not able to know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 1:18, 2:14).
Tolerant Calvinist: Grow up.
Agrammatos 