The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum Hello -- In need of help concerning Proof Texts

I have to agree with J_Edwards that despite your best attempts to list what you consider to be "core doctrines", you might consider using direct quotes from the historic Reformed Confessions and/or Catechisms. Those documents were not written over night nor extemporaneously by one man musing in his living room. But rather, they are the result of years of study and the collaboration of godly and scholarly men. It's hard to do much better than what they have done.

There isn't much one could add to the thorough reply given you by J_Edwards, but there is one section in particular that caught my attention and which needs serious revision:

Regeneration is an action performed on us by God alone according to His judgment, in which He imparts to us Christ’s righteousness and an indwelling of the Holy Spirit who compels us to believe and trust on Him for salvation. This is also known as God’s “calling.” We are also given in regeneration a new nature which seeks Him and is contrary to the sinful nature.

1. Regeneration is a divine and sovereign act of the Holy Spirit. . .
2. According to the eternal counsel (aka:foreordination and predestination) of God. . .
3. Whereby the Spirit recreates a sinner's dead spiritual nature so that he then possesses an inclination antithetical to that which he possessed by nature, so that after regeneration, a predisposition to love God, desire to do that which is good and to hate all sin. From this new nature, the sinner is then drawn to Christ.
4. This drawing is accomplished through the hearing of the divinely inspired Word of God; the outward calling and the influence of the Spirit; inward calling and consequently the sinner repents and believes upon the Lord Christ.
5. The believing upon Christ results in a person's justification, i.e., a declaration of one being "not guilty" of the charges against him having been clothed with an "alien righteousness", i.e., Christ's righteousness being imputed to him.

What I'm hoping you will grasp here is that you have confused/intermixed several things together under the one term, "regeneration"; regeneration, calling, conversion, and justification. Most importantly, one is not justified (saved) because of regeneration although one cannot be saved without first being regenerated. Regeneration makes it possible, albeit infallibly so, and leads one to justification. It is critically important that these individual doctrines be articulated precisely and cogently due to the heresies currently infiltrating the churches today, e.g. NPP, FV, etc.

In His grace,