Cheryl Schatz

Greg,
Thanks for taking the time to flesh out your view.

1) When I argued that humankind also has the ability to fulfill the law of Christ, I was thinking in terms of Galatians 6:2.

Restoring, helping, and doing good to one another does indeed fulfill the law of Christ, whether it is done by Gentiles outside the house of Israel, or done by the Jews within.

If man’s default condition can only be evil by nature, how can he by nature (Romans 2:14) do the things contained in the law as Paul claims?

I don’t believe that man’s default condition is only “evil by nature”. The Bible says in several places that we can do good. The gentiles can do good and even the Pharisees who were against Jesus could do good to their own children. The issue for Paul was not whether we can do good things but if the good that we can do is the basis of a “work” that will save us. None of us is sinless so the good that we do doesn’t create a “good” person who has no need for the Savior. So we both agree mankind is capable of doing good things.

I am simply affirming that humans are born with a spark of the divine (made in God’s image) and the free will to exercise that spark.

caveat: This in no way says, nor does it imply that I can effect my own resurrection (apart from Christ) into a brand-new corporeal (flesh) body (Job 19:25-27) that does not wear out and die (Revelation 21:1-6). Only Jesus can do that for me.

I can also agree that we are capable of doing good by our own free will, however we do not have the ability to live a sinless life without the Holy Spirit’s power for our will has been tainted by the fall. Our salvation also is not just a new body and the resurrection but a restored relationship with God that has been paid for by the Lord Jesus. Only Jesus can do that for us too, right?

Romans 7:18 (NASB)
18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not.

But I do agree with the classical humanism of Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) as touching his call for moderation and tolerance in stark contrast to the dogmatism of the reformers (Luther & Calvin).

caveat: The humanism of Erasmus is NOT the same as the secular humanism of today.

I believe that the truth is in the middle so that humanity’s free will is not completely free nor is it completely in bondage. If human will was completely free then we wouldn’t struggle with sin as Paul shared his struggle in the book of Romans. And if human will was completely in bondage then it would make no sense for Jesus to say that even the evil Pharisees could do good things.

Also no matter how many good things we can do should we desire to do them, those good works can never wash away our sin for just one sin against God’s law makes us a law breaker.

James 2:10 (NASB)
10 For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.

You also said:

3) I do not deny that we all wage an inner war between choosing to do good things or opting to continue in the pursuit of wickedness.

And yes the heart is deceitful and wicked (Jeremiah 17:9); no contest, but the Bible also speaks of a merry heart and a clean heart.

But would you also agree with me that God is the one who must clean our hearts since we are incapable of making ourselves pure?

Proverbs 20:9 (NASB)
9 Who can say, “I have cleansed my heart,
I am pure from my sin”?

What I see in the Scriptures is that the one who trusts in God is considered righteous. And that one who is considered righteous by God is able to consistently live by faith in his/her actions.

4) I believe that we have inherited physical death from Adam in conjunction with the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17)

Genesis 4:7 also tells me that I have been given the ability to do the right thing and slam the door in sin’s face.

Unless this set-up has somehow been changed or abrogated in the remainder of scripture, I am having a difficult time finding an inherited trait that forces me to open the door, make nice with sin, and let it have its way with me.

The inherited trait does not force us into letting sin have its way with us. Rather the trait causes us to desire sin naturally while God has also created us in His image allowing us the ability to refuse sin should we so desire. So just as Paul says that the gentiles obeyed the law even though they had not been given the law (just as we all have a God-given conscience) none of the gentiles kept God’s law perfectly.

The issue with Cain is two-fold. First of all he did not give his sacrifice to God by faith thus only Abel’s offering is said to have been by faith:

Hebrews 11:4 (NET)
11:4 By faith Abel offered God a greater sacrifice than Cain, and through his faith he was commended as righteous, because God commended him for his offerings. And through his faith he still speaks, though he is dead.

After Cain did not come to God by faith, he had his sacrifice rejected by God. It is interesting that Cain is told that he must master sin after he had already sinned by refusing to come to God in faith and sinned by being angry without cause.

The way I see this is that the sin nature made it easy for Cain to sin by being angry without cause, but just because it was natural for him to feel hatred doesn’t mean that this sin had to have complete control of him. While Cain had the mandate to master the hatred within him so that it would not become murder, the fact that he had an internal hatred to begin with shows the sin nature.

So the difference is that the sin nature causes us to have the internal inclination towards sin yet we are still able to make choices regarding what we will do with our sinful feelings. If we give in to the feelings that are already within, sin becomes our master and it becomes harder to fight just as practiced sin makes us a slave to sin.

Greg, I am wondering if you can see the difference between what is within naturally and our actual acting out of the sinful thoughts? It seems to me that the cause of confusion is mixing the two up. Your answer didn’t deal with inner sin nor did you deal with Cain’s already sinful anger that had already happened. If you are willing to distinguish between the two (one sin that had not yet happened at the time God talked to Cain and one sin that had already been committed within him) that would be great.