My background is also academic, but I was taught that Protestants believed that people when people were born, it was already predetermined whether they went to heaven or hell. Also, that everyone's soul was black, but some people (the saved people) had a cloak of grace that masked the black soul, and those were the saved people. However, it was impossible to know if you had been saved or not, so you should act like it.

Catholics believed that everyone was born part good and part bad, and your going to heaven or hell was determined by how you acted on earth.

Of course this course was taught by a Catholic....

interpret the early part of Matthew 6.

My favorite set of verses.

re: salvation, I believe the thinking was that salvation was a two-way street. Yes, Jesus saves you from the goodness of his heart, but you've got some responsibilities to continue to be worthy of it. Jesus won't stop loving you, but he's not going to ignore what you get up to while waving your Admit One Saved! certificate around. I may be getting some of this from purgatory theory, where you don't go to Hell but get to work off the sins you didn't manage to have cleansed before you died.

Making a fuss of how righteous you are and doing the elaborate public praying was always considered gauche in my church.

One of my friends friends posted this on facebook, and I was so confused by it:

I'm so glad that when God looks on sinful me He sees the blood of His only son washing my sins away. Aren't you glad He knows our hearts?

My background is also academic, but I was taught that Protestants believed that people when people were born, it was already predetermined whether they went to heaven or hell.

As others have said above, that's true for some Protestant denominations. I grew up Missouri Synod Lutheran, which preached that it's all a matter of faith. If you have faith, you're saved -- nothing was decided at birth. Also, faith will motivate you to be a good person.

My background is also academic, but I was taught that Protestants believed that people when people were born, it was already predetermined whether they went to heaven or hell.

That is straight Calvin. Definitely not all Protestants believe that!

This elaborate wikipedia article says there are three main branches within Protestantism: Calvinist, Lutheran, and Arminian. [link]

I don't think we dealt with "new" religions in this course- It was Judiasm, Islam, Christianity (divided into Catholic and Protestant (as in the Protestant Reformation times)).

but I was taught that Protestants believed that people when people were born, it was already predetermined whether they went to heaven or hell.

I'm not aware that any modern Protestants still believe that. It is definitely Calvinist/Puritan thought but not mainstream.

Thanks. It seems like it plays out in a few different ways. But I can see how it all seems to fit together. I guess it all starts with the idea of needing to be saved by belief.

Okay, and on the What Am I Getting Myself Into? front, the weather tells me that it will rain on Friday, ie, while we are on the boat and sailing home from Catalina. Oh dear. Guess it's good I don't mind the rain? Will be lots of kids thinking they want to keep dry in the hold, until they realize how queasy it gets down there.

Fred is my brother in Missouri Synodness.

We were also taught that we could lose our faith and thus end up in Hell if we died in that state.

Of course that brought all sorts of questions to my mind--like what if you just constantly switch between having faith and not having faith? You could rapidly alternate between being saved and not being saved.

And what if you have faith all your life, but, say, just before your death you're in such agony and so messed up psychologically you lose your faith seconds before you die? The whole thing seemed problematic to me. Plus the whole binary nature of faith/no faith seemed weird, because in real life I'm never 100% certain about anything. So if I had 60% faith but suddenly my faith dropped to below 50%--was that the cutoff point for eternal damnation?

It's possible I thought too much about this stuff.