Belief System or Simple Belief

The true meaning of Scripture can be distorted when read through the lens of a belief system. A system threatened by a biblical statement might reshape that statement into conformity with the system, devalue it, or simply disregard it.

Thus, a belief system teaching God preordained a group of people to Heaven and the rest to Hell, apart from anything they believe or do, might conclude that once those in the Heaven bound group are saved they cannot be lost again. This is held regardless of repeated warnings in Scripture about apostasy (Galatians 5:4; Hebrews 6:4-6; 10:26-31).

A belief system teaching “a man is justified by faith alone and not by works,” might view some parts of Scripture as unreliable. So, James has been called “an epistle of straw” because it states, “a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (2:24).

A belief system teaching infant baptism rather than a believer’s baptism (Mark 16:16) might invent a place other than Heaven or Hell, like Limbus Infantum (“Limbo”), for unbaptized infants. Why? Because the idea of babies in Hell is just not palatable.

Any belief system leading a person to abandon simple belief in what the Bible states should be abandoned. Such is a construct of human imagination, not divine revelation.