Christ and Assurance

Despite what you might read on many evangelical blogs, it seems that not all Roman Catholics eat babies and worship the Pope.Furthermore, some Roman Catholics are actually rather good at theology. In fact, dare we say it, many of them are infinitely better at theology than most of their Reformed detractors. On occasion I do derive a certain sadistic pleasure from watching the writers over at Pontifications wiping the floor with the odd snotty-nosed evangelical upstart in rather the same way that my cats like to play with mice before biting their heads off. In both cases there is often blood on the floor afterwards.

I rather enjoyed this recent post criticising Calvin's doctrine of election and the damage it has on the assurance of the believer. Since Calvinism argues for a double predestination whereby God has freely chosen to damn some individuals whilst electing to save others, it is technically impossible for a Calvinist preacher to say to an individual "God loves you" since the individual in question may well have been chosen for damnation. Rather like dirty water flowing the wrong way back up a blocked drain, this doctrine of double predestination in turn affects our doctrine of God. Since God in his sovereignty always accomplishes what he wills to accomplish, the fact that some people are not saved is evidence that God does not actually want to save them. Going further back still, this means that God does not even love the non-elect, because if he did love them, he would want to save them, but since they are not saved, that means that God doesn't love them either. God in fact loves only the elect, since they are the only ones who are saved. Witness this theology in action as one of the Pyromaniacs attempts to argue that kosmos ("world") means "the elect" in John 3:16. Nil points for exegesis or understanding the etymology of kosmos, methinks.

In the individual life of the believer, this theology raises difficulties when one asks about the assurance of one's own salvation.I don't think there is a believer at one time or another who hasn't wondered about their salvation or not, and as a young teenage Christian I was no exception. The Reformed system holds that since salvation is by the decree of God, you cannot lose your salvation, though in practice this may prove small comfort to the troubled believer since it does not really answer the question about assurance, but simply asks it in a different way. Instead of asking "can I lose my salvation?" (No, because it is an irrevocable gift of God) the question simply becomes "well, am I one of the elect then?" (You are - but only if you persevere to the end). The trouble is that in the present, you can never be completely certain that you will not fall away at some point in the future, which will have meant that your faith was never genuine in the first place. The questions raised by a nagging conscience then lead only to introversion: Am I saved? Am I one of the elect? What if I fall away in the future? And so on. Much of the introspection of Puritanism has its origins in this theology.

Yet for all its weaknesses, Calvin's system is an attempt to reconcile God's salvific will with the fact that not everyone is saved, and that the final judgment appears to have a double outcome. Calvin locates the reason for the division in the decree and will of God, whereas Arminianism has tended to answer the same question in the opposite way. Arminianism still holds to a double outcome of judgment, but this outcome has its origins not in the will of God (as with Calvin) but in the sphere of human decision. Your salvation and assurance now depend not on the will of God, but on a human decision. Yet in both theory and practice this approach does not offer any real assurance either. How many decisions do you have to make to be confident that you are saved? Who said you were free to choose God in the first place? I personally loathe this system as with hindsight it ruined my confidence and assurance for the early part of my Christian life after I read Once Saved, Always Saved? by David Pawson, in which Pawson argues that salvation is hard to get, and even harder to keep, and that most people, even most Christians will be ultimately be lost to eternal conscience torment since they have not been obedient enough (as I recall, even one unconfessed sin was enough to bring you perilously close to losing your salvation - no wonder it made me neurotic). I re-read the book earlier this year and found it to be so downright awful in its use of scripture and grasp of theology that I had to laugh, but it did a lot of damage to my tender young faith in my early teens.

I can see the arguments for both the Calvinist and Arminian position, yet both have one major flaw in common in that neither of them offer complete assurance in the present. A Calvinist never completely knows if he or she is truly one of the elect, and an Arminian can never be completely confident in his or her "saving" decision or subsequent obedience. This flaw is, I think, really only a symptom of a bigger problem with both systems which is namely that their Christology is inadequate, so much so that it would seem that Christ makes little difference to the legitimate questions raised by the troubled conscience of the believer. To either the Calvinist who wonders if he is truly elect, or the Arminian who wonders if he has been obedient enough, their questions inevitably lead away from Christ on to their own experience and "performance", and neither offer any genuine comfort.

These questions are not a million miles away from the young Martin Luther, who famously agonised about his salvation. Was he one of the elect or not? How could he be righteous before God? Luther, as many people still, was asking questions about his salvation without reference to Christ. Luther's wise mentor, Johann von Staupitz, advised him to focus on the sufferings of Christ when considering the question of election and damnation. Even 30 years later, Luther could admonish others: "Why do you torment yourself with such speculations? Look upon Christ - there thine election is assured for thee?" All questions about salvation are not to be answered in the realm of human experience, but in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Doubts and troubled consciences are to be resolved Christologically, not agonised over in the human heart. Christ is the representative and High Priest of all of humanity, and he answers all questions about our righteousness and election. Here's Luther again:

"If Thou must look upon hell and the eternity of torment, and election too, look not in thyself, not in those who are damned...Look upon the heavenly picture of Christ who for thy sake descended into hell and was forsaken by God as one eternally damned, as he said on the cross,"O my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" See, in that picture thy hell is conquered, and thy uncertain election made sure...Seek thyself only in Christ and not in thyself, so wilt thou eternally find thyself in him."

A Christological answer is the only satisfactory answer to the question of election and assurance. Christ is the sacrifice not only for the sins of the church, but for the entire kosmos (1 John 2:2). This reason is, in short, why I favour Barth' system to either Calvin's or that of Arminius. In Christ, the representative human being, all of humanity is made elect. On the cross, all of humanity is damned and rejected, but this is the means by which all humanity is raised to life in the resurrection. Hidden in the kernel of God's judgment is his will to bring life and reconciliation, and both election and reprobation take place not in two separate groups of humanity, but in Christ himself. Thus he is the basis for preaching the Good News to all with confidence that it is intended for all, and so also it is Christ who liberates the individual from the trap of introspection.