Salvation vs. Helping Others

This dichotomy between faith and reason is way too extreme in my opinion because I think there is a firm reasonable foundation for faith in the Biblical accounts or I never would have come to be a believer myself. It's VERY reasonable to believe the Bible, very reasonable to assess its witnesses as credible etc. And that is evidence. ABE: And the more one trusts the Bible the more it confirms itself to us too. If you start out denying this or that in it you just make it impossible to experience its self-validating power. /ABEYes Abraham acted on the call to sacrifice his son through faith but it wasn't an unreasoning unevidenced faith. Abraham had plenty of reason to trust God because of his many communications with Him. He knew Who he was dealing with, he knew God's character, he even surmised that God would bring Isaac back from the dead, anticipating the resurrection of Christ, that's how well he knew God, and that's a faith that is not the empty foundationless sort of faith people too often think we are talking about.Unfortunately "Christians" who deny the plain meaning of the Bible contribute to this craziness.ABE: As for the topic of the thread, it's the usual theme of salvation and works, the Protestant formulation being salvation by faith alone, and good works being the expected fruit of salvation. There are many unsaved people who do kind and helpful things for others just because that's the way their character was formed, and sure, some of them do it better than many Christians who are after all only a bunch of saved sinners, some of us originally pretty selfish crude characters that take a lot of time to change into something presentably Christian. How well it's done isn't the important thing but the source of its doing. It has to be done IN Christ to have real value.Edited by Faith, : changing capital "H's" for lower case h to refer to Abraham.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.