What does it actually mean to lose faith? Can someone lose salvation? I thought I was a Christian for a long time, but I recently realized that I wasn’t. It is my understanding that we turn away from God if we read scripture and find ourselves seeming to catch God in a lie, or saying two contradictory positions.
I do wonder what I was feeling when I thought I loved God and had what I thought was a “soul on fire”
Well, my belief is someone loses faith when they no longer believe, which is kind of straight-forward. As for salvation, I’m a Universalist (so I believe salvation is extended to all), but otherwise I’d imagine people could; they accept Christ’s offer to save them, and then they decide they don’t.
I do want to probe a little; what exactly are this “lie” or “contradictory positions”, anyway? I would argue that is not typical of what makes one lose faith. Though many people are given a mistaken idea of what faith is exactly. There is this pop cultural idea of what Christianity is as “reading the Bible as a single text with a single voice and believing every line in it is true when read at face value.” That kind of faith certainly is vulnerable to being lost from such things. But it’s much more complicated than that. But I won’t be able to comment specifically unless I know what exactly we’re talking about.
If you ask me what I think you were feeling? Faith. Faith is in many ways like a plant that grows. It goes through stages, it changes, sometimes it gets less healthy and needs to be nourished, pruned, or something. But even when it isn’t as bright and healthy as it used to be, doesn’t mean it never was, or that it can’t bloom again.
That makes sense. I created a separate topic for the seemingly contradictory positions since they’re kind of a big mess.