Can a person with bad doctrine still be among the elect?

I certainly hope so! :P

excellent topic, and this gets back to my recent thread about "Truth...why does it matter?"

I believe for a person to be Elect of God and for the Spirit of God to move them to true, enduring repentance and obedience (sure, lots of people can fake it for a short time), they must have a correct and right understanding of the Gospel...that can be a very simple understanding, but it must be true and unpolluted by human religion

for example, Mormons cannot be Elect unless they leave that system, and the same goes for most Roman Catholics

John 4

"Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."

Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

that pretty much sums it up...a critical passage of the gospels that John MacArthur gave a fantastic message on


To get the best understanding of this I like to use a situation where death is imminent and the person is wishing to be reconciled to God. Call it a "death bed confession". Probably like what Sam Kinison was going through in the last seconds before his own death. YZF, you have to know that the overwhelming majority of real Christians do not know much doctrine. Take me for example, it was only recently that I've begun to study doctrine and doctrinal history. People typically believe what they're told, not because they've checked it out. Not that I agree with JWs, but honestly, what is now understood of the trinity took nearly 300 years to be set forth as a doctrinal truth. Read up on Tertullian(160-235), Arius(250-336) and Athanasius(293-373). For a few hundred years, real Christians were dying as martyrs for their commitment to Christ without a clear understanding of who he was in relation to God. I don't doubt their salvation, I seriously doubt they understood the trinity.

When you suggest that "they must have a correct and right understanding of the Gospel", how would you apply this to people living before the trinity concept was hashed out and does this mean that you are saying the requirements for salvation have changed? I don't think you would.

huh?

You'll have to get a doctrine history book. It may have been that the apostles understood the trinity, but if you read the church fathers between the apostles and Athanasius, and we're talking about 200 years' time, there was a lot of confusion on the topic. There was a big problem with this until the council of Nicea. Check it out yourself.


These are just some of the people to research:
Origen
Clement of Rome
Polycarp
Tertullian
The Apologists
Marcion
Montanus
Clement of Alexandria
Ireneaus
Hippolytus