Microsoft Word - ChristianityNotReligionBkMSS.doc

referred to as the "non-transferrability of God's attributes." Something or someone else cannot be said to be inherently and ess ...

Christian understanding. When we say, "God is good," we do not mean that God belongs to a class of "goodness" or that God confor ...

what is beneficial, because He has utilitarian advantage, because He serves a purpose. If "God is good" because He serves a purp ...

sovereignty, His actions. It is a subtle form of idolatry to allow the conduct of God to supplant and supersede the character of ...

existent "Good," then the ideal has become an idol. The establishment of a standard of good behavioral activities apart from who ...

nor of the character of either good or evil expressed within those activities. The words "act," "action," and "activity" in the ...

example, Jesus observed the religious and moral external activities of the Pharisees and concluded that there was a spiritual em ...

self-generatively evil. Man is not a devil. A man is evil only relative to his deriving the expression of the character of the E ...

of God's goodness in man's behavior (third theistic premise). Thus man was free to function as God intended by the expression of ...

evaluation of individual and collective social "good." Natural man has posited the three premises of moralism ever since: (1) se ...

do not talk of these things, except perhaps as a joke. Everyone there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirr ...

advocates the autonomy of goodness and fails to understand the spiritual derivativeness of all human behavior. "Whatever is not ...

(Isaiah 64:6). All our moral actions by which we try to be good or righteous, when presented before God are as offensive as pres ...

introduced it supplants the singular sufficiency of Jesus Christ and constitutes "another gospel." (9) Morality is "salvation by ...

"obedience of faith" (Rom. 1:5) that listens under God's Spirit and is obedient to Life. (11) Morality is deadly. There is certa ...

do whatever God wants to be and do in us. The rigid chains of moral inflexibility allow for no novelty, newness, no spontaneity ...

life," morality plays the part of an impostor. Jacques Ellul notes that "morality is the means whereby the Christian dodges deat ...

the deceptive and diabolic tactic of the deceiver. The devil, the "father of lies" (John 8:44) and all falsehood, has substitute ...

"is part of the condition of the fall. Now endowed with the power to define good and evil, to elaborate it, to know it and to pr ...

derivation out of God alone, and its availability to man by the indwelling of Jesus Christ alone. Morality denies the derived ex ...