If, as Tj has been arguing, it is just blazingly obvious that works don't matter and baptism is to be dispensed with and the rest of us are just really, really stupid to read Scripture as we do (he's made it clear he thinks I'm pretty dumb)... Why, I wonder, did the early Church require baptism and the necessity of works along with faith for salvation? And I'm talking the REALLY early Church--late first and second centuries. The only people in the period who denied this were Gnostics, and Tj agrees that Gnosticism is heresy. So, here's my thing: Was the revelation brought in the first half of the first century so ineffectual that even those who were working with the Apostles got it all so terribly wrong? It was so ineffectual that even Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, the Didache, etc. botched it? Was Christ a lousy teacher? Were the Apostles? Was the Spirit not guiding any of these people? Was the Spirit so shockingly absent from them, and from the poor people being instructed by them, that God permitted massive theological delusion in the space of less than a decade? That would make God a pretty lousy Father.
(Yeah, I'm bringing up another point, Tj, not changing the subject. I can't seem to get you to respond to the questions I've been asking since #11, so I thought I'd bring in another angle.)
