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Notes -
The idea that God's punishments/rewards are utterly unconnected to our virtues/demerits?
Of course as I say downthread, I don't actually believe progressivism is just Calvinism minus spirituality. But Calvinism minus spirituality(like many liberal protestant denominations) winds up being a lot like progressivism.
Well, sort of—our punishment is entirely connected to our demerits, but our rewards are because of Christ's merits. (And this is largely true of Christianity in general, to some extent, at least—saying that unregenerate man can merit his own salvation is Pelagian.)
I don't think liberal denominations are due to particular denominational distinctives. The only real reason that Catholics, for example, aren't affected like the mainline protestant denominations (well, at the level of official teaching, I'm sure there are a ton of bad parishes), is because of the inability to abandon prior commitments—you can't really get much further than the recent same sex blessings without crossing relatively clear lines (while the mainline Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and yes, Presbyterians, have all gone farther). It rather seems to just be that they follow leftist politics, and bend teaching to match—progressivism comes first, and its churchly counterpart is derivative.
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