Top of my controversial topics list is...

It’s hard to know where to even begin here.

The church has never taught that sin is meaningless. It taught that sin can keep you from heaven!!! And still teaches that. Some Sola Fide adherents, OTOH, because the doctrine insists that righteousness is merely imputed or declared anyway at justification, may see themselves as sinless even though they’re not: “simul justus et peccator”, etc. And this is nothing but pretense, hypocrisy, nothing to do with the gospel; God doesn’t deal in falsehoods.

Anyway, the idea that the believer is free from the penalties of sin as long as they have faith has also led some to think that grace/the gospel is a license to sin as Jude 1:4, for example, makes clear was already a threat at the beginning. But the church always opposed this, as Paul and others did, of course. And the early church opposed it so severely that, across the board, throughout the church world, it was considered that, if someone sinned in some grave and serious manner: adultery, murder, etc, they were no longer part of God’s fold, and repentance was impossible. Christians had turned away from the world and its sin, often at great cost. Persecution and martyrdom were normal occurrences. Certain New Testament passages support this idea that repentance is impossible, and, as well, it was simply the consensus that was received and held at the beginning. So much for forgiveness being some sort of carte blanc already-ever-accomplished deal as long as one believes.

In the 200s AD, however, the overseer/bishop of Rome, Callistus, ruled that a person could, with a sincere change of heart, come to repentance and return to fellowship with God and His followers, even as this was allowed only over time and after much penance was involved. This was very controversial, causing no little storm within the church. He based this on the understanding of God’s mercy and love and desire that all come to Him. Eventually this teaching would take root and be accepted throughout the church, everywhere. Either way, sin continued to have much meaning in the church, quite different from today’s climate in general I might add.

Other actions would be required of the church, in the east and west, as the need arose, sometimes driven by other controversies. The canon of the new testament would be assembled at council in the 300s, as well as the doctrine of the Trinty and the nature of Christ being hammered out due to the Arian controversy. In the 400s the Pelagian controversy arose over the role of man’s will vs grace in his salvation. A big plus that came out of it all was that, based mainly on the arguments that ensued, most of them from Augustine, doctrines on grace were set down in the following century at council. Using 25 canons or statements it was solidly maintained that fallen man cannot possibly move himself to God in any way, that he has not the power to find God to begin with, or to please Him, to come to faith in Him, to justify himself, to live out the righteousness demanded by the law because he doesn’t possess that righteousness within himself to begin with, on his own. And yet the law is holy and good; man was made for it; he wasn’t created to be a sinner after all. The real distinction between fallen and redeemed man is that fallen man lacks God, union with Him, due to his own ignorance and pride-driven preference for himself over God, initated by Adam. Man cannot pull himself up by his own bootstraps; he needs grace, he needs God to find him, to inform him, to call him, to move him, to justify him.

What Paul means by saying that we’re justified and saved by faith is that we’re justified by grace, by God, as opposed to ourselves, because faith makes God our God again. Faith is to say yes to God, placing us into right stead and order with Him. Adam had said no to God, and He’s been patiently working with mankind ever since to bring us back around to yes, definitively made available to all with the advent of His Son who reveals and reconciles us with Him. That faith, that agreement, that yes, that unity, is what pleased God first above all else about Abraham’s response. It’s a game-changer for man- it’s the basis of justice for man, it’s what we were all made for.

But the church also maintained that man, even when called by God, can still say no. He can resist grace at any time. He’s not just saved but on a journey to salvation, to his purpose, to fulfilling that which he was made for which can be summed by loving God with his whole heart, soul, mind and strength and his neighbor as himself. In this profound, supernatural love, in this transformation into God’s image, is found all the purpose, satisfaction, and happiness a human can know and possess. Within that he has finally obtained the true and priceless Object of all human desire. But it’s also a journey that he can jump off of at any time, returning to the flesh, departing from the Spirit. So it’s a struggle, between our pride/desire to sin and our choice for good over that evil. So, after the 25 canons the church stated thusly:

“According to the catholic [universal] faith we also believe that after grace has been received through baptism, all baptized persons have the ability and responsibility, if they desire to labor faithfully, to perform with the aid and cooperation of Christ what is of essential importance in regard to the salvation of their soul. We not only do not believe that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema. We also believe and confess to our benefit that in every good work it is not we who take the initiative and are then assisted through the mercy of God, but God Himself first inspires in us both faith in Him and love for Him without any previous good works of our own that deserve reward, so that we may both faithfully seek the sacrament of baptism, and after baptism be able by His help to do what is pleasing to Him.”

While baptismal regeneration was the normal belief held by all the churches from antiquity, those going by Scripture alone in these later days often argue with each other over it. Either way baptism, aka “the sacrament of faith”, was considered to be the moment a person is born again, dying to the old man and coming up from the waters as a new creation in obedience to Christ’s command. At baptism one is forgiven and cleansed of sin. It’s taught that, at that moment, providing that faith is genuine, nothing would stand between the believer and heaven if they were to die then and there.

Sacraments, BTW, are theology “set in stone” so that even the simple, often illiterate man down through the centuries, can know and live out God’s will in the most basic ways: the need for rebirth, the need for continuous communion with and nurturing from God, the need to reconcile with Him again if need. All grace, and yet grace that must be “claimed” as it’s accepted and acted upon daily. We must walk the walk-and that’s both a gift and a choice. As we proceed on that journey, growing in the knowledge and love of God, our choice for good is becoming firmer, more sure, more complete, and so is our salvation.