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How soon must one repent?.

From the time of the transgression, What is the required time frame for repenting?

Repent by the sacrament of confession which requires true repentance and honest, best efforts to avoid sinning again. And doing penance. It is not the trivial thing some would make it.

Cutoff date is death - when the elevator goes either up or down. Without repentance and forgiveness you're in the position of the man gathering sticks.

Free will means having ones own unimpeded, independent , autonomous , self-determination etc in decision making.

when the approach taken by a church knowingly involves coercion, those things attributed to liberty or 'free' will
are lost.

so one can delay repenting till the precipice of death comes , but you remain in the body of the church till that
cut off point for repentance?

Nope, as I have explained before, there is an abundance and evidence and a surety of proof...... but you don’t see it .....

Further, this guy is commenting on the Bible and presumably offering comment about biblical interpretation.

He is ignorant of the basics but comments anyway.....,simply does not know what he is talking about.....

The “basics” here is not the “reality” of God, nor even the evidence for God. He commenting on what the Bible says and how it is interpreted. As I said, he does not have an understanding..... simple.

No, you're out from the point of sinning. You have until death to get back in. That's when the hammer drops.

Your definition is at odds with the Encyclopedia Britannica for one. It is a capacity to act, completely divorced from the action of choosing as explained above. Don't know how to make it clearer.

DBT I have concluded that either you "cannot" logically engage in an argument or you simply "will" not. You keep blithely quoting 1Cor.13 as if it is a description of the attributes of God's love when it is not. It is a chapter whose context is talking about love between brothers in the church. It is sandwiched between two chapters talking about church life.

How God exercises His love from eternity is not the same as how we are to exercise love between brothers in time. God has always reserved for himself the right to keep a record of wrongs and to punish sin.

Even from a purely logical and common sense point of view your argument has no coherency. What exercise of government would never keep a record of wrongs or punish them? How would it make a government unloving if it did punish transgression? Should they punish on the basis of record or on the basis of a whim? We expect a loving and just government to care for it citizens by punishing transgressors from an accurate record. The same is true for God.

On the other hand this chapter makes perfect sense when applied to close interpersonal relationships. We don't keep records of our brother's shortcomings and hold them over their head or we will not have a close relationship. Because God does justly review everyone's actions there are somethings which we just let go and let them in His hands to decide and we focus on a close relationship. It's the same in the world outside of the church. It is not our duty to execute vigilante justice over our neighbors every time they offend us, nor do we say when your list of wrongs reaches x number we are going to stop being neighborly. Even this passage is balanced out by other passages in the same book where the church is asked to hold people accountable for deliberate and serious offenses in their behavior.

You hop-scotch through scripture trying to play your game of tic-tack-toe syllogisms with little regard for context, logic, or common sense.

Perhaps this approach works for an analysis with the old primer of Dick, Jane, and Sally; but it does not work for the Bible or any other book that is worthy of discussion.

Are you unable or unwilling to see the simple common sense of this?

That remark shows a poor of understanding of the subject matter. The mechanism and information inputs of decision making is inseparable from the decisions being made. The latter cannot exist without the former.

Memory function loss, for example, destroys the ability to recognize, think coherently or make rational decisions. There are many conditions that can and do impair cognitive function and decision making.





Dictionary definitions only reflect the common usage of words and phrases. Dictionary definitions tell us nothing about the biology of decision making, the work and function of a brain, social conditioning, belief formation, biases, etc, etc.....

That's not an argument. You are offering your opinion. A poorly informed opinion at that.

The fact is, the earliest form of bible, the Codex, is not the same as the current version/s. Nor is this the only problem with the bible.

For example;

Compare differences between the King James Version and Codex Sinaiticus


''The text of Codex Sinaiticus differs in numerous instances from that of the authorized version of the Bible in use during Tischendorf’s time. For example, the resurrection narrative at the end of Mark (16:9–20) is absent from the Codex Sinaiticus. So is the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen” (Matthew 6:13). The woman caught in adultery from John 8 is omitted in Codex Sinaiticus. According to James Bentley, Tischendorf was not troubled by the omission of the resurrection in Mark because he believed that Matthew was written first and that Mark’s gospel was an abridged version of Matthew’s gospel. If this were true, the absence of resurrection in Mark would not be a problem because it appears in the older Matthean gospel. Modern scholarship generally holds that Mark is in fact the oldest of the Synoptic Gospels, which could cause theological concerns over the omitted resurrection.''

''One other omission in Codex Sinaiticus with theological implications is the reference to Jesus’ ascension in Luke 24:51. Additionally, Mark 1:1 in the original hand omits reference to Jesus as the Son of God.''

And that remark shows poor understanding of the distinction between the capacity to act and acting. And that's not a "dictionary definition" but a summary sentence of an encyclopedia article. Show me an authoritative definition to the contrary.


So you would concede that your usage of the phrase is an uncommon usage of the phrase?

Well, yeah, like I said, you’re not much of a bible scholar.

Let’s just run a little test...since you think you know something about what the Bible says..... can you explain why and how God does not keep a record of wrongs? Do you presume there will no judgment?

Please use the Bible as a reference, not your own opinion.

Further, could you elaborate about what you mean when you say God is good to all..... unconditionally.....?

In your own words would be good..... not just a copy and paste....

Collins dictionary:

Free Will =

' the ability to make a choice without coercion.... human ability to make choices that are not externally determined;'.

' The freedom of the will to choose a course of action without external coercion.'


Cambridge Dictionary:

'the ability to decide what to do independently of any outside influence'

Merriam Webster:

'freedom of humans to make choices that are uncoerced'

TheFreeDdictionary:

.free will - 'the power of making free choices unconstrained by external agencies'


Vocabulary.com

'If someone blackmails you or forces you to do something, they're taking away your free will by limiting your choices.'

CatholicCulture .org

Free will - ' The power of the will to determine itself and to act of itself, without compulsion from within
or coercion from without.'

If you think the Sinaiticus is the most authoritative text of the Bible why have you been repeatedly using the phrase, "Let he that is without sin among you cast the first stone?"
The whole account of the "pericope de adultera" is not in Sinaiticus at all! This is another example of where you hop-scotch through documents and compose your tic-tack-toe syllogisms and then contradict yourself by using a phrase to make a point that is not even in the text that you consider the most authoritative.

Before you get too wound up over Sinaiticus you ought to know that the Old Latin Bible and the Latin Vulgate were based on texts that were even earlier and they have the account of the pericope de adultera in them just like it is in the AV.

So what premise are you giving up?
1. one of your pet phrases--he that is without sin among let him cast the first stone?
2. or that Sinaiticus is the most authoritative text?
3. or that your propositions are logical?

Since natural man is born into the sin of Adam [and dead in sin], then he is effectively 'cut off' from the moment of birth
[or for some pro-life types, from the moment of actual conception]




Scripture informs folks that the Lord considers wicked mankind worthy of destruction.
ie; being condemned to death is all they rightfully deserve according to God.

Let's look at another example of DBT's self-vaunted scholarship:
Modern scholarship generally holds that Mark is in fact the oldest of the Synoptic Gospels, which could cause theological concerns over the omitted resurrection.''

The short ending of Mark omits verses 9-16, not the whole chapter, so therefore in the short ending we still have the resurrection:

5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. 6 And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.”

You should not be putting yourself forth as a scholar if you are not going to present scholarly material.

You ought to also be aware that this text was NOT truly "discovered." It was located in a monastery where it had been discarded from usage. Why do you think it was not in usage? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that we now can conclusively establish that there were many 6 and 7th century alterations:

"A paleographical study at the British Museum in 1938 found that the text had undergone several corrections. The first corrections were done by several scribes before the manuscript left the scriptorium.[62] Readings which they introduced are designated by the siglum אa.[79] Milne and Skeat have observed that the superscription to 1 Maccabees was made by scribe D, while the text was written by scribe A.[80] Scribe D corrects his own work and that of scribe A, but scribe A limits himself to correcting his own work.[81] In the 6th or 7th century, many alterations were made (אb) – according to a colophon at the end of the book of Esdras and Esther the source of these alterations was "a very ancient manuscript that had been corrected by the hand of the holy martyr Pamphylus" (martyred in 309). If this is so, material beginning with 1 Samuel to the end of Esther is Origen's copy of the Hexapla. From this colophon, the correction is concluded to have been made in Caesarea Maritima in the 6th or 7th centuries.[82] The pervasive iotacism, especially of the ει diphthong, remains uncorrected.[83]"

Half the time you sound like a Reformer. Are you a closet 5 pointer?

You've ignored baptism for one thing.

There is nothing to concede. You should understand that a simple term such as 'free will' is not an explanation for human behaviour or decision making.